Kristina Keneally (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

Senator McKim says it's probably the latter; I'm inclined to agree. In fact, the release of this document states: 'There was no single consolidated report prepared as part of the strategic review process.' Well, what was produced by the strategic review then? What was $5 million of Australians' money spent on? Listen to this clanger of a sentence featured on this $5 million piece of paper: 'Collectively, the outputs of the strategic review provide the corpus of knowledge that the portfolio employs to establish, govern and prioritise its budget arrangements.' The 'corpus of knowledge'—that's what our $5 million paid for. That's $5 million worth of bureaucratic buzz words right there.

The community has a right to know how one of our largest government departments and one that is so fundamental to our national security is being administered. Luckily for the Australian people, Mr Dutton hasn't always been able to dodge the scrutiny as he's attempting to do today. Since the amalgamation of the home affairs department there have been a number of reports by the Australian National Audit Office on its operations and performance, and their findings can only be described as scathing. It seems that every single time someone gets a peek behind the curtain they don't like what they see going on in the Department of Home Affairs. This is a department riddled with inefficiencies, waste and maladministration, all at the hands of the Minister for Home Affairs.

Take the ANAO's June 2018 report into the initial merger of the Department of Immigration and Border Protection with the Australian Customs and Border Protection Service and the establishment of the Australian Border Force. This process was described by the former Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, as:

… the most significant reform of Australia's national intelligence and domestic security arrangements in more than 40 years

You would rightly imagine that overseeing this process would be a high priority for the minister who was ultimately in charge of it. Shockingly, the ANAO found that there was:

… no evidence identified to indicate that written briefings were provided to the minister on progress throughout the implementation process.

So, the minister didn't get any written briefings from the department on what Prime Minister Turnbull called the most significant reform of Australia's national and domestic security arrangements. No wonder we have only a single piece of paper and just a corpus of knowledge.

In December 2018 the ANAO reported on the department's Cape-class patrol boats, the front line of our border protection. They found that the boats had consistently fallen short of their patrol-days targets since 2014. This was before we learnt, in December 2018, that the department was forced to ration fuel and reduce patrols because of Minister Dutton's $300 million cut to the department's operating budget. The department doesn't have a good track record of responsible spending either. We know that the department spent over $450,000 on corporate hospitality and a further $100,000 on executive office upgrades in the 2017-18 financial your alone. We also know that they spent $132,000 on motivational speakers—obviously not motivating them enough to produce an actual report—and gave $9 million to Toll Group to build accommodation on Manus Island, a project that was abandoned and never completed but apparently still paid in full.

This all pales in comparison with the department's ongoing decision to use limited or closed tenders to procure services on Manus Island and Nauru. On at least six occasions the department gave a total of nearly $1.2 billion worth of contracts to companies without proper scrutiny. This includes the $423 million they gave to a company called Paladin, which was registered to a beach shack on Kangaroo Island and which the minister claimed he had 'no sight over'. In another report, from January this year, the ANAO found that the department's biometric identification services project was 'deficient in almost every respect' and that while the total expenditure on this project was $34 million, 'none of the project's milestones or deliverables were met'. No wonder they couldn't produce a report. It would be too embarrassing for them to produce it publicly.

Most recently, in February, we learnt just how poorly our citizenship process was being handled by the department. The ANAO found:

Processing times have increased and long delays are evident between applications being lodged and decisions being taken on whether or not to confer citizenship.

Significant periods of inactivity are evident for both complex and non-complex applications accepted by the department for processing.

And: 'The department is not checking the quality of the decisions taken.'

As of 30 June 2018, there were more than a quarter of a million applications for citizenship by conferral, by descent or through adoption that had not yet been processed by the department. At the end of September last year nearly 200,000 people in Australia were on bridging visas, over 85,000 more than when the Liberals and Nationals came to government in September 2013. The ANAO are currently in the process of completing three more reports—and, unlike the government, I bet they publish them—related to the department and have publicly flagged a number of potential performance reports in the future. Minister Dutton has consistently met the ANAO's criticism with a combination of denial and apathy. It's no wonder the department is struggling when the minister in charge can't handle any degree of criticism or scrutiny. He shies away from transparency, because whenever someone shines a light on his department his incompetency and apathy are revealed for all to see.

Today's effort is this $5 million piece of paper—by the way, they didn't even manage to fill the whole page. They allocated $7 million to them in the budget. They didn't run out of money; they just ran out of words. They couldn't even fill a whole page. This piece of paper cost $5 million. This is just another example of the contempt that Minister Dutton shows anyone who attempts to hold him to the standards expected of a government minister.

When will Minister Dutton finally be held to account for his ongoing incompetence? Why would his own colleagues in this place, who voted for this order of production documents, accept this farcical response?

This was a multimillion dollar review, paid for by the Australian taxpayer, implemented to try and identify and fix the endemic issues inside one of the most significant and largest single government departments. This is vacuous, expensive and wasteful.

This report should have been voluntarily released by the minister to reassure the community that the department in charge of Australia's national security, border protection and immigration is capable of doing those things. The only reason he has to reject the will of the Senate, and particularly the will of his own colleagues who voted for this, is that he has something very significant to hide about the management of his department.

We will continue to hold the minister to account, to scrutinise his work, because it is what the Australian people deserve. We will call on Minister Dutton to release the completed version of the strategic review, the corpus of knowledge—whatever name he wants to put on it—and allow the public to see exactly how he is running his department.