Stephanie Foster

The government must stop the creeping privatisation of these critical roles and invest taxpayer dollars where they belong in building a strong and skilled public sector workforce.

Home Affairs Secretary Stephanie Foster told this masthead in an interview that the outsourcing of the Marine Unit roles was due to skills and availability of that skilled workforce.

There have been some challenges in the Marine Unit with getting specific skills in areas like engineering, Ms Foster said.

We have an absolute requirement for a safety perspective to have particular jobs filled with people with particular qualifications, and so that will lead to us using contracted workers for some of those skills.

Finance and Public Sector Minister Katie Gallagher said, I encourage the union to continue negotiating.

Australian Public Service Commission Chief Negotiator Alison Stott, who is leading the Commonwealth's negotiations, will next meet with unions on October 6.

Home Affairs Secretary Stephanie Foster said, has explained why she and fellow agency heads are pushing to ban video footage from parliamentary hearings being edited and shared on social media, a move that's been slammed as an affront to democracy.

The Secretary's Board, chaired by Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet Secretary Stephen Kennedy, called for the ban in a recent parliamentary submission, complaining bureaucrats are being subjected to ridicule, hostility and abuse online.

The information gathered by the tool is being used to help the public servants who process close to 10 million visas a year to better detect potential character grounds for refusal under stricter laws introduced by the Albanese government in February.

Home Affairs Secretary Stephanie Foster told this masthead in an interview that the tool had been developed because it's not possible for us to do a social media search on every visa applicant.

It's not the answer to everything.

but it will help us get more information prior to the visa being issued for people who might be in a high-risk category, she said.

After last year shaking off its title of the worst-ranked place to work in the Australian Public Service, the agency's latest census results, provided exclusively to the Canberra Times, show some ground has been lost.

But Secretary Stephanie Foster is looking ahead.

Of the 12,385 employees who took part in the survey between May 4 and June 5, 2026, just 65% of respondents said they would recommend Home Affairs as a good place to work.

down seven percentage points from 2025.

Home Affairs was still ahead of the previous two years when just 57% and then 60% responded in the affirmative.

We've had a very tough year, Home Affairs Secretary Stephanie Foster told this masthead in an interview, vowing to get us back on track by listening to staff and working at a branch level to respond to concerns.

I'm disappointed that we've seen a drop in our results this year, even though it was not unexpected given the redundancies.

Concerns around having stable and secure employment were the biggest drag on job satisfaction, falling 11% to 75%, answering positively as Home Affairs approved 679 voluntary redundancies, a pattern expected to be reflected in other agencies amid widespread cuts.

The reality is that secretary's jobs are not subject to competition.

He pointed to the many examples of career public servants in top roles, from Prime Minister and Cabinet Secretary Stephen Kennedy, plucked from his role as Treasury Secretary, to Home Affairs Secretary Stephanie Foster, Attorney General's Catherine Jones, Defence's Megan Quinn and DFAT's Jan Adams.

The US had got it right with salaries of about $400,000 to head up much larger agencies with much bigger budgets, he wrote.

Professor Podger acknowledged that remuneration needed to be sufficient to attract and retain the high calibre required I suggest that most secretaries be classified at the same level of responsibility and remuneration based on their having portfolio responsibilities and serving Cabinet Ministers.