By Staff Writer
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced his anticipated Cabinet reshuffle on Sunday, July 28, 2024. He named Tony Burke MP the new Minister for Cybersecurity, albeit also the Minister for Immigration, Home Affairs, Arts, and Leader of the House.
With this scale of responsibilities on Burke, plans by demoted Minister Clare O’Neil, now Minister for Housing, to make Australia the most cyber-secure nation in the world by 2030 appears as unachievable as it was when she first made the claim. O’Neil’s tenure as Minister for Cybersecurity oversaw some of the country’s largest data breaches and IT outages, including the Optus breach, Optus outage, Medibank, Medisecure, and most recently, the Crowdstrike outage.
When questioned on the scale of responsibilities placed on Tony Burke, the Prime Minister said, “He’s certainly up for it. There will be one person who will be responsible. I gave a lot of thought to the appropriate structure… There is a change that then has a knock-on effect. The fact is that we have been a very stable government.”
Attorney General Mark Dreyfus again takes on responsibility for the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation and the Australian Federal Police. The Attorney General’s department lost both agencies in 2017 when the Turnbull Government created the Department of Home Affairs. This will provide some relief to Burke’s broad portfolio of responsibilities.
In other moves, Pat Conroy has been elevated to cabinet in his role as the Minister for Defence Industry and Capability Delivery, International Development, and the Pacific. Murray Watt will take on workplace relations, Malarindirri McCarthy picks up Indigenous Affairs and Julie Collins will take over Agriculture and Small Business. The reshuffle follows the retirement of Ministers Linda Burney and Brendan O’Connor.
