Nigel Scullion (NT, Country Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs, Senator Vanstone. Will the minister update the Senate on the considerable progress being made to implement the recommendations of the Palmer Report?

Amanda Vanstone (SA, Liberal Party, Minister for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank Senator Scullion for the question. It is not news to anybody that the Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs has been under criticism over the last 18 months or so and that that criticism has focused particularly on two cases. Today I would like to inform the Senate of what the government has done in response to inquiries that focused on those two cases to tell us what had gone wrong, and where we could make changes for the better, to try to make sure that nothing like that ever happens again.

Today I took the opportunity to release publicly several reports that we commissioned as a consequence of both the Palmer and Comrie-Ombudsman inquiries. Those inquiries indicated that we certainly had some information problems and therefore needed to look at our information technology systems to make sure that staff who were doing the job had the best systems available to them to do that job or, to put it the other way, did not have systems that would prevent them from properly doing their job. We were also advised to get a review of the detention services contract, and we commissioned Mick Roche, a former deputy head of Australian Customs, to do that. We were also advised that our record keeping was not as good as it should be, so we went to what all must agree would be the best place possible to get some advice on that, and that is the Australian Archives.

Those reports were released this morning because we want to be a very open and transparent organisation and so that people can see what advice we have been given in terms of fixing these problems and see that we have in fact been on the move to improve and have been doing the work. But big reform of a big department is not the sort of thing that happens overnight. You can allocate nearly a quarter of a million dollars of government money and you can put out a press release, but then you actually have to do the work and make the changes.

In terms of training, we are establishing a college of immigration and border security compliance. That will be up and running in a couple of months. It is a case not of building bricks and mortar and buying land but of putting more people through better training. Since the inquiries, we have put nearly 340 people through specialist training that relates to identity investigations, search warrant training and maintenance of a reasonable suspicion that someone is an unlawful entrant. Better training means better equipped staff and that, inevitably, will mean better outcomes.

In terms of information technology, we have advice that we have, basically, a series of stovepipes of systems within the department and that, even when someone has searched all the systems they believe it is reasonable to, they then have to go to paper records. We have been advised by the Archives that even the paper records are not as good as they should be. This certainly indicates that we need to work on that and look at how we can reform our IT systems, which we would expect to do, obviously, in a budgetary context. That is not something we would expect to do outside of the budget.

We also got advice that the detention services contract could be done in a better way. So I have decided that, instead of renewing the contract towards the end of 2007, we will in fact re-tender that contract. We will take the advice and break the contract up into at least two contracts: one specifically for detention services and one focusing on the separate health services that are provided.

We are also doing some excellent work focused on the culture change that is required in DIMA, which is to become much more client focused. But I hope by what I have indicated to the Senate today, and by what I have released this morning—some of the material will be sent to senators and members during the day and the rest will be accessible by all of them on the websites—people can see that we do take these problems seriously. We are on the move to improve. We have already done a lot of work and we have more to go.