Public servants in the two biggest departments, Defence and Home Affairs, will be hastily preparing ministerial briefs over the next two days on the suspicion that they’ll have new bosses to brief any minute now.
Those in the Attorney-General’s Department — far smaller but also important — will be doing the same, although they’ve had an acting minister for a while now. There may well be other consequential ministerial changes — if Linda Reynolds merely gets demoted and not dumped, she’ll need briefing in her new role, while the incumbent there will move elsewhere.
Home Affairs and Defence are two of the worst-performing portfolios in the Commonwealth. In the case of Defence, to be fair, many of the problems are not of its own making. The submarine project is a debacle because of the Turnbull government’s protectionist decision to build the things here in Australia, adding a huge premium to the cost, the likelihood of significant delays, and ongoing tensions with Naval Group and French politicians who see the whole deal as primarily about jobs in France, not Adelaide.
The F-35 program, however, is a colossal stuff-up entirely of Defence’s making. There’s yet another of an endless series of reports on cost blowouts and delays for the plane, this time around its software, while Congressional leaders are now openly warning the program will be dramatically cut — especially given the ridiculous cost of upgrading older F-35s. The program is now so old due to delays that the earliest planes are hopelessly out of date.
Home Affairs, as Crikey has repeatedly recorded, is in a class of its own when it comes to scandals and stuff-ups. The auditor-general’s staff may as well open a permanent branch office there, so persistent are the problems around procurement and compliance in the mega-department. At no stage has Peter Dutton, now once again being touted for Defence, demonstrated the slightest care about the incompetence and failures that have marked Immigration/Home Affairs since he arrived there from his disastrous stint in Health in 2014.
That augurs very poorly indeed for the chances of stronger ministerial control over Defence’s persistent procurement problems. It’s not even clear that Dutton, a former policeman, understands the basics of procurement and importance of good processes and compliance with government rules.
In most departments, procurement disasters might cost a few million dollars. In Home Affairs they can cost billions. But in Defence, they can cost tens of billions of dollars over decades.
Let’s hope the new defence and home affairs ministers get an honest and comprehensive briefing on why their new portfolios have been such disaster areas in recent years.
Duttons incompetence at everything matches Stuart roberts.
Dutton should have stuck to crashing police cars for compo, and Robert should have stuck to holy land tour groups.
Reynolds was probably a hopeless chocolate soldier because she’s woeful at politics.
Stuart Robert has already had a stint as Assistant Minister of Defence. He could be on his way back in there, destined to create the same debacle as he’s done in Government Services and the NDIS. What a numpty.
A bit harsh on Defence I think concerning the F35 debacle. My memory is that John Howard signed us up to the project in the early 2000’s when he was in the US being feted by George W for his support for the disastrous Iraq War. Little Johnny was given a tour of the Lockheed Martin facility, no doubt wined and dined and shown their new futuristic project to build the amazing Joint Strike Fighter. Johnny signed us up on the spot in the US as I remember it, even as Defence was working through it’s own evaluation of the best replacement fighter for the Hornets. Another costly legacy of the Howard years.
Yep, chalk another doozy up to John Howard.
Didn’t the Dassault rep arrive in Oz expecting to give a sales pitch for the Rafale fighter and then told he would not be meeting anyone in government or defence? A decision had been made. Australia did have experience with the company in the purchase of the Mirage fighters back in the 60’s.
There’s another little thing – we bought 116 Mirage aircraft. All but two of those airframes were manufactured, go to whoa, in Australia. So were most of the engines. Some components, notably the DEFA cannon and most of the avionics, were bought from France. But it was Australian engineers and scientists who came up with nearly all the life extension mods that were applied to the aircraft worldwide, towards the end of its service life’ But we don’t do that sort of thing in Australia any more. We don’t know how, according to the pollies.
Indeed. He famously had just signed the lease of a harbourside house, organised schools for his kids (& I’d heard rumours that he was looking to by a little yacht to muck about with during the 12-18 month long tendering process) in the eastern suburbs & was about to fly the family out from France that week, when word came through of Howard emerging from a room flanked by Lockheed Martin sales reps & State Dept urgers, waving a signed contract.
So he shrugged, packed up & went home.
Peter Dutton’s early political education was as a young policeman in the Bjelke-Petersen era in Queensland. He would have learnt that sensible decisions are not what its about. Its about achieving your own personal agenda and the tax payer is expected to pay for it. As an adult this has been re-inforced at Federal level. By those measures he is doing exactly what he has been trained to do.He apparently has no ability to think things through himself.
Re-arranging the deck chairs…
Corruption is bad management. An organisation cannot operate effectively under bad management. That’s accountability is supposed to bubble up to the top. These bozos still think “I didn’t know”, “I haven’t read that document”, and “that was handled within my office – I wasn’t briefed” is an adequate explanation for their negligence.
Honest briefings!! That would be a courageous decision on the part of the heads of Defence and Hone Affairs.
Besides, isn’t Pezzullo the head of Hone Affairs? He would surely be sobbing himself in if he were to brief the new Minister truthfully. He is every bit a Dutton clone and seems to care not for rigour or transparency or any of those other old fashioned public servicey things.
Sobbing, gggrrrrrrr. Dobbing!
I did wonder..
Considering the number of Australians who say “honing in”, your typo might be appropriate.
Oh hang on, hone means “improve”…