It appears likely the Department of Immigration and Border Protection has found its future home: Belconnen, where its national office has long been based. The government is not yet willing to say this, though it has adopted a new approach to managing leases that seems to give the department little choice but to stay in the town centre.
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Sticking with Belconnen would be the right decision. Nonetheless, if it is confirmed, questions will remain over how such a decision was reached. It is also unclear whether the department's secretary, Michael Pezzullo, will be able to collocate all of his Canberra staff at one site, as was his desire last year when he invited bids to host the soon-to-be-combined Immigration and Customs workforce. The tender documents showed that either Immigration's 4000-odd staff in Belconnen, Customs' 1500 or so employees in Civic, or potentially both workforces would be uprooted from their part of the city into offices built, or refitted, to suit the new department. Regardless of which option the department pursued – be it a headquarters in Belconnen, Civic, Woden or at the airport – the transition would have caused upheaval, and worse, for some businesses. It still may, to an extent.
Belconnen's economy, however, would suffer significantly more than the other precincts. The Immigration Department is by far the largest employer in the town centre and hundreds of small businesses – particularly shops and eateries – could potentially become unviable if it left. However, Finance Minister Mathias Cormann has now taken control of government leases from individual departments and says he will consider "local impacts" when he reviews Immigration's "long-term accommodation needs". Given that it is only by ignoring local impacts that he could justify a shift from Belconnen, it seems a fait accompli that the town centre will keep its most important tenant.
Until now, agency heads such as Mr Pezzullo had only two main criteria guiding their procurement decisions: to achieve value for money for taxpayers and to encourage competition. Yet Canberra, a government town, is shaped to no small degree by where departments and agencies choose to base their workforces. It would have been wrong to make such an important decision without any consideration of how it would affect this city. As such, Senator Cormann is right to elevate such decisions to a whole-of-government level. This approach will also allow the Finance Department to prevent agencies from spending significant sums of public money on new buildings and leases when other suitable offices are available.
It is a pity, though, that it took a public outcry – and lobbying by Canberra's Labor and Liberal politicians – for the federal government to realise this flaw in what had been an ad hoc, and potentially wasteful, approach to accommodating its staff. Nor has Senator Cormann detailed precisely how he or his department will go about determining the "local impact" of lease decisions. The ACT is a self-governing territory, with its own planning laws and agencies, and elected representatives to oversee them. The Commonwealth should formalise the practice of at least consulting the ACT government over such decisions.
The alternative is that Senator Cormann, or perhaps his departmental secretary, Jane Halton, becomes effectively the mayor of Canberra, albeit with no direct accountability to Canberrans. Is that really wise?
