‘I haven’t joined to preside over its decline’: Red Cross chief on charity’s future

After Andrew Colvin stepped away from one of the country’s toughest jobs as head of the Australian Federal Police five years ago, there were two or three months when he waited in vain for his phone to ring. Colleagues would later tell him they’d agreed he needed to be given a proper break. But the well-intentioned phone silence was confronting.

“I’m like, ‘hang on a second, I’ve been sitting here thinking I had no prospects’, he recalls, when we meet midtown in the old General Post Office building in Sydney’s Martin Place, now the site of the upmarket Fullerton Hotel.

“So I was getting a bit nervous and anxious … I’m very careful about that [with others] now, I stay in touch”.

Andrew Colvin at The Place in the Fullerton Hotel in Martin Place.Credit: Edwina Pickles

The period of lying fallow ended abruptly in January 2020, as the Black Summer fires raged along the continent’s east and south-east coast, right around to Kangaroo Island in South Australia. The Morrison government, struggling to get ahead of a mounting storm of criticism, called in Colvin to head up a National Bushfire Recovery Agency, which he had to build from the ground up even as the fires were still menacing some communities.

When the agency was later folded into a new authority, Colvin moved on, spending a few years with consultancy giant Deloitte. But he was hankering for “a better sense of purpose and service”, he says.

That need was fulfilled last month when the 54-year-old moved into the position of CEO of the Australian branch of the Red Cross. And it is why I’m looking at a tiny teddy bear, carefully pinned to his jacket lapel, right where his commissioner’s badge used to be in his policing days.

The bear is a miniature version of the 50,000 hand-knitted “trauma teddies” painstakingly turned out by Red Cross volunteers every year, for distribution to the sick, the forlorn, the aged, and those who just need comfort. (I’m staggered to learn that close to a million of these soft toys have been handed out since the program started in 1990.)

Red Cross trauma teddies.

The Australian branch of the Red Cross celebrates its 110th anniversary this year, and Colvin’s job is to reorient it, after several years where the organisation ran deficits and was forced to downsize (he prefers the term “right-size”) from around 4000 staff to 1200 today.

“There will be some people who think it’s a strange role for someone who has had 30 years of policing,” Colvin says. “But I don’t see it [that way] … At the end of the day, people become police out of a sense of service, I know I did. To me, it was a logical progression”.

The appointment allows him to re-engage with the Pacific, a region he “cares deeply about”, having got to know it through police contacts in the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea. His plan is to “build on what is an amazing brand, that everyone recognises internationally, that is instantly a source of comfort for people in need. That’s super powerful. But what we have done in the past isn’t [exactly] what we are going to do in the future.”

Lunch with Andrew Colvin. Pumpkin, chickpea and chard curry and roasted Cone Bay barramundi with seasonal mushrooms.Credit: Edwina Pickles

Colvin’s day is a whirl of meetings in the CBD, so we keep the venue central, and quick, meeting at The Place, an eatery on the mezzanine level inside the hotel atrium. We opt for an alcohol-free lunch, choosing the specials: his a pumpkin, chickpea and chard curry, served with coconut gravy and fragrant rice, and mine the roasted Cone Bay barramundi with sauteed kale, fennel and seasonal mushrooms.

Colvin grew up in Australia’s then beef capital, Rockhampton, and would accompany his father, Gerald, a carpenter with the state government, on work trips around central Queensland during the holidays. Gerald and his mother Pauline, a keen community volunteer, borrowed money to send him to Rockhampton’s Grammar school, but Colvin ( a self-confessed introvert) says he was something of a “grey man” there, never picked for leadership roles or nominated most likely to succeed.

So it’s with some gratification that he’s recently accepted an invitation from the school to be celebrated with a plaque as one of its “distinguished” ex-pupils.

After leaving school at 17, Colvin enrolled at the then-new Australian Defence Force Academy in Canberra, hoping to become a helicopter pilot. But “I quickly realised that they are the best of the best and I was never going to be that student,” he says. He stuck at science studies for two years before switching to an arts degree which he completed through the University of New England. Years later as a mid-career police officer he garnered a master of public administration from the Harvard Kennedy School in the US.

‘A lot of my friends do it tough and they are open about their struggles with mental health as a result of [the] Bali [bombing].’

Former AFP commissioner Andrew Colvin

While ADFA didn’t get him into a helicopter cockpit, it did introduce him to his future wife Natalie, then a fellow student. Colvin says the defence academy was “not a very welcoming place” in those years, [there was]“a lot of bastardisation, all very publicly exposed now”. Unbeknownst to each other, he and Natalie decided separately to leave ADFA at the end of Colvin’s second year, winding up at the AFP police academy together.

Colvin had less interest in being a cop on the beat than in the international dimensions of policing, especially investigations involving money laundering and the proceeds of crime. It was “chasing bad guys and having fun”. But all that changed on September 29, 2002 when he got a call from Canberra head office asking him to set up a counter-terrorism capability for the AFP.

He’d barely got his feet under the new desk when the horrific Bali bombings at Kuta Beach occurred just 12 days later, leaving hundreds murdered and injured. The immediate aftermath was chaotic. “We had thousands of [returning Australians] coming into airports all over the country, we were taking their cameras from them, we were taking their film, we were getting statements from them, we were taking their clothes off them if they had been anywhere near the [target Sari] club; we needed to have the residue testing on their clothes.

“We were working with Singapore and Malaysia and Thailand because people were just trying to get a plane any way out of Bali they could,” he recalls. The AFP played a key role in the horrific task of victim identification. Colvin says friends of his in the force, 20 years later, are still dealing with the trauma. “A lot of my friends do it tough, really tough, and they are open about their struggles with mental health as a result of Bali.”

Colvin became commissioner at only 44, the youngest person appointed to the role. He embarked on a bold program of cultural reform, earning the sobriquet of the “woke commissioner” from some who were less enamoured of change.

“Two things you know for sure about police,” he says. “They hate the way things are, and they hate change. But I wanted the AFP to be the best organisation it could be …and I didn’t think we were fulfilling our potential.”

AFP Commissioner Andrew Colvin (centre) addresses the media during a press conference on the organisation’s work during the Bali Nine investigation, at the AFP headquarters, Canberra, 2015. Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

Having announced that his door was open to all comers, he expected few to knock on it. “But they did, and in huge numbers,” he recalls.

He called in former sex discrimination commissioner Elizabeth Broderick to help “crack” the organisation open, and drive diversity in recruiting and officer retention.

In a discovery worthy of a Utopia episode, Colvin found that a contributing factor to the low number of female recruits was an outdated “grip test,” originally based on the need to master a Smith & Wesson revolver, which he describes as a “bugger of a weapon”.

Generally women found it more difficult to handle than the men, yet the test had been retained for “maybe 15, 20 years”, long after the Smith & Wesson had been replaced by the easier-to-handle Glock.

The so-called “beep test” (developed in the 1970s to test cardio fitness) was another barrier putting women at a disadvantage in early-stage training. Colvin lowered that bar (again drawing some criticism for doing so), but he argues “you don’t need to be a decathlete when you join the police … our job was to take you and in six months’ time make you fit and strong”.

The last 12 months of Colvin’s term were “tough” he says. There were some internal crises at the executive level, and a heated controversy erupted over raids which the AFP launched in June 2019 on the home of journalist Annika Smethurst and on the Sydney headquarters of the ABC, after publication of stories based on leaked classified documents.

Andrew Colvin, then the head of the National Bushfire Recovery Agency, pictured in Wingello in NSW after bushfires in 2020.Credit: James Brickwood

He declines any discussion of that episode in any detail, but says “what I was most upset about was this view that emerged that somehow I was anti-free speech or police were anti-free speech. There can be nothing further from the truth.”

Four months after the raids, his five-year term was coming to an end, and he sat down for a conversation with his wife about a possible second term, thinking the answer would be yes.

But “she went into that conversation with an absolute categorical ‘you’re cooked, you’re done’” he says. “I’m like, ‘what do you mean?’ And she said, ‘You are not the person you used to be … you’ve gone into your shell, the girls [their two daughters, now in their 20s] don’t know you any more, you need to take a break.’” He insists the drama over the raids was not the reason, but concedes it was “another rock in the backpack that just got a lot of rocks in it over time.”

The Red Cross delivers him a fresh challenge at a still relatively young age. The organisation provides a huge range of humanitarian services through its 16,000 plus staff, members and volunteers, including support for refugees and the aged, meals on wheels, and disaster relief and recovery.

A key challenge is how to replenish ageing volunteer ranks from younger generations, a dilemma facing many charities. Colvin says he’ll be seeking ways to turn that around.

“We are in a better position now to go forward again”, he says. “I haven’t joined the organisation to preside over its decline.”

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