Biting the hands that serve you: desperate Minister blames Department.

By Lyle Dunne

One of the questions about the aftermath of the election is how the opposition will manage the transition to government. Less attention has been given, understandably, to the question about how the government will manage the transition to opposition. One Minister who seems to have a head start, however, is Brendan O’Connor: he’s already behaving like a member of the opposition.

He’s been much in the news in the last week or so, first with the campaign on 457 visas, then the controversy over whether his Department had, or should have, informed him about the status of Maksoud Abdel Latif.

There’s a common thread here: in both cases, the Minister appears to be at least implicitly attacking his own bureaucrats, in a way that’s unusual, to say the least, for a Minister in a Government nearing the end of its second term.

Latif, an asylum seeker who had been held in a minimum security detention centre for eight months, had been convicted of murder and terrorism in Egypt in 1999, and was the subject of an Interpol alert. O’Connor originally claimed that neither he nor his predecessor, Chris Bowen, had been briefed on the case; however he was subsequently forced to admit that Bowen had indeed received a submission on the subject in September 2012, but had not signed it, nor returned it to the Department – indicating he hadn’t read it.

O’Connor continues to maintain that neither he nor his staff were ever informed of the matter, which initially sounds (Westminster aside) like a fair criticism of the Department. However one has to ask what this says about arrangements within the Minister’s office: are there no procedures for handover when a new Minister is appointed, such as perhaps a briefing on outstanding issues? Did no Ministerial staffer say “here’s the box [or boxes] of papers Minister Bowen didn’t get to”? Is there no priority coding, e.g. might a terrorist and convicted murderer in a minimum-security facility warrant some sort of red post-it note? (Interpol seems to have thought so.) Did Bowen shred all the records in a fit of piqué, and did no-one on O’Connor’s staff think to ask for a list of outstanding issues? (Departments normally provide one unasked, in fact, to new Ministers.)

In summary, it sounds not so much like a simple failure on the Department’s part, as a failure of communication within the Minister’s office and/or between that office and the Department.

Communications within a key ministerial office ‑or between that office and the  Department — appear to have disintegrated.

This echoes O’Connor’s withdrawal of his earlier claim that the number of illegitimate 457s “would exceed over[sic] 10,000″ after the Immigration Department revealed that the figure didn’t come from them.

Nevertheless the government has introduced legislation to strengthen enforcement powers around 457 visas, including a “dob in” hotline.

The appeal of such a campaign for Labor is understandable. It’s a sector of anti-immigration sentiment that they can make their own, where the Coalition cannot follow. They can appeal indirectly to anti-migrant or even racist feeling while on the surface running a straightforward class-warfare campaign: it’s all the fault of wicked employers seeking to “rort” the system by pretending that they have tried to fill jobs domestically, when they’re just trying to bring in cheap foreign labour.

Labor’s dog whistle

Some in the ALP might not thank O’Connor for reminding voters that the roots of the White Australia policy lie in the labour movement, whose economic interests are served by keeping out foreign workers. He runs the risk of undermining decades of work designed to depict conservatives as the ones who are racist. It must be hard to keep a straight face when accusing the Coalition of “dog-whistle politics” in relation to illegal immigrants, while simultaneously running your own, less-than-subliminal campaign against legal immigrants.

But there’s a bigger problem: a lot of voters are aware that Labor is actually still in government, and has been for two terms. Some may have already noticed that O’Connor is in fact the Minister responsible for 457 visas. Thus any criticism of the present system must redound on his, and his government’s, own heads.

If it is the case that employers are obtaining 457 visas without providing documentation showing domestic recruitment attempts, then the obvious question is “well why didn’t you check?”

And by “you”, we mean the Minister, who in our Westminster system is responsible for the actions of the Department.

And if the excuse is – as it seems to be – that the Department didn’t have enough resources, or enough power, to carry out thorough checks – then the only way blame can travel is up, to the Cabinet, and ultimately the Prime Minister, who are responsible for allocating resources, and for legislative priorities.

The only way blame can travel is up.

One might imagine than Labor governments and Canberra public servants would be natural allies, sharing a view that (despite occasional evidence to the contrary) government was ultimately a force for good, and that well-intentioned interventions in the economy or society were likely to prove on the whole beneficial. Indeed, voting figures for the ACT seem to bear this out.

There are however at least a couple of countervailing arguments, some old, and some new.

Rudd legacy

The Rudd government went a long way to poisoning relations with its public servants by effectively abolishing Cabinet government: Cabinet submissions were no longer circulated to Departments for “Coördination comments”, so Ministers could no longer effectively be briefed by Departments. (Apart from Rudd’s own peculiar psychology, the motivation seems to have been the concern that public servants had been tainted by working for the Howard government, much as, under Stalin, Russian PoWs who had escaped from the Germans in WWII were considered to have been tainted by contact with the enemy. And shot.) This led to radically centralised decision-making, bottlenecks and inertia. These procedural issues, which the rest of Australia never really understood, were very keenly felt in Canberra.

Worse, in recent times, questions about the best interest of Australians have become irrelevant to what is increasingly seen as a lame-duck government. The only concerns now are creating legacy projects to safeguard their reputation for posterity, limiting the scope of an Abbott government to achieve its agenda, damage control, and scapegoat identification.

Recent events suggest Labor MPs are no longer convinced by the argument that “if we don’t hang together, we shall surely hang separately”.

It’s hardly surprising that, in the present atmosphere of panic, belief in ministerial responsibility has been trumped by the desire for plausible deniability.