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Homeland Security seems a lot of effort just to keep Peter Dutton busy

Creating a new megadepartment might be unnecessary, but at least it'll be expensive and disruptive.

Andrew P Street
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Let's say, for the sake of argument, that there's no plan a-brewing for the Liberal Party to call a spill of the leadership in about 20 Newspolls' time, if the party's fortunes don't dramatically improve under the leadership of Malcolm Turnbull. 

Furthermore, let's say that Immigration Minister Peter Dutton wasn't being feted as the Minister Most LIkely To Roll Him With The Support Of The Conservatives In His Party.

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Is this our next Prime Minister?

As Malcolm Turnbull flounders in the polls, Peter Dutton is being mentioned as a possible leader.

And let's say that Attorney-General George Brandis wasn't getting more and more ensnared in the scandal over his conduct regarding the Bell Group debacle and seemed at all capable of doing his job.

In this alternative, significantly better universe, would the stripping of areas currently under the AG's purview and adding them to Immigration and Border Protection in order to create a massive new megadepartment of Homeland Security seem like a super-cool idea? 

The gut reaction would be probably not, since it would appear that our departments are successfully doing their job - and if, as the PM contends, there is a need to "improve co-ordination across the government in preventing terrorist attacks" then that sounds like a problem that could be quickly and cheaply sorted out with a stern warning to the departmental heads to play nicer with one another. 

However, we do not live in that universe so creating a Department of Homeland Security (you know, like America's got! It's in that show on the TV!) would serve three important purposes. 

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One, it minimises the amount of damage that Brandis can do in the dying weeks before he's quietly shuffled off to that nice farm where all your childhood pets live - sorry, to the gig as High Commissioner to London. 

Two, it would make Peter Dutton feel trusted and respected by his PM - and as we know, the only ship that Border Force don't turn back is mateship.

And thirdly, and probably most importantly, it would be such a headache to create that Dutton will be too busy to think about challenging. 

See, we like to think of government departments as being pretty much the same: large, well appointed buildings in which happy, stilted people awkwardly talk about how stoked they are about their presentation to the executives this afternoon, how much they enjoy paleo pear and banana bread, and how they're off to an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander staff network meeting. 

However, government departments each have their own cultures, their own ways of doing things, and - awkwardly - often their own internal computer systems. And departmental mergers never, ever, ever, ever are reported in headlines like "merger way ahead of schedule", "report: budget savings of merger were not wildly overestimated" or "staff delighted with ongoing series of sudden, arbitrary changes to their established work practices".

Take the establishment of Border Force, for example: the department that sounds like like a terrible action film. That involved the merger of two departments - Immigration and Customs - and was announced in 2014 by then-minister Scott Morrison, and was a nightmare for all involved.

For a start, those who'd worked in the fairly bureaucratic, paperwork-heavy Customs were a little shocked at being informed that they'd be carrying weapons and wearing paramilitary uniforms as part of Border Force, at a cost of $10 million. This was followed by that hilarious drama over their godawful logo amid questions like "so, were the designers given the brief 'you know what'd be great? A cyclopian crocodile in a nice collared shirt, who is also a tiny demon in a football helmet'?" 

More importantly, IBM were give half a billion dollars to create a new system for the megadepartment and missed the deadline to do so in October 2016, fresh from their impressive bungling of the national census only a few months earlier, raising entirely valid concerns about the security of sensitive data. 

The merger also came during a industrial dispute, leading to complaints that strikebreakers were being used to bust industrial action by members of the Community and Public Sector Union, while experienced Customs bureaucrats quit in droves as their aggressively hawkish Immigration counterparts started throwing their weight around. 

The concerns of said departing staff regarding this new "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" culture were realised in the embarrassing September 2015 fiasco which was the ironically named Operation Fortitude, in which armed and uniformed officers attempted to set up a checkpoint in the middle of Melbourne and started demanding people prove they had the right to be in the country. This led to a snap protest by outraged Melburnians before the ABF's little party was shut down by Victorian Police. 

And things don't appear to have settled down either. Last year an internal survey of the Department of Immigration and Border Protection concluded that "70 per cent of officials… have no confidence in their boss Mike Pezzullo​ or Australian Border Force Commissioner Roman Quaedvlieg​, with some complaining a culture of blame came from the top."

So sure, merging six departments sounds like a nightmarish ordeal which will lose hard-won institutional experience, create all sorts of internal compliance issues and drain the morale of already-drained staff - but it'll keep Dutton nice and busy between now and the election.

After all, if you can't make actual friends, distracting your potential enemies is the next best thing.

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