The founding secretary of the Department of Home Affairs, Mike Pezzullo, was dismissed late last year for egregiously breaching the public service code of conduct. The man who lectured public servants they should live by that code, broke it in a manner no previous secretary in living memory had done.
While that should have provided an opportunity for the Albanese government to address the original sin of putting the immigration function within a national security and law enforcement portfolio, it appears immigration will remain in Home Affairs.
That will make the job of new secretary, Stephanie Foster, much harder than it need be. Foster does have the advantage of being able to draw a line under the multitude of scandals Pezzullo was involved in – and there were some shockers, including the bizarre idea that privatising the visa IT system was somehow in the national interest.
Thankfully, the Coalition government itself put an end to that madness but not before Pezzullo had spent almost $100 million dollars preparing for privatisation.
Another advantage Foster will have is that she won’t be constantly justifying why the migration system became so broken over the last decade as described by Martin Parkinson, or why the visa system became so vulnerable to the unscrupulous as described by Christine Nixon.
Pezzullo was obsessed with showing that Parkinson and Nixon were wrong and that any problems that were identified were not his fault.
But Foster still faces a task of Herculean proportions.
A starting point will be to provide immigration staff with a new vision for the role of immigration in Australia’s future.
Foster will need to put to bed Pezzullo’s argument that the era of nation-building was over and that immigration would be just about managing flows of temporary entrants.
This was despite the fact the government at the time was running a permanent migration program of near record size. That continues to be the case today.
The reality is that Australia’s population will age and an appropriate level of permanent migration will be essential to manage the transition to a much older population.
Moreover, the Albanese government has correctly identified that having large numbers of people in long-term immigration limbo is simply bad policy, particularly in terms of migrant worker exploitation and social cohesion.
Foster’s task will be to reduce the number of people in immigration limbo at a time we have close to record levels of long-term temporary entrants in Australia.
A clear vision for immigration policy will help improve morale in Home Affairs which has persistently been one of the worst in the public service. Pezzullo insisted this was due to poor pay and conditions.
While those would have contributed, Pezzullo’s dark world view of dangerous immigrants, constant scandals and massive visa application backlogs, some engineered illegally, would not have helped.
No public servant wants every day to face a rising backlog of applications and angry clients who are shut out because staff can no longer take the criticism. Foster must promote a more open culture of legal and timely decision-making, procedural fairness and positive client service.
Partly due to Pezzullo’s arrogance, and Scott Morrison’s view the public service is there to just do as it is told, it appears the policy advising, research and statistical analysis part of immigration has also been run down. This will need to be re-built.
Foster has few senior staff with an immigration policy background who can be relied on. This may also be a function of Pezzullo favouring recruitment of people with a defence or law enforcement background and his view the immigration function was second rate.
Immigration inevitably operates in a heavily politicised environment. Unfortunately, in 2024 that will be taken to a new level as the Dutton opposition has made clear that asylum seekers and the blow out in net migration will be primary political targets.
Opposition immigration spokesperson Dan Tehan has said the government has been asleep because it has allowed asylum seekers arriving by plane to grow to over 2000 per month.
Deputy Opposition Leader Sussan Ley has demanded a crackdown, even though it was the Coalition government that initially allowed this situation to arise with no crackdown. Ley also ignored the $160 million package to better manage the asylum system that Labor has announced.
The $160 million package will take time to take effect. At end November 2023, there was a total of 107,912 asylum seekers living in the Australian community – an unprecedented level. While some depart voluntarily, only around 15 per month are actually removed from Australia.
The $160 million package is very limited given the size of the challenge. Foster will need to do the best possible with the $160 million to slow the rate of new applications with faster processing of the latest who have applied.
And while it is good the immigration compliance function has been returned to the immigration area of Home Affairs, and funding somewhat restored after being run down under Pezzullo, there is not nearly enough compliance funding to significantly increase removal of unsuccessful asylum seekers.
In other words, despite the $160 million package, the number of asylum seekers in Australia is unlikely to fall by much, if at all.
The Dutton opposition will play this for all its worth even though the situation is a direct result of Dutton’s negligence when he was minister.
Finally, Foster will be under pressure to deliver on the Prime Minister’s promise to get net migration down from over 500,000 currently to pre-pandemic levels of around 250,000. That will be with an interim reduction to 375,000 in 2023-24.
Data for the first part of 23-24 suggests getting net migration down to 375,000 in 2023-24 will be extraordinarily difficult without further policy tightening. In every quarter of 2024 and in 2025, the ABS will release data that shows net migration is still high.
That will give the opposition another opportunity to kick the government and the department about its “big Australia” policy.
A core problem is that the government insists these net migration numbers are just estimates in an attempt to disown responsibility for managing net migration.
The opposition will not allow the government to get away with that. It will hound the government for allowing the blow out in net migration, irrespective of whose policies led to that.
Foster must convince the government that despite the obvious difficulties in managing net migration, that is no excuse for not having net migration targets and a framework for delivering outcomes as close to those targets as possible. That would be not only good policy and practice, but also good politics.
First published in The Canberra Times January 15, 2024
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