By Paul Hemsley

The Department of Immigration and Citizenship (DIAC) gave a talk on its plans, goals and methods for managing its worldwide workforce at SuccessConnect 2011 in Sydney.

DIAC Assistant Secretary for Workforce, Planning and Reporting Branch, Ben Neal said the Department is not unique, but is not common to have policy, program and service delivery in its equation.

“We’re looking to split it out, but it represents yet another workforce planning challenge for us in trying to find people and bring them together in a single portfolio where we have very different types of people who can deliver those services,” Mr Neal said.

Mr Neal said DIAC Secretary Andrew Metcalf has put in a lot of things in place to change the culture of the organisation.

“One thing he’s particularly proud of is these three things – ‘Fair and Reasonable Dealings With Clients’, ‘An Open and Accountable Organisation’ – so nothing that we do in the organisation is closed, everyone should understand it and we’re very open about the difficult challenges that we have,” Mr Neal said.

According to Mr Neal, the final point was for a ‘Well Developed or Supported Staff’ because reports detailed that it was DIAC staff and their “risk adverse behaviour” that caused certain issues to be escalated.

“Once it gets up to the top level of the organisation, it becomes very difficult to maintain contact with the facts and that was one of the major reasons why those things happen,” he said.

Mr Neal said these issues were “catastrophic errors” referring to incidents in 2005 and 2006, which were the unlawful detention of Cornelia Rau and also the unlawful removal of Vivian Alvarez Solon.

“Both of whom where Australian citizens, so to detain an Australian citizen or to deport on is in a list of catastrophic errors that are pretty high up there,” Mr Neal said.

He said those two incidents really changed the department and caused it to receive “a lot of press for all the wrong reasons”.

According to Mr Neal, DIAC now has a culture which is much more attuned to the need to have data to make decisions.

“The biggest win we’ve had in terms of people division is our ability to integrate business planning with workforce planning and how that is based on our ability to have meaningful data around the organisation,” Mr Neal said.