Besieged Immigration chief lands prize job

Sydney Morning Herald
July 11, 2005

By Mike Seccombe

The Prime Minister has appointed the head of the Immigration Department to a plum overseas job before an inquiry delivers its verdict on a series of bungles.

Bill Farmer, who presided over, and publicly apologised for, a long series of mistakes by his department, will be Australia's next ambassador to Jakarta, one of Australia's top three diplomatic postings. He had already been rewarded by John Howard with an Order of Australia in the recent Queen's Birthday honours.

Mr Farmer was in charge when the department improperly detained for 10 months a mentally ill Australian resident, Cornelia Rau, and deported to the Philippines an injured citizen, Vivian Alvarez Solon.

Mr Farmer will leave the job today, only days before the Federal Government is to receive the final report of an inquiry by a former federal police chief, Mick Palmer, which was set up to examine the Rau case and more than 100 others.

A draft of the Palmer report, tabled in the Queensland Parliament last week, was damning of the department's culture.

Mr Farmer's administration also came under fire last week from the National Audit Office, which concluded that the department's contractual arrangements with the private-sector operators that run Australia's detention centres were inadequate in failing to stipulate the quality of services provided and ensuring their value for money.

Yesterday Mr Howard defended Mr Farmer, saying on the Nine Network: "I have a great regard for Mr Bill Farmer. He's been a great foreign affairs officer in the past and he's done a good job in immigration."

But he said, Mr Farmer had "indicated to the Government a little while ago that he felt that a new person at the head of that department was needed" to drive the necessary cultural changes within the department.

That person will be Andrew Metcalfe, a deputy secretary in the Prime Minister's department since August 2002. But he, too, is steeped in the culture of Immigration, having risen through the ranks of that department over 13 years. He was deeply involved in the so-called children overboard affair, as deputy secretary of the department in 2001.

"Mr Metcalfe has a strong leadership capability," Mr Howard said in a press release. "Importantly he possesses good skills in organisational management."

Mr Howard denied Mr Farmer had been scapegoated to protect the two ministers under whom he served in Immigration, Philip Ruddock and Amanda Vanstone.

But the Opposition, which has previously called for the sacking of both Senator Vanstone and Mr Farmer, dismissed the Farmer move as rewarding poor work, and continued to attack Senator Vanstone.

"I don't think you send a message about the need for cultural change by rewarding the head of DIMIA [Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs] with Australian honours and a diplomatic post," said Labor's new immigration spokesman, Tony Burke. "Real cultural change is going to demand that the minister be moved on as well."

Another long-time critic of the administration of Mr Farmer's department, the refugee advocate Julian Burnside, QC, said yesterday he had expected Mr Farmer to be dumped ever since the Queen's Birthday. "How predictable was that? As soon as he got the gong, you knew he was for the high jump."

 

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