Matthew Canavan (Queensland, Liberal National Party, Minister for Resources and Northern Australia) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I table documents relating to orders for the production of documents concerning files held by the Department of Environment and Energy and the strategic review of the Home Affairs portfolio.

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

With regard to the statement given by the minister representing the Minister for Home Affairs, Senator Cash, I move:

That the Senate take note of the statement.

On 29 July, the Senate ordered Minister Dutton to provide this chamber with:

… the completed Strategic Review of the Home Affairs Portfolio as announced in the 2018-19 Budget.

The 'completed strategic review'—take note of those words. That strategic review was allocated $7 million in the budget and was designed to assist officials towards 'integrating capabilities, reducing duplication and maximising efficiencies'. It was earlier this month that we learnt that the Minister for Home Affairs had no intent of ever making that review public. And, rightly so, the Senate unanimously supported a motion on Monday to order Minister Dutton to provide us with a copy of the completed strategic review.

Tonight, the Senate and the Australian people have had that order thrown back in our faces. Despite the strategic review's final cost of nearly $5 million to the Australian taxpayer, the Senate has been given a single solitary page of information by Minister Dutton.

Rachel Siewert (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

They're expensive!

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

This is expensive, Senator Siewert. This is a $5 million piece of paper. Either this is the single most expensive piece of paper in the history of this chamber or it is a blatant rejection of the will of the Senate by the Minister for Home Affairs.

Nick McKim (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It's probably the latter.

Kristina Keneally (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) Share this | Link to 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.

Nick McKim (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator Keneally and I have some disagreements on policy matters in the purview of the Department of Home Affairs, but I will place on the record that I agreed with every single word that she said in her recent contribution.

If this wasn't so serious it would be an absolute joke. The money that this department wastes beggars belief. This massive department—probably one of the biggest administrative consolidations of power in Australia's history—basically could not organise a beer in a brewery.

The Australian National Audit Office has regularly, consistently and significantly criticised this department for its incapacity to manage basic administrative functions. Whether you are talking about outrageous delays in visa processing, whether you are talking about its propensity to torture refuges on Manus Island and Nauru or its regular and consistent failures to adhere to government purchasing guidelines—all of which, I might add, have been the subject of significant criticism from independent statutory authorities ranging from the Australian National Audit Office through to the Human Rights Commission—this department has consistently failed to deliver value for money for the Australian people.

I wish I could say that I was surprised at the farce that this Senate has been presented with this evening, but I am anything but surprised. This is absolutely par for the course from the Department of Home Affairs.

This is a department that has a tame minister, who is predisposed to accede to all of this government's organisational desire to control and surveil every single aspect of the lives of Australian people. And the fact that they have this tame minister, and a tame Prime Minister—who used to be the minister responsible for various parts of what is now the Department of Home Affairs—is leading Australia down a very dangerous path. We have a secretary of the department who believes Australians are like innocent hobbits who need to be protected from the dark forces at work in the world, and who is not prepared to contemplate that actually some Australians, me included, value our freedoms more highly than we value the mirage of absolute safety that this minister, and this secretary, are attempting to sell us, the Australian people. They are marching us down the dark and dangerous road to a police state and a surveillance state, and they are doing so in the most inefficient and draconian way imaginable.

This farce that the Senate has been presented with stands as a symbol of the farce that this department has become. And the best stroke of an administrative pen that could be wielded in Australia today is to smash up this department—to de-consolidate the Department of Home Affairs, to spread the power out. Because power that is concentrated and power that is unaccountable—and both of those criticisms apply to the Department of Home Affairs—is the most dangerous kind of power that there is. The consolidation of power bringing, for example, ASIO into the home affairs department, was a sad day for this country. It was a sad day for democracy. And every time this department takes the next step down the road to a police state, every time this department continues to erode fundamental rights, freedoms, and liberties in this country—rights, freedoms and liberties that we used to send Australians overseas to fight wars to defend—and every time this department takes another step down that road, it is the Australian people who are losing something precious. They are losing their freedoms. They are losing their privacy. They are losing their capacity to go about their day-to-day lives without the all-seeing eyes of the government spying on them. And I use that term advisedly: the government is spying on Australians with the draconian laws that this department continually recommends up to its minister, who continually takes them to cabinet, who continually brings them into this place.

It's not good enough. It needs to be called out, and I'll tell you why it needs to be called out, Acting Deputy President Faruqi: because if you want to fight something, you have to call it out. If you want to call something out, you've got to name it. So I'm going to continue to be a member of the very small and selective group of senators in this place who have used the f-word: fascism. I've used it repeatedly, and I will say it again today. Don't believe that the slow frogmarch to fascism cannot happen in Australia—anyone who believes that is not a student of human history. Fascist regimes rise because people do not fight for their rights. And I am here to fight for the rights of ordinary Australians, and to insist that we have an informed debate in this country about this erosion of rights and freedoms, and about how we balance the perfectly reasonable desire to be safe in this country with that erosion of rights and freedoms.

Australia remains the only liberal democracy in the world that does not have some form of charter or bill of rights to protect and enshrine our rights. And yet the Australian Greens are the only party in this parliament that has a policy that Australia should have a charter or a bill of rights. And the reason we need a charter or a bill of rights in this country is so that citizens have got the tools that they need to stand up against this march down the road to a police state. We will campaign through this parliament and, I predict, beyond—because we won't get a charter of rights in this parliament, because neither of the major parties support those protections.

We'll campaign in this parliament, we'll campaign in the next parliament and we'll keep campaigning until, finally, Australia loses that tag of the only liberal democracy in the world that doesn't have a charter or bill of rights, either legislatively enshrined or constitutionally embedded. It should be in the Constitution, in Australia, a charter of rights. I acknowledge constitutional change is very difficult in this country and basically relies on broad political agreement in this place and in the public debate to succeed. But there is no reason we should not have a legislated charter of rights, and that is what I commit the Australian Greens to continue fighting for.

We are presented with this farce today, a farce that has cost millions of taxpayer dollars. I think about this every time I hear a government minister stand up now and say, 'Oh, no, we cannot increase the Newstart payment because we are making choices and we are setting budget priorities.' This government that just smashed up the progressive tax system in Australia, to give away $158 billion in tax cuts, can't find within its collective heart the relatively miniscule amount of money it would take to deliver a $75 a week increase in Newstart. Those are your priorities, and you stand condemned for those priorities. Yes, budgets are all about priorities, but when you're throwing away millions of dollars in a completely useless review, you stand condemned for your warped priorities.

Question agreed to.