Rift between Brandis and Dutton deepens as the behemoth of Home Affairs rises

Immigration Minister Peter Dutton got a towelling from the Senate this week when he couldn't reach a deal with the crossbench on his legislation to toughen requirements for people seeking Australian citizenship.

The bill was to impose a harder — many would say a ridiculously difficult — English test on those wanting to become Australians, and to require a longer waiting period.

The Senate gave Mr Dutton a Wednesday night deadline to muster support or lose the bill from the notice paper.

He offered some concessions but without success, and the bill dropped off — to return only if and when the numbers change. The minister says he'll fight on.

Mr Dutton had been sent a fresh message about the limits on his power. He doesn't like such reminders. We know this from his attacks on court and tribunal rulings against his ministerial decisions, and his vitriol about lawyers who represent refugees and asylum seekers.

After he agreed with broadcaster Alan Jones about the "un-Australian" behaviour of lawyers who frustrate government efforts to return people to Manus and Nauru following medical treatment, the ongoing deep rift between Mr Dutton and Attorney-General George Brandis flared publicly earlier this month.

In a speech to the International Bar Association Senator Brandis said pointedly that "those who exercise executive power must always accept that they are subject to, and must always be respectful of, the supremacy of the law. And in that process, as the custodians of the rule of law, the role of lawyers is essential".

Senator Brandis didn't name Mr Dutton, but his target was clear.
Colleagues observe the palpable hostility between the two ministers, both from Queensland, as Senator Brandis has recently been increasingly willing to assert small-l liberal positions (slapping down Pauline Hanson and Tony Abbott as well as Mr Dutton), and has in turn been the object of apparently antagonistic briefings to the tabloids.

Tension brewing

As the new Home Affairs department that Mr Dutton will head is being sewn together — including immigration and bringing under its umbrella ASIO, the Australian Federal Police, Border Force, the Criminal Intelligence Commission and AUSTRAC — it's an open secret that Senator Brandis (who loses ASIO but retains the power to sign its warrants), his department and some officials within the agencies are deeply apprehensive about it.

Some of their concerns may be reinforced by the picture painted a week ago by the new department's secretary-designate, and current immigration secretary, Mike Pezzullo who, like Mr Dutton, is seen as an empire builder who takes no prisoners.

Mr Pezzullo, speaking to the Trans-Tasman Business Circle, spelled out Home Affairs' "philosophical context", and sent the message that it would be activist, intrusive (often secretly) and have long tentacles.
His starting point was the "duality of good and evil" at the heart of globalisation.

On the "evil" side — the "dark universe" — "terror has become de-territorialised", and global networks of crime and exploitation are becoming more apparent.

"There are global dark markets for hacking, money laundering, cryptocurrency movement, assumed identities for criminals, terrorists, child exploitation perpetrators and others," he said.

In this context the security power, designed to protect the home front, "is being organised into a single enterprise to deal with the interconnected and globalised threats that we face at home", in an era when "home" and "outside" blur.
"To protect and secure home, we have to be prepared to act globally and to develop networks with like-minded actors, including industry."

The task requires wide and deep reach, with the department's "facilitation" functions (migration, passenger services and the like) and security being the flip sides of the one coin.

"The state has to increasingly embed itself — not majestically, sitting at the apex of society dispensing justice — but the state has to embed itself invisibly into global networks and supply chains, and the virtual realm, in a seamless and largely invisible fashion, intervening on the basis of intelligence and risk settings. Increasingly, at super scale and at very high volumes," Mr Pezzullo said.

"Sometimes we'll embed in a way that will be invisible to you [in business], because we'll take data and we'll put it with other data sources and then see, we'll wash it and then we'll come back with an intervention decision which might be 'no-one on that plane needs to be questioned' or maybe 'everyone does', and you'll go 'yep, OK, whichever we have to do, we do'."

The facilitation model requires "a public-private partnership model between Home Affairs and its component agencies and virtually every sector … whether it's the banking system and talking to them about the active defence of their networks, whether it's the infrastructure sector … utilities, power, water, etc, the air traffic control system," he said.

"Home Affairs is going to be sort of the centre of excellence of figuring out how does Australia work. And we have to be careful about how we write this down, because when you then write the manual, how you take Australia down, there'll be like one copy of that, and I'm not going to tell you where I'm going to keep that, because that's going to be a very dangerous book!"

No surprise Dutton believes he is above the Law.  It is in his DNA.  He is a Copper.

Mr Smith is pumping the trumped up trivia from the ABC Socialist Propaganda Station.

The Lefties are grabbing at any scraps thrown their way as good news on the Lefty front is like hen's teeth teeth days.

Especially now that everybody nose that Bull S.'s top priority is to RESTART the BOATS and send ELECTRICITY PRICES thru the roof.

Will Bull S. have another election loser like his Medicare Fraud this time round ?

It sure must be discouraging to be a Lefty these days.

Dutton will get it.

juliar wrote on Oct 20^th, 2017 at 3:34pm:


Just like the liberal party is the winner in a turnbull v abbott bout!

Quote:


They could host their own series of the biggest loser.