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A leaked report from a private consulting firm paints a dire picture of the IT operations of the Department of Home Affairs.
The report, by Proximity Consultants, was written between December 2021 and February 2022. The details of the report were first shared at an audit committee hearing on Friday, 31 March.
“The financial underpinnings to support the resolution of critical policy and operational issues have not been available,” the report read, as reported by the SMH. “Functions and priorities were never right-sized or funded appropriately from the outset.”
“A large gap between funding and operation requirements is forcing the department to make trade-offs between risk tolerance, service delivery quality, and cost.”
The training of frontline officers is a particular issue for the department, as is maintaining IT systems that are, in some cases, 30 years old, the report found. Retaining staff has also been an issue, with 600 people leaving the department in the year before the report was written.
The department had 13,371 staff in 2021 — well below the mandated 14,000 Home Affairs is meant to operate with.
Home Affairs has sought to make up the shortfall with outside contractors, which has cost the department $227.5 million each year since 2014, money that has largely been spent supporting aged IT systems.
When confronted with the report, Justine Saunders — the department’s chief operating officer — agreed there were issues.
“Over time, we’ve had to manage historically through a number of trade-offs around operational delivery, systems, processes and people,” Saunders said, according to ITNews.
“We’re obviously seeing pressures in regards to our data and systems, knowing that we’re dealing with aged systems today.”
The Department of Home Affairs was formed by then prime minister Malcolm Turnbull and first headed up by the current Leader of the Opposition, Peter Dutton, in December 2017. The department was seen at the time as an unwieldy mega-ministry, overseeing ASIO and the ABF, as well as the AFP for a time, though that has since been demerged.
The parlous state of the department is of particular concern, as it is also largely responsible for policy in areas such as cyber security and national security.
The head of the audit committee, MP Julian Hill, was scathing of what the leaked report revealed.
“Sh--show would be a technical term for a government that gets to the point it commissions an expensive consultant report to referee a dysfunctional fight between Home Affairs and the Finance Department because ministers failed for years to simply do their jobs,” Hill said on Friday.
David Hollingworth has been writing about technology for over 20 years, and has worked for a range of print and online titles in his career. He is enjoying getting to grips with cyber security, especially when it lets him talk about Lego.
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