Home Affairs’ cyber systems are vulnerable to hacking and frontline officers are not properly trained, according to a damning internal report that says chronic underfunding has undermined the department’s ability to keep Australia safe.
The leaked confidential review into the mega department responsible for national security, cyber defence and foreign interference among other areas revealed the department lost 600 employees in a year and more than $2 billion in cost-cutting has stopped it from hiring enough staff.
The probe into the agency’s budget, conducted by consulting and legal firm Proximity between December 2021 and February 2022, interviewed dozens of top brass including the agency’s secretary Mike Pezullo, who has run the department since its inception.
“From the beginning the department was set up to fail, in terms of its expectations and budget envelope,” an anonymous department official told the investigation.
Home Affairs was created by then-prime minister Malcolm Turnbull in 2017. Peter Dutton was the first minister in charge of the department, which brought together agencies including ASIO and the Australian Border Force. Moderate Liberals including former foreign minister Julie Bishop opposed its creation.
“The financial underpinnings to support the resolution of critical policy and operational issues have not been available. Functions and priorities were never right sized or funded appropriately from the outset,” the report found.
Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus held a press conference to announce that Debra Mortimer has been appointed chief justice of the Federal Court, the first woman to hold the position.
“While all agencies are expected to be efficient and balance their budgets according to government direction, the baseline budget situation for the department has become misaligned with its core and far-reaching activities related to keeping Australia safe.”
“A large gap between funding and operation requirements is forcing the department to make tradeoffs between risk tolerance, service delivery quality, and cost.”
Budget documents show Home Affairs’ budget is slated to drop by $500 million over the next year, from $7.8 billion to about $7.3 billion.
While funding has increased in recent years, the report noted the agency’s responsibilities have tripled. It previously managed five key areas including border protection, citizenship and customs. By 2022, it had control of 13 functions including national security policy and operations, cyber policy, critical infrastructure and ethnic affairs/social cohesion.
A Home Affairs spokesman said the agency reviewed base funding annually and sought one-off top-ups “where funding is critical to meet immediate

priorities”.
“The Department has a strong record in budget management and has historically reported balanced results despite its complex budget arrangements and has achieved an average financial result within 0.7 per cent of the allocated budget over the eight years to 2021-22,” the spokesman said.
Dutton’s office declined to comment.
The chair of the parliament’s public accounts and audit committee, Julian Hill, said Home Affairs’ top executives had admitted the agency was set up to fail and was compromising national security.
Referring to the poor relationship identified in the review between Home Affairs and the agency responsible for the budget, Hill said: “S***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.”
The review did not identify many examples of the ways in which underfunding harmed its operations. The document says the department struggles to train frontline officers appropriately and has not maintained up-to-date IT systems, including its 30-year-old visa system requiring 17 different screens to process a single visa.
The report also found the department wasted $180 million on a visa system overhaul proposed by the Morrison government.
Home Affairs chief operating officer Justine Saunders was unable to specify which areas of the department suffered from the lack of funding when asked about the review during a hearing of parliament’s audit committee on Friday.
Saunders, who participated in the confidential audit, said the department was working with the new Labor government to find long-term funding solutions.
When Saunders denied the budget could be characterised as unsustainable, Hill responded: “Right, so nothing is underfunded even though that’s what the review says?”
The visa system has not yet been upgraded, but a review of Australia’s migration system is due mid-April. Home Affairs Minister Claire O’Neil told the AFR Workforce Summit at the end of February that the visa backlog had been reduced from 1 million to 500,000 over the eight months she had overseen the department.
In the year before the review was conducted 600 staff left the agency, resulting in a “hollowing out of talent”. It had 13,371 staff in 2021, well below the 14,000 staff the agency can purportedly hire under its “average staffing level” cap
www.samigration.com V.4763

There are fears that more people will be separated by the introduction of a minimum salary level for those wanting UK family visas. Families living in the UK and abroad have raised concerns about what new rules will mean for them as they try to reunite with foreign spouses. In December, the Home Office, which says migration to the UK is too high, announced a package of measures to reduce net migration, following a spike in arrival numbers. V.5318
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An Ethiopian asylum seeker, who does not speak English, claims he was duped by a senior immigration official into paying an admission of guilt fine when he thought he was paying for bail.Two Western Cape High Court judges have condemned the official`s `deplorable` behaviour, set aside the fine, and ordered the immigration official be taken off the case. Tsegaye Esyas claims Annelise van Dyk treated him like an animal which led to him attempt suicide while in police cells. V.5320
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EREMY MAGGS: I want to stay with crime now. Individuals with a criminal record may be faced with significant challenges when seeking employment, I think that’s a given. Here in South Africa, employers may legally exclude an applicant from consideration for a position if having a clean criminal record is what is termed an inherent requirement of the job. That phrase, inherent requirement, is important, but what exactly does that mean, and when can an applicant be lawfully excluded for having a criminal record? V.5321
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As a South African who has adopted a nomadic work lifestyle alongside my wife, Ingrid Lotze, I’ve been an interested observer of South Africa’s snail-pace digital nomad visa (DNV) development process. Despite the optimism surrounding its introduction, the visa seems to miss several crucial marks for digital nomads like us. V.5322
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DA MP says hours lost continue to result in persons being unable to collect their ID documents due to unmanageable queues The DA has been inundated with complaints that the Department of Home Affairs (DHA) systems are offline, resulting in long queues and delayed processing of documents. Through questions posed to the Minister, the DA can now reveal that the DHA has lost over 77 years’ worth of working hours due to system downtime and load-shedding from 2019 to date. Concerningly, this data only relates to hours lost for the application of smart IDs, meaning decades more of working hours could have been additionally lost in other spheres such as passport or visa applications. V.5314
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Home Affairs’ seemingly endless court battles set the department back more than R110-million between April 2023 and the end of February this year. This was revealed in a written parliamentary response by minister Aaron Motsoaledi. He said the department accumulated a litigation bill of R117 692 996.3, higher than the R72 637 944.51 spent the year before. V.5315
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Airports Company South Africa (ACSA) this week revealed that Cape Town International Airport (CTIA) has achieved a ground-breaking milestone by processing more than 10 million passengers over a single financial year. This is the highest number of regional and international passengers processed since COVID-19 V.5316
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In recent years, South Africa has seen a significant influx of immigrants from various African countries, as well as other parts of the world. This has raised important questions about the country`s immigration policies and their impact on job creation for both locals and immigrants. The South African immigration system, like many other countries, is a complex and ever-evolving process that aims to balance the country`s economic needs with its social and cultural interests. Let`s take a closer look at how this system intersects with job creation in South Africa. The South African government implemented the Immigration Act of 2002, which outlines the country`s immigration policies and procedures. Under this act, foreigners are required to obtain a visa or permit to enter, work, or study in South Africa. The type of visa or permit required depends on the intended purpose of the individual`s visit and their country of origin. V.5312
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Due to system downtime and load-shedding, the Department of Home Affairs (DHA) lost nearly 141,000 hours of Smart ID application and production time between the 2019/20 and 2022/23 financial years. Minister Aaron Motsoaledi revealed this figure in a recent response to questions raised in Parliament by Democratic Alliance MP Adrian Roos. Motsoaledi provided a breakdown of smart ID production and application hours lost to technical difficulties and load-shedding per province for each financial year from 2019/2020. These disruptions hit home Affairs offices in the Eastern Cape the hardest, with over 34,000 hours to rotational power cuts and system downtime. Mpumalanga offices lost the next-highest number of hours at 17 V.5313
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Home Affairs Minister Dr Aaron Motsoaledi has said the public has shown great support for the final White Paper on citizenship, immigration and refugee protection which appeared in the Government Gazette on Wednesday. Briefing the media, he addressed what he saw as a long-overdue need to replace an outdated Citizenship Act, as well as enact proposed changes to existing legislation. V.5306
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