Home Affairs portfolio staff to reach 23,000, bosses reveal

Home Affairs bosses revealed the headcount before telling a Senate estimates hearing on Monday that the massive machinery of government change would cost less than $10 million, with a bulk of the spending going to about $3 million in security upgrades at its Barton offices.

Public servants under the portfolio will make up 15 per cent of all APS staff after several agencies, including the Australian Federal Police and Australian Border Force, came into its tent in December and if ASIO comes into the fold if legislation is passed this year. About 14,000 within the portfolio will work outside its statutory agencies, and in the Home Affairs department.

The Tax Office has more than 20,000 public servants, and the Department of Human Services employs 34,000.

Home Affairs secretary Michael Pezzullo launched another public defence of his agency - the second in six months - against claims it would be an "extra-judicidal apparatus of power" and said its formation from several different departments had run smoothly.

"Some commentary on the establishment of the portfolio continues to mischaracterise the new arrangements as being either a layer of overly bureaucratic oversight of otherwise well-functioning operational arrangements or, worse, a sinister concentration of executive power that will not be able to be supervised and checked," he said.

"Both of these criticisms are completely wrong.

"Any suggestion that we in the portfolio are somehow embarked on the secret deconstruction of the supervisory controls which envelop and check executive power are nothing more than flights of conspiratorial fancy that read into all relevant utterances the master blueprint of a new ideology of undemocratic surveillance and social control."

Mr Pezzullo said staff in the Home Affairs department would not lose pay or accrued leave, and he told senators he had made "a number of determinations" so their working conditions were preserved after the MoG change.

The department had encountered early problems when 14 staff weren't paid allowances, however these would be included in the next round of pay, acting deputy secretary Stephen Groves said.

Mr Pezzullo listed four major projects for the new department: preserving and building on the strengths of agencies moving into the portfolio; coordinating intelligence, data exploitation, advanced identity and biometrics technology; preserving the independence of statutory agencies; and using protection and security as a "means to pursue ... economic prosperity, social cohesion and an open society".

Apart from ASIO, a small branch of about 25 staff working within the Attorney-General's department that largely works on intelligence policy matters is yet to move into Home Affairs.

Mr Groves said Home Affairs, Attorney-General's and the Infrastructure department were still negotiating some "finance, IT and people-type activities" before they moved across but Mr Pezzullo denied a suggestion from Labor senator Kim Carr this involved some "argy-bargy".

The creation of the Home Affairs mega-portfolio has cost taxpayers roughly $2 million so far, which included a task force to work out the details of the project.

Mr Pezzullo would not confirm whether an investigation into Australian Border Force head Roman Quaedvlieg had been completed.

However Australian Commission for Law Enforcement Integrity sent Mr Pezzullo a report on the investigation at the end of last year, he said.

The Prime Minister's department has had the corruption watchdog's report into abuse of power allegations against Mr Quaedvlieg for at least five months while he has been on full pay earning hundreds of thousands of dollars, senators heard.

Frustrations are mounting within the newly formed Home Affairs Department, as well as the corruption watchdog, about the length of time the investigation is taking.