The founding secretary of the Department of Home Affairs, Mike Pezzullo, was dismissed late last year for egregiously breaching the public service code of conduct. The man who lectured public servants they should live by that code, broke it in a manner no previous secretary in living memory had done.
While that should have provided an opportunity for the Albanese government to address the original sin of putting the immigration function within a national security and law enforcement portfolio, it appears immigration will remain in Home Affairs.
That will make the job of new secretary, Stephanie Foster, much harder than it need be. Foster does have the advantage of being able to draw a line under the multitude of scandals Pezzullo was involved in – and there were some shockers, including the bizarre idea that privatising the visa IT system was somehow in the national interest.
Thankfully, the Coalition government itself put an end to that madness but not before Pezzullo had spent almost $100 million dollars preparing for privatisation.
Another advantage Foster will have is that she won’t be constantly justifying why the migration system became so broken over the last decade as described by Martin Parkinson, or why the visa system became so vulnerable to the unscrupulous as described by Christine Nixon.
Pezzullo was obsessed with showing that Parkinson and Nixon were wrong and that any problems that were identified were not his fault.
But Foster still faces a task of Herculean proportions.
A starting point will be to provide immigration staff with a new vision for the role of immigration in Australia’s future.
Foster will need to put to bed Pezzullo’s argument that........