Staff Writer
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced his planned cabinet reshuffle on Sunday, 28 July 2024. The Prime Minister appointed Tony Burke MP as Minister for Cyber Security, who will also serve as Minister for Immigration, Home Affairs and the Arts and Speaker of the House of Representatives.
Given the scale of Burke’s responsibilities, demoted Minister Claire O’Neill’s (now Housing Minister) plan to make Australia the most cyber-secure country in the world by 2030 seems as unattainable as when she first asserted it. As Cyber Security Minister, O’Neill oversaw some of the country’s biggest data breaches and IT outages, including the Optus breach, the Optus outage, Medibank, Medisecure and most recently the CrowdStrike outage.
Asked about the level of responsibility placed on Tony Burke, the Prime Minister said: “He can certainly shoulder that responsibility. There is one person who can shoulder the responsibility. I have thought long and hard about the appropriate structure… Change causes a chain reaction. The fact is that we have had a very stable government.”
Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus will resume responsibility for the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation and the Australian Federal Police – both agencies his department lost when the Turnball government created the Department of Home Affairs in 2017 – reducing some of Burke’s broad responsibilities.
Other appointments include Pat Conroy being promoted to cabinet as minister for defence industry and capacity supply, international development and the Pacific, Murray Watt to work relations, Maralindiri McCarthy to Indigenous affairs and Julie Collins to agriculture and small business. These changes follow the retirement of ministers Linda Burnie and Brendan O’Connor.
