The Abbott era ‘mega department’ thinking might be passé, but there are still more than a few bureaucrats and politicians advocating the creation of an Australian department of homeland security.

While Peter Jennings and I have put our arguments for and against such a super-department in terms of need, not a lot has been written about whether it could even work in Australia. The formation of the Australian Border Force (ABF) and the mega Department of Immigration and Border Protection (DIBP) offers some insight into that question.

Despite the often hysterical rhetoric that has described the ABF as a black-shirted paramilitary force, its architect, DIPB Secretary Michael Pezzullo, and builder, ABF Commissioner Roman Quaedvlieg, have plenty to be happy about. Nevertheless, the reform process has a long way to go before completion, and its continued success is still not guaranteed.

On 1 July 2015, DIBP and the Australian Customs and Border Protection Service officially amalgamated into one department. In addition, a new frontline operational enforcement arm—the ABF—was stood up. DIBP has responsibility for policy, regulatory and corporate functions, while the ABF draws together the operational border, investigations, compliance, detention and enforcement functions.

Over the past two years, the ABF executive has managed to bring together workers from two very different departments with distinct organisational cultures—Customs and Immigration—to create a new uniformed and disciplined enforcement agency. It was no easy feat.

Pezzullo and Quaedvlieg have introduced reforms that have delivered higher levels of accountability in the ABF and planted and nurtured the seeds of a new enforcement-focused culture. In two short years they’ve also lifted the force’s base level capability in terms of recruitment, training and physical fitness.

In logistics terms, the ABF has been able to issue its people with new uniforms and guns that are fit for purpose. And it has become adept at rapidly deploying new investigative and intelligence technology.

In operational terms, the success has been equally impressive, especially in illicit drug seizures and counterterrorism.

The ABF has improved the border experience for travellers at our major international airports. For people arriving in or departing from Australia, getting across the border has never been quicker.

From the continued deployment of smart gate kiosks, to new risk management techniques, the work of ABF staff has been increasingly focused on those who seek to break the law or flout our regulations.

The ABF’s Operation Sovereign Borders has managed to dramatically reduce the flow of irregular migrants arriving at Australia by sea. And in doing so it has saved untold lives.

However, along the way there have been mistakes. In October 2015, a poorly worded media release for Operation Fortitude created a furore when it gave rise to the impression that the then brand new ABF had powers to stop and question people on the street.

Embarking on an ambitious amalgamation of diverse workplace cultures has presented many ongoing leadership challenges. Among ABF officers, there has been plenty of resistance to the higher levels of accountability and training, as well as to the sharper enforcement focus. That’s not surprising when you consider that some of those involved in the change have spent a lot of time thinking of themselves as service providers but are now meant to be facilitators and enforcement officers.

The ABF has a lot more reform and change to come if this important national security capability is to reach full maturity. A range of legislative reforms are still required to provide the organisation with all the enforcement powers it needs. While it’s able to deploy its own physical surveillance teams, it cannot by law use less expensive technology options such as tracking devices. Those kinds of legislative inconsistencies need to be resolved.

As part of the consolidation, the ABF and DIBP received much-needed cash injections to fund the change process. The formation of both agencies was meant to generate significant savings. While some efficiencies are being realised, the maturation of the ABF was always going to be a 10-year endeavour. Along the way the modernisation process will result in further demands for new operational and intelligence capabilities. The establishment of the ABF and DIBP was not a set-and-forget policy and two years in it remains a work in progress.

The ABF and DIBP experience offers the architects of any future Australian department of homeland security plenty of lessons. Fundamentally, the changes associated with forming a department of homeland security would, at the very least, require a significant and sustained financial commitment and policy patience. It might take five to 10 years before the full potential of an Australian department of homeland security could be fully realised. While structural and policy changes could be rapidly delivered, one of the biggest challenges would be dismantling existing departmental cultural barriers to closer integration and cooperation.

A nation’s border security is intrinsically linked to its national security. There should be no doubt that perceptions of border security impact upon public confidence in a government’s security strategies; after all, the protection of borders is a fundamental principal of sovereignty.

There’s little surprise then that, in 2014 and 2015, being ‘tough’ on border security has been a hot political topic. Then-Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s February 2015 national security statement revealed that there would be a lower threshold for action where the security of Australia’s borders was concerned. This change highlights the importance of border security to national security and the electorate’s confidence in government.

But getting ‘tough’ on border security is no simple task. It’s a sphere of government activity that’s evolving rapidly. Even the ways in which we’ve traditionally conceptualised borders are challenged by our globalised, connected and interdependent world.

Of course the border remains a physical space, but today, it’s much more than a line on a map defined by geographical coordinates, demarcating where a government’s sovereign power begins and ends. It’s a complex construct that comprises a combination of transnational connections and control measures. They are also elastic, virtual and psychological.

The Australian border has great economic, social and strategic value. The scale of border security transactions already puts immense pressure on the facilitation and intervention capabilities of the Department of Immigration and Border Protection (DIBP) and the Australian Border Force (ABF).

DIBP analysis suggests (PDF) that the volume of transactions at the border will ‘increase markedly’ over the Australian federal budget forward estimates period. Such increases would push the department’s proposed capabilities to their limits.

Among our ever-expanding legitimate flows of goods and people are an increasing array of diverse and complex non-state security threats that move through or manifest at the Australian border, including international terrorism, transnational serious and organised crime, and global health and quarantine challenges.

Added to this is the new challenge of screening passengers leaving Australia with the aim of identifying those who are potentially travelling to fight in foreign conflicts or participate in terrorist activities.

In contrast with traditional national security issues and border management, there’s been far too little public policy dialogue and research on border security. In March 2015 ASPI’s Border Security Program was established to stimulate thinking in this important area through the generation of new ideas and the exploration of policy options.

Today ASPI’s Border Security Program releases its second Special Report ‘Securing the Australian frontier: an agenda for border security policy’. The report discusses key border security concepts and emergent policy challenges for Australia.

Effective border security allows for the seamless and legitimate movement of people and goods across Australian borders, which is critical to enhancing trade, travel and migration. The provision of border security involves far more than creating a capability focused solely on keeping our borders secure from potential terrorists, irregular migrants and illicit contraband.

Border security policy deals with a unique operating space, in which extraordinary measures (extraordinary in character, amount, extent or degree) are often needed to provide a sense of security at the same time as creating the sense of normalcy that will allow economic interactions with trade partners to flourish.

With continued increases in people, information, commodities and value streaming across physical and virtual borders, the ability to regulate or control border flows in an absolute sense is declining. And hunting for potential threats, risks and harms at the border has become akin to searching for a needle in a perpetually expanding haystack. This necessitates a paradigm shift from a transactional approach to border security to a risk based model.

The diffuse and adaptive nature of border threats and risks ensures that border security, in an absolute sense, is more of an aspirational goal than an end state. This reality demands further public policy dialogue on what border security means in a practical sense. This dialogue needs to go beyond definitions of border security and border management. At the top of the list of topics is the search for a pragmatic description of what ‘success’ looks like for our border security agencies.

While Australia’s border security efforts have achieved a range of impressive results, the changing operating context, rapidly increasing border movements and tighter fiscal constraints mean that DIBP’s search for border innovations must continue at full steam.

Over the past few days, it’s become clear that the Australian response to the Syrian refugee crisis is inadequate. In 2014, Australia offered 4,500 spaces within the existing refugee and humanitarian programs. On Sunday, Prime Minister Abbott announced that Australia would take a ‘significant’ number of Syrian refugees on top of this. Yesterday, he added that Syria is ‘an absolute humanitarian catastrophe’ and that ‘there is an unprecedented crisis…We will give people refuge: that is the firm intention of this government.’

But at the same time, it appears that the Coalition hasn’t yet decided on a clear policy, though voices in Cabinet have made suggestions. Assistant Treasurer Josh Frydenberg and Foreign Minister Julie Bishop have advocated for a temporary protection refugee regime akin to the one the Howard government used to respond to the Kosovo refugee crisis in 1999. Meanwhile, Labor Opposition Leader Bill Shorten has pushed for a concrete one-off increase of 10,000 refugee places, while the Greens have advocated for a 20,000 increase.

The refugee problem from Syria is immense. Over four million refugees are now in the countries bordering Syria—Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan—while there are an estimated 7.6 million internally displaced persons within Syria. As such, while individual countries are accepting more resettled refugees is a welcome change, this won’t solve the crisis.

Nor, solely, can a European response. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has committed to taking in all refugees who apply for asylum in Germany this year, which may see Germany taking up to 800,000 refugees at a cost of up to €3.3 billion. But Germany also wants to see direct EU responsibility for registering and looking after newly arrived refugees in Greece and Italy, as well as creating a common policy on safe countries of origin. Head of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), Antonio Guterres, has similarly argued that Europe needs to create a mass relocation programme with 200,000 places The EU can’t, he suggests, respond to this crisis ‘with a piecemeal or incremental approach.’ But these plans still require refugees to have first crossed the Mediterranean.

Instead, what’s needed is a comprehensive global approach. Here, Australia can provide real leadership, modelled on the Comprehensive Plan of Action (CPA) which was negotiated in 1989 to respond to the Indochinese boat people. The CPA successfully resettled over 500,000 refugees over a six year period, built around strong regional and international cooperation and regional screening of refugee claims.

To deal with the current crisis, such an approach would require three parts. The first would be to shift the processing of claims away from Europe and towards host countries. Regional processing centres could be established in Turkey and Libya, where most of the European refugee claimants are departing from. The UNHCR has noted that such centres could be legal under international law if they clearly reflect the international legal standards including the 1951 Refugee Convention and the principle of non-refoulement and have formal authorisation from host states. And the UNHCR would be the obvious organisation to run the process. Libya is facing significant insecurity; to ensure the safety of all refugees and migrants, any centre there would need international protection (from peacekeepers, for instance) even with government consent. Alternatively, it could be established in Tunisian territory along the border.

But these centres wouldn’t work without a clear forward path for processed refugees and provisions for safe returns for those denied claims. The target would be to resettle 400,000 refugees—10% of the total—by the end of 2016. This resettlement program could be combined with the regional program EU members are negotiating—which could also be combined with the temporary protection scheme suggested by Bishop and Frydenberg. The EU already has a Temporary Protection Directive created after the war in Kosovo. That Directive allows for refugees to be granted temporary protection in accordance with the Refugees Convention for a period of one year and can be extended. Given the nature of the Syrian war, a longer protection period would be warranted.

Finally, it’s critical that humanitarian assistance to the countries around Syria is also increased. The current UN Syria Regional Refugee Response Appeal is requesting US$4.5 billion but has only received 37% ($2.8 billion) of that total. The World Food Programme (WFP) has cut rations to refugees, can only offer US$13 per month for food to the most vulnerable refugees in Lebanon, and may need to cut all assistance to refugees in Jordan.

A comprehensive approach would give states the option to either commit to refugee resettlement, to funding the humanitarian operation and costs of the centres, or both. Most importantly, those approaches would significantly increase the burden sharing between the refugee hosting countries around Syria and the developed world.

Australia’s public policy debate on irregular migration and border security has become bogged down in a polarised ideological war characterised by poisonous politics. This ideological war has done little to innovate border security migration policies and has only portrayed border security strategies, policies and programs in a mono-dimensional way. Arguably, the public debate far too often devolves into the demonisation of the bureaucrats involved in policy implementation.

From the outset, reducing the concept of border security to a discussion of balancing between securing or not securing national borders from irregular migration is overly simplistic. The balancing metaphor in border security suggests that this policy debate involves a zero-sum game, where increased security measures will reduce the risk of negative consequences.

In a balancing approach to irregular migration, the wicked problem of border security is reduced to a single dimension. On one side is the free movement of irregular migrants. On the other is a simplified construction of border security as an absolute end-state—the border is secured. But this should prompt questions like ‘what does a secure border look like?’ and ‘is this achievable?’

In countries like Australia, border transactions are so frequent that every border transaction can’t be checked for compliance. Given the interconnected nature of economies, slowing or cessation of border transactions could well be catastrophic for all concerned.

Border security may be more akin to an aspirational goal rather than an end-state. If it is aspirational in nature, the border security challenge could then be recast into what level of border security risk governments should accept, or alternatively, what risk should be mitigated. The current border security paradigm limits the opportunities for policymakers to develop innovative strategies.

There already appears to be an informal policy in Canberra that irregular maritime arrivals are a much higher border security priority than visa over-stayers. How did we arrive at this policy? Perhaps such assumptions need to be subject to a more rigorous public debate.

The metaphors in public policy dialogues use a flawed conception of the border security system. Some members of the public assume that the ‘border security’ is delivered by a single integrated, agile system. But this simplified construction doesn’t do justice to the policy challenge of integrating large-scale distributed homogenous systems from across departments, sectors and countries into an entity.

In September 2013, following the Australian federal election, the Abbott Government established Operation Sovereign Borders (OSB) to deliver on the election promise to stop irregular maritime arrivals. The ‘zero tolerance’ program involved discouraging irregular migration, offshore disruption of people smuggling ventures, turning back of irregular maritime arrival vessels, and offshore detention and visa processing.

OSB was established as a joint agency task force comprising of three task focussed groups. All of component parts of the OSB policy implementation pre-existed the taskforce arrangements. Rather than addressing the ‘system of systems’ border security challenge, a taskforce approach was used to address the problem but with a traditional hierarchical organisational design.

OSB contributed to ‘stopping the boats’. OSB’s military commander used directive control as a short term solution to the larger problem of how to integrate inter and intra-departmental strategies. I can’t help but think that there are other more permanent solutions to the problem of integrating all of the different processes, systems and strategies involved in delivering Australia’s border security.

Traditional military thinking argues that in defensive operations the system of defence has layers of security measures. In this construct, the attacker is delayed and withered through the various layers. In the OSB case this is seen through disruption work offshore, boat turnarounds at the border, and mandatory detention and returns after the border.

In contrast to the depth approach, the overall level of security can be enhanced beyond the layered effect by the integration of all of the various efforts into a single system. By improving the integration of all of the component strategies, policies and systems a greater degree of border security can be assured.

Border security involves substantially more than building bigger or better security measures. Border security involves an array of activities focussed on facilitation, revenue collection, regulation, control—all related to the seamless movement of people and goods across borders. This policy challenge involves more than the management of a complex system. Rather, border security involves networks of systems that have operational and managerial independence. The systems involved have not been developed as a system but rather have evolved and been integrated over time, which presents additional challenges.

The policy challenge for the Department of Immigration and Border Protection in this ‘system of systems’ environment is linking and integrating the various systems so that the whole is more than its parts. The first step in addressing this challenge could involve focussing on managing risks and creating opportunities as opposed to mandatory detention and boat turn-backs. Through this lens, border security strategists could fine-tune the various systems within the system to achieve integrated strategic outcomes. But implementing such an approach will be no easy task. It will require border security strategists to develop a detailed understanding of the various systems involved but also the way in which they do and don’t interact.