May 16, 2025
The Albanese government's backflip on dismantling the Home Affairs Department should bring an end to "wars" on the mega-agency once presided over by Mike Pezzullo, James Paterson says.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced earlier this week that the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) and Australian Federal Police (AFP) would return to the Home Affairs Department after his government moved the agencies to the Attorney-General's Department in its first term.
Mr Albanese said the move came after challenges with information sharing arose in January following the discovery of a caravan containing explosives, which was initially alleged to be part of an anti-Semitic terror plot, before police said they believed the plot was fake.
"There were issues that arose out of information sharing during the, let's call it the caravan incident for shorthand, and we wanted to make sure that we got it right and learned from that experience," the Prime Minister told journalists on Monday.
Home Affairs was established in 2017, combining national security, immigration, and border protection functions into one agency under the leadership of former secretary Mr Pezzullo.
Critics of the model say it led to immigration functions being deprioritised, encouraged a repressive command-and-control structure, and pulled the domestic security agency away from the close watch of Australia's first law officer.
Moves to split off the AFP and then ASIO, as well as the decision to sack Mr Pezzullo after findings that he had breached his APS Code of Conduct, indicated the government's willingness to move away from the Home Affairs model.
Senator Paterson, the Coalition's spokesperson on home affairs, had campaigned on bringing ASIO and the AFP back into the department, declaring that Australia's national security infrastructure was not fit for purpose.
"Labor has finally adopted the Coalition's Home Affairs policy as part of their third round of machinery of government changes in the portfolio in three years," he said in a statement.
"It's an admission they were wrong to dismantle the portfolio after the last election and that it always made more sense to have key national security operational and policy functions under one roof reporting to one Minister."
"I hope this now brings to an end the Home Affairs wars and allows the professional and patriotic public servants in the portfolio to focus on their core duty of keeping Australians safe."
David Andrews, a senior policy adviser at the National Security College, said the MOG was more about prioritising national security than endorsing Home Affairs as the best model.
"There's still definitely a case for the model that had been applied over the last three years, and had been the case before Home Affairs was established, with particular regard to AFP and ASIO," Mr Andrews said.
"But I suspect that, as the Prime Minister said based on some recent events ... they've concluded that, given the wider threat environment that we're in at the moment, that this is the better course of action."
"That doesn't necessarily undo the challenges that come with regard to legal oversight and civil liberties, and those dimensions that I think were being more prioritised by the model that kept the Attorney-General as the approving authority for those [agencies] before."
But former immigration deputy secretary, Peter Hughes, said the latest changes would likely see immigration functions bumped down the list of priorities once again.
"My concern would be that in a Home Affairs portfolio that is once again overcrowded and overloaded with functions, the immigration side of the business will be pushed to the bottom of the pile and continue to perform poorly," he said pointing to "unacceptably long" wait times for visas and citizenship.