September 30, 2023
The Pezzullo affair has thrown a spotlight on the structure of the Department of Home Affairs. Despite its simple title, it is actually a sprawling department where different functions, once housed under different departments, come under the same roof.
In 2018, the Department of Homes Affairs was born, subsuming immigration, border protection and domestic security into one mega-agency.
There are obvious advantages to this. It ought to enable "joined up thinking" where the impact of changes in one area of policy on other areas can be better assessed. And there may be economies of scale where costs can be minimised. Even on a basic level, departments have a raft of support services, from canteens to human resources operations. Putting them under one roof may save money.
But there is also a downside, and it is a significant downside.
The Department of Home Affairs has been called a "super ministry". The minister in it - and the senior public servant who leads it - have a lot of political weight.
It also changes the focus of some departments when they became sub-departments within Home Affairs. By putting immigration into the Home Affairs department, for example, it makes the focus on the policing of immigration. But immigration is also crucial to economic policy and it is obviously crucial to social policy in a multicultural country. Concentrating on immigration as a matter of "stopping the boats" risks neglecting other very important emphases.
The charge sheet against Mike Pezzullo as, first, secretary of the Department of Immigration and Border Protection and then as Secretary of the Department of Home Affairs is that his "get tough" policy neglected other areas.
For example, just under a year ago, Home Affairs Minister Clare O'Neil described the migration system as "broken".
She alleged that there was widespread abuse linked to sex trafficking, the exploitation of foreign workers and drug crime. There were also very long backlogs in the processing of visa applications.
The Albanese government showed perhaps the first signs of dismantling the monolith upon election last year, shifting the Australian Federal Police back under the remit of the Attorney-General's Department.
Known as a machinery of government change - and more colloquially referred to as being "MoG'ed" in Canberra - these shifts are actually key to laying the foundations for a robust public service.
Common after federal elections, where public servants in Canberra are often thrown into what seems like a game of musical chairs, machinery of government changes distil or concentrate power, policy and funding.
Opposition home affairs spokesperson James Paterson highlighted this point most clearly, when he argued shifting the AFP to the Attorney-General's Department jeopardised clarity on who the country's most senior domestic national security policy minister was.
Was it Clare O'Neil or Mark Dreyfus, Senator Paterson asked, promising to restore the AFP to Home Affairs if given the chance.
Mr Pezzullo's conduct will no doubt be scrutinised in an ongoing investigation led by former public service commissioner Lynelle Briggs.
But hierarchy is everything in the Australian Public Service, and experts are calling out for the government to scrutinise the structural integrity of the mega-agency which has helped its boss reach such heights in the past five years.
