‘No one’s indispensable’: Former minister takes aim at Home Affairs

Former Home Affairs minister Karen Andrews has described the department she used to run as dysfunctional and insisted its long-time leader, secretary Mike Pezzullo, should take responsibility for its problems.

Andrews, a Liberal Party MP who was home affairs minister in the last 14 months of the Morrison government, said the department sat at the centre of domestic security in Australia but had serious flaws in its structure and leadership.

Karen Andrews has criticised her former department.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

In an interview, Andrews said she had observed unease among senior public servants about attempts by Pezzullo to centralise power in his office, poor results in the visa processing system and a “massive” staff morale issue. If she had been returned as minister she would have made some “pretty significant” changes, Andrews said.

Asked if the dysfunction was Pezzullo’s responsibility, Andrews said: “It has to be, simply because he’s the secretary of the department.” Quizzed on whether Home Affairs could operate without him she said: “Well, no one’s indispensable.”

Pezzullo did not answer a series of detailed questions about Andrews’ comments and his leadership generally, but replied with a statement saying that, he had “always acted with integrity”.

“For the duration of my tenure, I have been the subject of integrity oversight ... I am proud of the record of achievements of the Department of Home Affairs and commend the committed officers who continue to deliver results,” he said.

The current Home Affairs Minister, Clare O’Neil, did not respond to questions about Pezzullo, who continues as her departmental secretary. In a statement, O’Neil said a looming overhaul that she had commissioned would be “the first attempt in a decade to create a functional migration system which works for Australians”.

The Home Truths investigation by this masthead and 60 Minutes has revealed that Australia’s offshore processing regime was marred by millions of dollars of suspect payments directed to local politicians in Nauru and Papua New Guinea – which the department failed to stop. It has also laid bare how a porous and poorly administered visa system had allowed a wave of Albanian criminals to take over large parts of the cocaine trade in Australia.

The investigation comes on top of two major independent reviews by senior public servant Martin Parkinson and former Victorian police commissioner Christine Nixon, which called out big delays in assessing genuine visa applications while criminals and sex traffickers game the system to stay in the country for up to a decade.

Political editor Peter Hartcher reports today that the federal government is in the process of establishing an independent inquiry into this week’s revelations about the management of the department in recent years, with an announcement expected as soon as Monday.

When Home Affairs was formed in 2017, it brought together immigration, customs and Border Force, and gave Pezzullo administrative oversight (though not operational control) of independent security agencies ASIO, the Australian Federal Police, the anti money-laundering agency Austrac and the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission.

Andrews, who will step down at the next election, said a key feature of Pezzullo’s leadership was a desire to centralise. He was “the consummate public servant and he would want to gather information into the one place as much as he could,” she said.

“The way that Mike Pezzullo operated was that he liked to manage the agencies as well as the employees that were part of Home Affairs. I don’t think the agency heads liked it.”

A senior public servant who was not authorised to speak publicly agreed that Pezzullo had “inserted himself into everything”.

Pezzullo, the official said, had wanted to “take over the technology, the platform that holds the data” in the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission. “Pezz wanted to be the organised crime tsar,” they said.

Andrews confirmed that Pezzullo had tried to gain control of the independent agency’s aggregated data, saying: “Yes, I was aware that that was one of the things that he wanted to do.”

She said she had resisted this because “often centralisation equates to control”. Coordination between agencies “doesn’t mean that the department has to hold every single piece of information and determine who can access that, how they can access it and when they can access it,” Andrews said.

She said Pezzullo had also tried to mediate the contact that the heads of the independent agencies had with her as minister.

“There was a meeting of agency heads that would come together, [and] by and large, Mike Pezzullo would speak first at that meeting, and then the agency chairs followed. I asked agency heads to speak to me directly, rather than be managed by Mike Pezzullo. I never felt I reported to Mike Pezzullo, so I was under no obligation to relate those discussions in a formal sense,” she said.

Andrews said the size and difficulty of the Home Affairs department required “particular strengths” including a “good relationship with the people you work with”.

“Thinking that you’re the smartest in the room is a high-risk strategy when you’re talking about people with very senior level responsibilities,” she said.

Last year, without fanfare, the Labor government restructured Home Affairs, removing the federal police, the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission and the anti-money laundering agency from O’Neil’s Home Affairs and returning them to the attorney-general’s portfolio. ASIO remained administratively part of Home Affairs.

Asked if Pezzullo should keep his job, Andrews said: “Are a fresh set of eyes needed? Well, I think that Clare O’Neil has demonstrated that she wants to make some fundamental changes … and that may well mean that there needs to be some changes at senior level.”

“With the greatest respect to Mike Pezzullo … he has been in that job now at a very senior level for a long time.” Pezzullo, she said, “gets to wear any deficiencies” in his department.

One structural issue was that the armed, uniformed Australian Border Force was led by an independent commissioner, but his staff were public servants in the Department of Home Affairs who ultimately reported to Pezzullo.

That set-up meant that the Border Force commissioner “can’t give an instruction effectively to the people that seem to report to him … It’s dysfunctional,” Andrews said.

If she had remained Home Affairs minister after the last election, Andrews said she would have pushed to give Border Force statutory independence. Visa processing “should be streamlined and very straightforward,” but was not, she said, because immigration “was seen more as an administrative function than it should have been”.

“There are some things that should be kept, and some things tweaked and there are some things that should be just thrown out the door.”

The staff in the department were enthusiastic and competent, she said, “So all I can think is that the instructions that they were being given was not in line with the views of the government of the day”.

Asked what she had done to oversee or direct the department on the questions raised in reporting this week relating to suspect payments on Nauru and Manus Island, Andrews said procurement was “at arm’s length [from] the minister’s office”. She reiterated that: “The management of a department – including staffing and process – is the responsibility of its secretary and/or leadership team.”There are some things that should be kept, and some things tweaked and there are some things that should be just thrown out the door.

Andrews declined to answer a question about how much responsibility the long-time minister, Peter Dutton – now Opposition Leader – should take for the department’s problems.

Andrews’ comments differ markedly from those attributed to her in a glossy departmental publication called The Fourth Year to commemorate four years of the operation of the Home Affairs department.

In her foreword, Andrews is quoted saying the formation of the portfolio in 2017 was “a prescient reform” and “the most significant reform to Australia’s national security, intelligence and law enforcement arrangements in decades”.

“Australia not only needs to be prepared for the unexpected but also be able to respond quickly. As the results detailed here show, the portfolio has provided Australia with that capability time and time again.”

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