Albanese government restores abolished environment department but avoids major public service overhaul

The new Albanese government will unpick one of the Coalition's most controversial changes to the public service by recreating a department focused solely on environmental issues.

Labor will also dilute the power of the massive Department of Home Affairs, a so-called "super-department" set up four years ago to manage immigration and national security.

However, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese's initial shake-up, announced last night, is modest, and likely to disappoint critics who had hoped for a clearer, less-confusing government structure.

Mr Albanese's first Administrative Arrangements Order (AAO) — which details the matters that ministers and departments deal with — creates two new government departments.

A Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water will be established following Labor's pledge to "end the climate wars" and reduce the nation's carbon emissions.

Mr Albanese's predecessor, Scott Morrison, abolished the department of environment and energy three years ago, merging the functions into the agriculture and industry portfolios.

At the time, the Australian Conservation Foundation said the government had downgraded the environment and the climate crisis to "afterthoughts in public policy".

Mr Albanese will also create a new Department of Education, a portfolio that was previously combined with employment and workplace relations.

The AAO also redistributes a range of minor responsibilities away from Mr Albanese to other ministers, reversing the growth of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet in recent years.

Home Affairs to stay, with minor tweaks

Labor has left the home affairs super-department mostly untouched, despite criticising then-prime minister Malcolm Turnbull's decision to create it.

Home affairs subsumed the old department of immigration and border protection, the Australian Federal Police (AFP), domestic intelligence agency ASIO and a range of other national security functions into one portfolio — all overseen by a single public servant: Mike Pezzullo.

When it was created, Labor senator Jenny McAllister told parliament the super-department could weaken national security by "reducing the contestability of key decisions".

Greens senator Nick McKim went further, saying it was a dangerous idea that pushed Australia "ever more rapidly down the road to authoritarianism".

Mr Albanese's AAO removes several functions — policing, criminal justice and protective services — from home affairs and returns them to the attorney-general's portfolio.

However, home affairs will gain responsibility for natural disaster management, including the National Recovery and Resilience Agency.

Tellingly, it will retain control of ASIO and national security functions, which was the concern of most of its critics.

Cabinet's structural problems remain 'unfixed' 

In 2019, Mr Morrison decided to pivot sharply away from how traditional cabinets worked.

He reduced the number of departments to 14, despite having 23 cabinet ministers.

This effectively ended a once-fundamental principle of cabinet government: one portfolio, one voice.

In other words, each cabinet minister is an advocate for a single portfolio, is briefed by a single department, and argues that case vigorously in cabinet until a consensus is reached.

Mr Morrison was not the first prime minister to create super-departments, but he was the first to oversee five.

These departments force one secretary (department head) to brief multiple cabinet ministers, potentially muzzling the voices of important areas of government.

Andrew Podger, a former secretary and public service commissioner, told the ABC that Mr Albanese's AAO represented only a minimal fix to these problems.

"I was surprised there are only two new departments when there are still 23 ministers in cabinet," he said.

Mr Podger said a further problem was that, in recent years, cabinet ministers' responsibilities spanned multiple departments, which reduced cohesion and made it "just much more difficult" to govern.

Seven of the 16 departments in Mr Albanese's government have more than one cabinet minister.

The giant Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development, Communications and the Arts has four.

Mr Podger said the AAO was both an improvement and disappointing.

The new government structure comes into effect on July 1.