The Turnbull government’s creation of a Department of Home Affairs “super” portfolio in 2017 – incorporating various national security and law enforcement functions with immigration – was the now-dead dream of former defence minister Peter Dutton and secretary Mike Pezzullo. The aim was to re-create in Australia an equivalent to the US Department of Homeland Security and the UK’s Home Office .
The creation followed the merging of customs and immigration whereby its new head, Mike Pezzullo, ensured that his old agency, customs, would wag the immigration dog. It subsequently created the Australian Border Force, with its dark uniforms and guns.
No one was to be left in any doubt that immigration was solely about keeping the bad guys out.
After an announcement by Anthony Albanese, Asio is now moving back to the attorney general portfolio, along with the AFP, where the two functions had been before the home affairs experiment started.
While the title remains, the vision of making immigration and multicultural affairs function as part of Australia’s national security and law enforcement apparatus is hopefully over.
The official title of Tony Burke’s new job is minister for home affairs, minister for immigration and multicultural affairs, minister for cybersecurity, minister for the arts, and leader of the house. It’s a big job but it no longer encompasses national security and law enforcement.
The home affairs experiment was doomed to fail. Immigration is a complex mix of demography, economic, industry, social and humanitarian policy.
The national security and law enforcement aspects of immigration are important but small. Playing up those aspects is largely about the politics of scaremongering.
No one in the Coalition, possibly including Dutton, will want to repeat the disaster.
The Australian public would have little idea how spectacularly that experiment failed, particularly in terms of limiting the impact of “bad guys”.
It was shortly after this time that reports emerged of a global human trafficking syndicate exploiting flaws in Australian border security and the immigration system, in which foreign workers were brought in on tourist visas and then assisted to apply for asylum so they could remain and work on farms and construction sites and in restaurants and sex shops. Most of them are still here living in the shadows of society, vulnerable to ongoing exploitation.
Dutton seemed to think ramping up cancellation of visas on character grounds, particularly of people who had lived in Australia almost all their lives, would be a good political move. All it did was massively increase the number of long-term detainees as removals plunged under Dutton. Eventually the high court had its say on indefinite detention.
Dodgy education providers who were in the business of selling work visas rather than education would also flourish. With the introduction of unrestricted work rights, these boomed immediately after international borders re-opened.
Labor was far too slow to act on these issues. While many sensible changes were made by O’Neil and Giles, new minister Burke still has a huge job on his hands and little time to act before the next election.
He will need to get to work on what he wants to fix. That should include better policy on student visas, the massive asylum and other visa backlogs and explaining a long-term vision for immigration policy given the massive net migration blowout from 2022.
Abul Rizvi is a former deputy secretary of the immigration department
