Home Affairs minister Clare O’Neil was not earmarked for the sprawling portfolio until the high-profile Kristina Keneally failed in her attempt to move the lower house.
Clare O’Neil has had a bit on her plate. One of the breakout stars of Anthony Albanese’s cabinet, the Home Affairs Minister is fighting
Before we get down to the business of Lunch with the AFR, I confess a shameful lack of familiarity with Greek food and defer to O’Neil to order for us both. She picks a trio of dips, saganaki , kolokithokeftedes , a beetroot salad and a village salad. The surprise is understandable. O’Neil was never earmarked for Home Affairs, or even a much-coveted spot in cabinet, having spent her last few years in opposition as Labor’s spokeswoman for aged care.to shift from the Senate to the lower house cost her party a once-safe seat and created a vacancy in the cabinet-level Home Affairs portfolio.
“He grew up in a time when the cultural cringe was the big dynamic here in Australia,” O’Neil says of her dad, who died when she was just 11.“Things that were Australian were sneered at, and it was his life’s work to shift that dynamic and to celebrate Australian authors ... and to tell the story of our country not as some sort of antipodean outpost but as a strong, modern, beautiful country.”
“I look back on it now with humour at how little I understood,” she says. “The first time I went into a business that I was working with for McKinsey, I remember going behind the front desk behind reception and just looking around at all these people and thinking I have no idea what these people do every day.
“I really would love to be able to be a foster parent again, but it’s probably not going to happen until my kids are adults.” O’Neil held the multicultural seat comfortably on polling day, despite suffering a 6.7 per cent swing, as voters delivered a harsh verdict on chaos of the Rudd-Gillard era and gifted Tony Abbott’s Coalition a thumping majority in parliament.
Now in her fourth term, O’Neil says she no longer holds her earlier view that question time wasn’t a great accountability measure, though she still believes most observers find the spectacle of politicians arguing with each other alienating. She says her decision to consider running came about through a combination of her frustration over another election loss and the need to have more women in leadership roles.
The department told O’Neil and her colleague, Immigration Minister Andrew Giles, that Australia had a backlog of almost 1 million active visa applications on hand and not enough resources to process them.“We can’t press pause and stop migration for a year while we sort out the system. The reason past attempts to fix the system failed was because previous governments were trying to build a visa processing system around the broken policy framework.
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