Home affairs and cyber security minister Clare O’Neil has used an address to the National Press Club (NPC) to announce what she described as a reset for the policy direction of her portfolio. The task ahead for the nation’s public servants in the super department and beyond will be mammoth.
The minister invoked the tone of a song from the Broadway musical ‘Hadestown’ on Thursday to capture the urgent and complex work ahead for her five-year-old department, which is led by secretary Mike Pezzullo.
When the chips were down, Australians were willing to shed old ideas about society and government and make big, gutsy choices about the future, she said.
“There would be few five-year periods in which Australia’s national security picture has changed so much,” O’Neil told an audience of some of the country’s most powerful national security players.
“It is overwhelming to list all that has occurred: a one-in-100-year pandemic; bushfires which burned millions of acres of land and covered our cities with choking smoke; cyberattacks which saw vital personal information stolen from millions of Australians.”
The minister said the challenge for Home Affairs was to…
