One of the minor but notable parts of federal Labor’s recent cabinet reshuffle was the appointment of Wills MP Peter Khalil as special envoy for social cohesion.
A few things to keep in mind: at the next election Khalil is facing a challenge from former state Greens leader Samantha Ratnam. One of the issues she’ll be campaigning on is Labor’s lack of action on the horrors taking place in Gaza. Notably, Khalil’s new role has been created before the creation of an envoy for Islamophobia, which was promised when the government appointed Jillian Segal as envoy for antisemitism.
Khalil’s response was a nicely circular, near meaningless collection of words and metaphors (bonds, threads, cohesion, interconnected, diversity, Australian).
Australia’s diversity and our cohesiveness as a society is one of our greatest strengths. What connects us above all is being Australian. That thread runs through our communities, connecting us all regardless of our culture, heritage, language, customs and experiences. These bonds are what tie us together as an interconnected and cohesive society, and when we embrace the diversity then we strengthen what it means to ‘be Australian’.
Which doesn’t give much of an indication as to what he’s actually supposed to get up to. Which got us thinking… what does an envoy actually do?
1940s-2000s
In this era, envoys were traditionally diplomatic representatives, often used to address a specific issue. For example, in the late 1980s Bob Hawke appointed foreign affairs and trade secretary Richard Woolcott as his special envoy for the creation of APEC. In 1999 John Howard appointing former prime minister Malcolm Fraser as a special envoy to (successfully) seek the release of Australian workers Steve Pratt and Peter Wallace after they were imprisoned in the then-splintering Yugoslavia.
If the government did appoint an individual to tackle a specific issue, it was generally as an “ambassador”. Sir Ninian Stephen was appointed Australia’s first ambassador for the environment in 1989, a role that survives to this day as the ambassador for climate change.
The “envoy” as a representative for a specific issue really began to blossom under Kevin Rudd, who appointed Sandy Hollway Australia’s “special envoy on whale conservation” in 2008. But even this was an explicitly international role filled by a public servant. The trend of parliamentarians being given politically controversial envoy roles is somewhat more recent.
Philip Ruddock
In 2015, then father of the house Philip Ruddock served the distinctly Abbottonian role of “special envoy for citizenship and community engagement” — a nice way of saying he was enlisted to look into reviewing “the eligibility requirements for citizenship” as part of the Abbott government’s push to make it easier to strip people involved in terrorism of their citizenship.
But this was a warm-up to the real gag at our expense. In early 2016, after Ruddock announced he would not contest the next election, newish PM Malcolm Turnbull gave him the “retirement gift” of naming him special envoy for human rights. As Crikey noted at the time, it was an odd appointment given most people associated Ruddock with the part he played disseminating the children overboard lie. The gig, largely focused on the death penalty internationally, saw Ruddock rack up $200,000 in flights and accommodation in the first year — at the same time as he was also receiving a $200,000 parliamentary pension.
Andrew Robb
Also in early 2016, Turnbull declared he was appointing Andrew Robb, who had just announced his retirement and to that point had been minister for trade, as special envoy for trade until the election later that year. Robb demonstrated his commitment to foreign investment by accepting a lucrative consulting gig with Chinese-owned Landbridge the day before he left office.
Barnaby Joyce
In 2018, walking pub meal Barnaby Joyce was appointed special drought envoy by then prime minister Scott Morrison, possibly in the hope that the scandal-prone former deputy PM would be kept too busy to cause the government any more hassles for a while. The results were… mixed. By September 2019, drought minister David Littleproud had to table a letter in Parliament saying the government could not comply with a request to release the drought envoy’s report because “no document exists”.
Fortunately, Australia’s best retail politician had an answer ready when the media inquired about what he’d been up to: he’d made an “awful lot” of reports. In the form of text messages.
“I’m not going to tell you what they said, they were directed to the prime minister, if he wants to tell you what they said, that’s up to him … I can assure you, I directly sent reports,” Joyce told the ABC.
“If you say a report is a written segment to the prime minister … then they definitely went to him, I definitely sent them, I sent them by SMS to him and they were read.”
Up to that point, Joyce had claimed $675,000 in parliamentary expenses over the period he’d held the role (though the government refused to clarify the breakdown of what he’d claimed as envoy and what he’d claimed as an MP). He had spent less than three weeks in drought-affected communities outside his own electorate in that time.
Tony Abbott
Abbott’s appointment as Indigenous affairs envoy in August 2018 probably came with a similar plea to Joyce’s: for Christ’s sake, behave yourself. And while Abbott never caused any major scandals in the role (it could be equally questioned what he achieved), given his form on Indigenous issues, both with regard to policy and rhetoric, his appointment was greeted with outright dismay from the people it affected. As Jackie Huggins, the co-chair of the National Congress of Australia’s First Peoples put it:
Haven’t we been punished enough in Indigenous affairs? How long can we put up with a paternalistic government who does not choose to engage or to talk to us?
Tony Abbott has a track record in terms of denying Aboriginal people their rights to social justice, but also to self-determination.
There’s almost that notion of chief protector has come back to re-visit us. We’re all very dismayed at the outcome.
