National security at the mercy of splintered authority

Malcolm Turnbull was passionate but unconvincing in his justification for the establishment of a homeland security ministry.

In a move where the politics is utterly naked and the alleged benefit extremely hard to spot, there is no compelling rationale for a bureaucratic change so vast it’s going to take a year to pull together.

The Prime Minister believes that having all the domestic security agencies in one ministry will create greater unity of purpose and a more seamless national policy with a clearer implementation of the government’s priorities in national security.

At best this is an unproven and improbable hypothesis.

Meanwhile the dangers in the new approach are substantial.

One rather convoluted justification is that because Attorney-General George Brandis had responsibility for ASIO, but also had other things in his portfolio, there was never a single minister wholly and only responsible for national security. Whereas now there will be, with super cop Peter Dutton.

If ASIO demands the attention of a whole minister all to itself, that is the last thing this new sprawling bureaucratic empire will produce.

Dutton will have a clutch of other agencies, all very important. Not only that, the plan at this stage is that he will remain Immigration Minister.

But immigration is most assuredly not purely a national security issue. In the British system on which this model is based, the home secretary deals with all aspects of immigration policy, such as the target size of the program, the economics of immigration and so on. Dutton will presumably be doing the same in the new dispensation.

That means, ipso facto, he is not a full-time national-security minister. And if he is not dealing with all those vital non-national security parts of immigration, but a junior minister is doing so, that means immigration has been effectively thrown out of cabinet.

Either way, it’s a poor result, and certainly not a full-time national security minister as advertised. The three key agencies — ASIO, Border Force and the Australian Federal Police — now each reports to a separate minister.

The only design problem with this is that Michael Keenan, who has responsibility for the AFP, does not sit full-time in cabinet.

We are a thousand times more likely to get good policy with those three ministers all attending cabinet, each deeply informed by their respective agencies, and each bringing to bear the broad background and skills of professional politicians, and then melding their perspectives with those of the prime minister, foreign minister, defence minister, etc.

Perhaps the most serious change is decoupling ASIO from the attorney-general. The fact that one minute before announcement the government had to change its plans to ensure the attorney-general still had to sign off on ASIO warrants indicates the government secretly is quite nervous about the change.

We rightly authorise ASIO to transgress the civil liberties of Australian citizens to protect our security. Having ASIO directly supervised, as it is now, by the government’s chief law officer is reassuring. It’s also the Australian way. There is absolutely no reason to change that.