The new Home Affairs Ministry will be an administrative behemoth. It is unlikely that it will bring any great national security dividends. It is very likely that it will have undesirable consequences for Australia’s immigration program.
The Home Affairs Ministry takes the federal police, ASIO, the Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre, and the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission away from the Attorney-General. It takes the Office of Transport Security away from the Infrastructure Minister. It gives them all to the Immigration Minister Peter Dutton, who already has his own quasi-security agency, the Australian Border Force.
The politics here are obvious. Dutton is a senior conservative in a government that conspicuously lacks senior conservatives. But as a policy matter, there’s little public evidence to suggest that we our federal agencies are struggling to coordinate on security matters – although the 2014 Sydney siege did reveal weaknesses in federal-state security coordination, which the government has rightly moved to repair.
Where agencies sit on the ministerial map can have significant policy consequences. The creation of the Home Affairs Ministry locks in this government’s recasting of immigration as an economic opportunity to immigration as a security threat – a threat to national security, biosecurity, even economic security. Malcolm Turnbull has begun to use Julia Gillard’s old formulation: “Australian jobs are for Australians”.
Immigration and security are only a good fit if you squint very hard. For the most part Dutton’s day job has been the mundane work of supervising and approving or denying marginal visa applicants. The immigration minister is vested more discretionary powers than anyone else in the cabinet. Now that his focus is on security – taking constant briefings from ASIO and the AFP about domestic threats – security is how Australia’s immigration program will now be framed.