The National Public Sector Managers and Leaders Conference – Melbourne
17 April 2015
Michael Pezzullo
Secretary, Department of Immigration and Border Protection
Leading change in the Australian Public Service: The case of the Department of Immigration and Border Protection
E&OE
Thank you colleagues it’s great to see such a large turnout from all tiers of government across a number of jurisdictions. Today I’d like to focus on what I believe to be a fundamental truth that what governments do is important—they make a difference and they change nations if they can effect good policy and deliver that policy. Let’s look at three disruptive events that have occurred since the Second World War in our nation and let’s look at the role of government on those occasions.
Turn your mind back to the late 1940s when the era of post–war planning and reconstruction was emerging in the aftermath of what of course was a terrible war that had come to Australia’s own shores. During the war public officials working with the ministers of the day in the Curtin and then Chifley governments started to develop a scheme for national infrastructure building which of course then saw the Snowy Mountains Hydro Scheme built and the industrialisation of our nation, the creation of new industries in automotive, mining, and other industries. The creation of a serious first–class education sector, such as through the creation of the Australian National University in 1946, and of course, in the case of my Department, the creation of the post–war immigration programme which first of all required the establishment of my Department in July 1945, and then of course a very significant effort on the part of government, civil society, states and territories and of course migrants themselves, which saw Australian’s population transformed from a small number of people—seven million occupying this vast continent to—with the ongoing effects of that programme still with us. 24 million people we’re about to tick over in a few months’ time, that’s more than a tripling in 70 years.
Governments make a difference. They change the shape and structure of nations. Take your mind forward to the early 1980s with the advent of the Hawke Government much discussed these days in terms of the Hawke/Keating reforms. I won’t dwell on those other than to say that including with bi–partisan support in terms of legislative changes that were required in the parliament of the day. Those reforms of course laid the foundation for a quarter of a century of economic expansion and the growth in incomes and wealth that we all prosper from. Take your mind forward again, more with an international flavour this time; to the end of the Cold War in the very late ’80s but more particularly the early ’90s, which saw the peaceful dissolution of the Soviet Union and the creation of new multi–lateral and regional institutions such as APEC, the ASEAN regional forum, and new trade arrangements under the then–new World Trade Organisation.
I’d contend that these eras of disruptive change saw high–calibre decision making which was characterised by very close partnerships between governments of both political persuasion, Labor and Coalition in Australia, working closely with a strategically focused adept public service headed by what I would contend were high–calibre secretaries, agency heads, and senior officials, and supported by very committed knowledgeable and diligent staff. Let’s take our mind and travel forward now to the era in which we are confronted with now—a multi–polar world of course has emerged since the turn of the century in 2000. Globalisation has become truly global spanning the entire globe for the first time in human history with expanded trade and travel flows. Power is shifting as is sometimes said from west to east including of course through the remorseless rise in economic and strategic power of China and India. Influential, not just in regional affairs but global affairs – nations such as Indonesia, Turkey, Brazil, Nigeria, Mexico and Poland. You’re seeing of course the rise of empowered non–state actors who in some cases can actually control and influence territory as is the case in the Middle East regrettably with Daesh.
You see questions emerge around the future of US power and more particularly its willingness to engage and deploy that power strategically, militarily and in other respects as well. We’re certainly seeing a remorseless increase in economic interdependence which will continue to grow but the question that needs to be posed in this disruptive era is will adherence to the post–war norms that were established after the Second World War remain intact? Norms around open trade, the management of commons such as sea lanes and airspace. Norms around the resolution of territorial disputes, norms around the non–interference by states using proxy forces across state boundaries as has regrettably been seen internationally.
We also have of course in this global era the global movement of peoples more in quantitative terms than at any time in human history. Less focused on settlement these days and more on temporary work, education, tourism, travel, studying, and so on and so forth. And of course, in addition to that vast pool of people moving about the globe, sometimes for settlement but for other purposes too, there are 50–plus million displaced persons. Displaced either within national boundaries as a result of civil strife and war, or indeed displaced across boundaries seeking refuge. We’re seeing of course a democratisation and significant spread of technology, and the rapid changes that that can occasion in comparative advantage amongst nations.
We’ve seen Australia’s weight, by definition, become dispersed and diluted in relative terms—not absolute terms, but relative terms— as other powers rise. This potentially will constrain our strategic and economic environment and our choices, and potentially leaves us open to coercion if we get our statecraft wrong, and could ultimately impact on our sovereignty. It potentially, if we don’t play our cards right, reduces our influence in global and regional decision making. And the prospective changes to the system of power and norms that is emerging is not necessarily going to be to our advantage if we don’t play our, those, cards right.
In a future conference such as this when we look back on this era, will this era be seen as one of a high–calibre decision making, both in terms of processes and outcomes? Will it be seen as a close partnership between effective governments, high–calibre public servants working diligently together, and in partnership with civil society, industry partners, and others?
Dealing with these issues, that I’ve just quickly sketched out, and their interdependencies, is of course core business for government and the senior public service, in particular because it’s the nation’s state that has the principle levers to deal with such issues, the levers of statecraft, diplomacy, border management systems in my case, economic diplomacy, and regrettably, on occasions, the need to of course employ military power.
Let me just drill down a level below that more stratospheric appreciation of the global scene to the role of the public service specifically. And I’ll focus these remarks on the federal public service, which is where I’ve worked all my life. I would contend that Canberra works best when governments and ministers are supported by a high–performing and talented group of secretaries and senior public officials, and diligent staff, who run their departments well, and indeed are allowed to do so, and who act as the preeminent advisors to their ministers, and as appropriate, to groups of senior ministers, as we do when we support the Prime Minister in the National Security Committee of Cabinet, which I attend.
But a wise and effective secretary of a department realises that his or her advice is always going to be contestable; contestable as between other departments with advisors in ministerial offices, and gratifyingly increasing with research think tanks, with academia, with advocacy groups, industry groups, private sector experts, commissions of inquiry and review. These are not bad things. Having diverse opinions, diverse evidence, or at least diverse interpretations of hopefully the same evidence, is a good thing.
And one thing that I would draw to colleagues’ attention is that when we look back on those eras, particularly that post–war reconstruction period in the late 1940s, the one key difference between that era and now is that that was sometimes seen as the age of the mandarin. And if you understand what that phrase is, it relates to short–hand use for somewhat anonymous and these days largely forgotten secretaries, who used to run their departments rather fiercely and who were lampooned in the 1970s British comedy series Yes, Minister. They were the sole advisors, they tended to channel all the advice. But equally, it was the case that research think tanks largely didn’t exist, advocacy groups didn’t, and so on and so forth. The private sector didn’t generate independent knowledge through consultancies and the like. So they had a clear monopoly on advice, and one wonders how some of those gentlemen—and they were all men—would have gone in today’s age of the 24/7 media cycle, and highly–contested advice.
So these days departmental advice has to be highly influential and compelling. It has to be based therefore on strong evidence, but it has to be actionable, it has to be clear, and it has to relate to a clear public policy problem that’s been defined, and of course it has to conform with the strategic, and indeed ideological agenda of the government. Although of course it’s important that we as public servants are completely impartial and dispassionate as to the electoral fortunes of the government that implements any particular policy. In this environment, the role of the secretary is not to hem or constrain a courageous minister, as is sometimes short–handily said, as in the stereotype of the wily mandarin who does everything to protect the department, which really means the secretary and the club of secretaries of which he, and they’re nearly all often men in the stereotype, by creating false choices for ministers or elegant paper trails which were engineered to deflect and sandbag.
No, we have to be completely conscious of the fact that our advice and our views are going to be impacted, and properly so, by contested views. Those departments and those secretaries who head those departments that engaged in the old stereotype behaviour of trying to monopolise information and trying to monopolise advice, have since the early 1970s—and this is a good thing in my view—found themselves being frozen out and diminished in the level of influence that they’re able to wield. And we saw of course in the 1970s and 1980s, particularly with the advent of the Whitlam Government, what has become an intrinsic feature of our governments ever since, the rise of policy advisor in ministerial offices. And as you would have discerned from my biography I actually served in that capacity myself in the early ’90s. So, I have a benign rather than negative view of the role of advisors.
However, departments should, frankly—with the resources that they have, the firepower that they’re given in terms of monetary and intellectual resources—be able to produce the best forms of advice, well considered and well researched. Because they’re the sole institutions that are able to pull everything together; they can draw on the work of the think tanks, the advocacy groups, the academics, and so on and so forth. But they can only do this if they build and maintain policy capability and strategic skills within their organisations; if they focus on looking at the future, through future scanning and horizon scanning, as it’s sometimes called, looking for both threats and opportunities; if they’re imaginative and innovative, working on those actionable ideas that I referred to earlier; and they focus strategically, with the leadership giving itself time to do so.
Now, whilst implementation for a public servant is of course very, very important, because we act first and foremost, we’re not theorists, the cult of what I would describe as purposeless implementation, as a substitute for doing the real job, which is innovative policy and strategy, needs to be critiqued. That is to say, the cult of purposeless implementation needs to be critiqued, with its obsessive focus on burdensome compliance reporting to central agencies, mechanistic profile management and internal red tape. Agencies—once a programme has been established and endorsed by government, and indeed led by government and ministerial decision making—should be allowed to get on with the implementation of those programmes with the least amount of interference possible.
So, our job is really to come up with ideas, compellingly so, get them supported by ministers who are willing to advocate for them and then, of course, to implement them once they are endorsed. So, let me drill down further and look at the case study that I have to quickly cover this morning and that is the changes that we are making, the Department of Immigration and Border Protection and I would contend that this programme of change ticks all of the boxes that I have just set out. We are bringing together under government direction and gratifyingly the relevant legislation as passed the House of Representatives with the Opposition’s support and is therefore likely to pass the Senate, I would contend. So, by 1 July this year which is only some 10 weeks away, the former Department of Immigration—which has been known variously since 1945 when it was first established, as I mentioned earlier, under different names but essentially it’s been immigration and a combination of either ethnic affairs, multicultural affairs, citizenship and the like and more recently immigration and border protection—it will be merged with the Australian Customs and Border Protection Service which has been in existence various manifestations since 1901—it’s one of the foundational departments of state—to form a single border department from 1 July 2015, which will be known as the Department of Immigration and Border Protection and which will contain within it a uniformed, disciplined force to be known as the Australian Border Force.
The Australian Border Force will be the border law enforcement agency and will be headed by a commissioner who will join me in the joint leadership of our agency from 1 July this year. The Border Force will be a uniform force that will enforce migration, customs and maritime laws. Why are we doing this? We are doing this because Australia needs a trusted gateway or indeed portal so that trade, travel and people movement can occur with the least amount of interference possible, because that’s just the nature of the world these days with high velocity, trade, travel and people movement that needs to be facilitated for our economic, cultural and social prosperity. But that facilitation needs to be combined with the greatest possible level of scrutiny, security and risk mitigation in terms of national security, law enforcement and community protection imperatives.
Let me just give you one small piece of evidence to sustain those propositions. Next year in the forthcoming programme year of 2015–16, we’ll break all previous records and on current projections, we’ll issue five million visas to foreign non–citizens seeking to visit Australia. Of those five million visas 190,000 will be for permanent settlement in Australia. That’s on current projections. That will be the largest permanent settlement intake in our history. It will outstrip any of the permanent intakes that we had during that post–war era that I described earlier, obviously with a smaller population base at that time. So, the rest of those visas, 4.8 million, obviously relates to temporary arrival, so either for temporary work, study, travel, tourism, going to business conferences, sporting contests and the like.
We cannot possibly run such a business – and the retail end of what we do, the issuance of visas, has to be run as a business. Unless we can cope with high volumes, facilitated decision making – but as your bank does when your credit card is being defrauded, without rapid reaction risk systems that can protect fraudulent applications, hopefully and preferably deny those applications in the first place. But, if they’ve been erroneously granted through swift action by our intelligence agencies and the Border Force, once it’s up and running, to have those visas, those visa holders interdicted and either stopped at the border, and if they get through to the border, which hopefully will be a very small proportion of that five million, are dealt with and deported accordingly.
You cannot possibly run a high–volume activity government enterprise with the old systems. So, by bringing together our ability to manage trade, travel and immigration, both permanent and temporary, as well as visitation, we will be able to cross leverage skills, capabilities, tools, analytical capabilities and the like. This is a huge change management exercise and I’m delighted to be joined in that exercise by my colleague, the Chief Executive Officer of the Australian Customs and Border Protection Service, Mr Roman Quaedvlieg. He and I are working through obviously putting the finishing touches on these changes that need to occur over the next 10 weeks so that we are ready for launch on 1 July and the Government has given us then one year until 1 July ’16 to undertake full implementation.
Obviously—and I won’t cover the ground in detail because of the shortness of time we’re looking at everything across the enterprise—our strategic planning and risk assessment capability, our workforce, the levels of learning, development and education that we’re going to require, our career management system to ensure that staff are equipped with the tools they need to do their current job, as well as the tools that they’re going to need to do future jobs, our digital services, how much of this activity can we push online; our intelligence capability that sits behind those digital services to do all of that vetting that I referred to earlier; our ability to undertake identity work either through biometrics or other forms of identity matching devices; our ability to share information both with, at the highly classified level of intelligence agencies, with law enforcement agencies and with other agencies as well and also, as a subset of this massive change, exercise how we create the professional enforcement capability that will be intrinsic to the Australian Border Force.
Let me dwell very briefly on the cultural aspects of this change programme. It cannot possibly be done on the basis of staff who have been in both agencies diligently working, in some cases, for 20 or 30 years, in older paradigms, just related in one case to physical goods and the case of customs, and in the case of immigration, de–settlement and migration. To achieve this new capability, the valuable insight skills and knowledge of those two sets of staff, the customs staff on the goods side and the immigration side, with the skills around people movement, need, by definition, to be combined with, and leveraged with the insights, skills, wisdom and knowledge that comes from others, with diverse experience in policing, military operations, in intelligence operations, and in some cases like functions such as banking, large retail, online business transaction – transactionally–based businesses that can deal with large volumes but still detect malicious or fraudulent transactions.
So we’re drawing on all of those sources of expertise. We are honouring, celebrating, and recognising those who have 20, 25, 30 years of experience doing frontline operational work, much of which won’t change. We still will have boarding teams in our Australian Border Force Marine Unit, we’ll have dog handlers, and on the immigration side we’ll also have staff who deal with customers and clients seeking visas. So those operational staff obviously will be trained on new systems, and trained on new ways of doing business, but the super–structure that needs to sit over those traditional ways of doing business will essentially come in from other agencies.
And to that end I’m delighted already as we approach 1 July that we are being joined at senior leadership levels by colleagues with diverse experience. You heard from my biographical introduction that I’ve got a significant background in defence matters. Mr Quaedvlieg head of Customs and Border Protection, is a long–standing former policeman both in the Australian Federal Police, a secondment to the former National Crime Authority, and Queensland Police, as well.
We’ve had for some years, the head of our Maritime Security Operation being a Rear Admiral of the Australian Navy on permanent secondment to, what is currently the Customs and Border Protection Service, running Border Protection Command. We’ve had until recently of course, Lieutenant General Angus Campbell, running a specific joint agency taskforce in relation to an operation known as Operation Sovereign Borders. General Campbell recently relinquished that post to return to the Australian Defence Force to prepare to take over as Chief of the Army, and he’s been replaced by a successor, a Major General, also of the Australian Army who heads that joint taskforce.
We’ve been joined by an Assistant Commissioner, which is equivalent in rank to a Major General, an Assistant Commissioner of the Federal Police will run our border criminal investigation division, with full Federal Police powers, and able to flow those powers down to investigating teams. We shortly will be joined by the current leader, or Chief Executive of the Australian Geospatial Intelligence Organisation, Ms Maria Fernandez will take over shortly at the end of this month, as our Deputy Secretary for Intelligence Capability and Systems. And finally we have been joined by Deputy Chief Executive of Customs, a former senior police officer Mr Michael Outram, who will take over on 1 July as the Deputy Commissioner of Operations of the Australian Border Force. You get the idea.
Finally it’s not just the very top of the leadership, but the secretary commissioner level that I’ve just described, or the deputy commissioners or the assistant commissioners and they’re civilian equivalents, but obviously we need to take a long, hard look ahead, in combination with our senior executive service or SES talent. We’ve done that with the assistance of a professional services firm. Every single member of our SES cohort, 150 of them have been put through an appraisal, and we’re currently going through discussions with each and every one of them about whether they wish to join us on this journey or whether they wish to do something else with their lives.
And finally, of course, are our senior middle management ranks, so critically important for the transmission of guidance to the shop floor, but also, that’s where a lot of the corporate operational knowledge and wisdom is both held, but sometimes frankly trapped. Our executive levels, ELs as we call them in the Commonwealth Public Service, will soon be going through a similar appraisal process. And again the question will be, the way you’ve been doing this job for 25, 30 years has got key elements that are important to take into the future, but also elements that are going to become obsolete. No different from what happened with bank telling all those years ago when online banking and ATMs came into being.
I take the view personally as secretary that you’re as old or as young as you feel. I don’t take the view that someone in their 40s, 50s, or indeed early 60s is over the hill, unless they want to be. If they don’t want to make the change then we’ll diligently work with them, we’ll do it compassionately, we’ll have regard to their life circumstances, if they don’t want to make the change they can’t come on the journey. It’s like taking an astronaut into space who is not fit for travel. But I don’t care what age you are, you can be indeed well in advance of those ages as I’ve just said if you’re young at heart, willing to innovate, and willing to help us make this change you’re going to be on the rocket ship.
Thank you very much.
