Last weekend’s ministerial reshuffle has created what you might call “security tensions”.
In rearranging the players on his frontbench, Anthony Albanese moved domestic spy agency Asio from the Department of Home Affairs, under whose metaphorical roof it has lived for six years, back to share the more rarefied air of the attorney general’s department.
It was the only structural change to the machinery of government – what the in-crowd call a Mog – that Albanese made as he shuffled his home affairs and immigration ministers into other jobs to neutralise a political problem that would not go away.
There was no obvious reason for it to happen now – other than that Asio always believed it should never have left and argued against it – and the ministerial movements provided an opportunity to continue the process of redressing a shift which began when Albanese won office two years ago.
In 2022, the then newly elected prime minister decided not to abolish home affairs – despite his government having criticised its creation in 2018. Instead, he moved the Australian federal police out of it and back within the attorney general’s remit. This week’s Asio shift is a second part of that undoing.
This has further exposed the tensions within the security community over the Turnbull government’s move to create the monolithic security department in the first place, and the tensions within the coalition.
The then attorney general, George Brandis, was never a fan of home affairs. That was known at the time and has only become clearer since.
In an interview for the Australian Politics podcast this week, Brandis suggests that then prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, bowed to pressure from his immigration minister Peter Dutton and Dutton’s departmental secretary Mike Pezzullo to create the mega security hub of home affairs.
Brandis also raised this in an opinion piece in the Nine newspapers on Wednesday, a missive which prompted Turnbull to fire back a rebuttal in the very same pages later that day.
Turnbull’s version was spelled out in his 2020 memoir, A Bigger Picture. He insists it wasn’t Pezzullo and Dutton who drove the case for home affairs hardest, but his own department, informed by similarly structured arrangements in the United Kingdom and the United States.
Brandis asserts this wasn’t the only time that Turnbull succumbed to pressure from the conservative end of the Liberal party, citing his decision to refuse to endorse former prime minister Kevin Rudd’s bid to become secretary general of the UN as the direct result of something similar.
Turnbull seems bemused at Brandis’s picking of a public fight and reopening of old wounds.
“George has always criticised me for not being a tribal politician,” Turnbull said this week. “That’s probably a fair point. But his own tribalism does sometimes cloud his judgment.”
Pezzullo was certainly in favour of establishing home affairs as the central hub for national security, as was his minister. Under the change, responsibility for both operational activity and national security policymaking was shifted to the new department.
At the last minute, Turnbull agreed to the firm request by the then Asio director general, Duncan Lewis, to at least leave the attorney general with the responsibility for signing off on Asio’s warrant applications. Lewis and others argued this was an important check and balance on the otherwise supreme authority over very serious spying powers that would rest with the giant new agency.
It’s this point – about how the powers are divided – that is the more substantive issue than the personality clashes and political tales, interesting though they are.
This is where the real security tensions lie, and no less for the move Albanese made this week. When he transferred the AFP back to the attorney general, the prime minister moved responsibility for both law enforcement operations and policy.
This week, when he shifted Asio, he only went halfway.
In the new administrative arrangements order – the document that details these things and which is now readily accessible online, thanks to changes introduced since the Scott Morrison secret ministries revelations – the fine print reveals that only the operational side of Asio’s work is now back with the attorney general. Responsibility for national security policy, its design and implementation, has stayed with home affairs.
This change goes beyond just having a second department involved in warrant authorisation to avoid having one giant department and one single minister checking their own homework and authorising secret activities – arguably an important extra layer of scrutiny in a country that does not aspire to become a police state.
Its impact is potentially more problematic because it means there are effectively now two bosses – one determining the extent of Asio’s powers and the other controlling completely how they are executed. What happens if the new home affairs minister, Tony Burke, wants to make a policy change that affects how Asio operates and the attorney general Mark Dreyfus doesn’t agree and won’t authorise the agency’s cooperation?
It’s not terribly clear.
This strange hybrid arrangement seems to be the one thing that is uniting those with opposing positions on how the national security architecture should look, transcending the power struggles and recriminations. While there may be differing views on whether the power over Asio and the AFP should lie with home affairs or the attorney general’s department, there does seem to be agreement on one thing: it should all be in one place or the other.
Brandis puts it thus: “Machinery of government always has to be kept under review, and there is an asymmetry and perhaps an irrationality between having the operational agencies in one department and the policy lead in another department.”
In other words, it’s weird.
Whether it’s a deliberate move on the government’s part, or just an oversight, to have the power over Asio split between the two, at best it could be cumbersome and cause irritation.
At worst, it could be a recipe for trouble in an area of lawmaking where some argue there is already too much grey.