Home Affairs is failing to meet targets to reduce spending on outsourcing and bring roles in-house, with the extra-large agency continuing to spend millions of dollars on external contractors.
The department fell significantly short of its 2025-26 target to reduce its outsourcing spend by $6.8 million, The Canberra Times can reveal, achieving just 57 per cent of its goal and falling short by $2.9 million. It also fell short of its target to convert outsourced roles to APS by 40 per cent.
A spokesperson said the agency's efforts to reduce contractor spending and achieve conversions had been "impacted significantly by restrictions on recruitment that were necessary to manage our staffing levels", as Home Affairs processed 679 voluntary redundancies.
The main public sector union has accused Home Affairs of outsourcing "critical operational roles" by continuing to contract out about 60 jobs in Australian Border Force's national marine unit.
Roles that "help keep Australia's borders safe" should be "properly funded and retained within the public sector, not outsourced to private contractors to fill gaps in workforce shortages," Community and Public Sector Union team lead Sam McCrone said.
"When trained public sector workers are forced to operate alongside contractors, our capacity to protect Australia's borders and seas is weakened," Mr McCrone said, warning of "serious risks to national security and sovereignty".
"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 the 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 from 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. That's been a long-term problem."
She said Home Affairs, which has an annual budget of almost $7 billion, remained committed to reducing outsourcing under the Albanese government's policy to bring core work in-house.
A published tender shows the department awarded a $37.3 million contract to Teekay Shipping Australia Pty Ltd for a marine crew to provide "military services and national defence" over three years to January 2029.
"We're continuing to try and identify positions that are filled by contractors that we can actually translate into APS," Ms Foster said.
"One of the ways that we actually reduced our budget last year was to reduce the number of contractors we're employing."
The agency found further savings in July and August after contracts that ran until the end of the 2025-26 financial year ended.
A spokesperson said this positioned Home Affairs "to continue reducing its reliance on contractors and ensuring that core functions are delivered by APS employees wherever possible".
The recent redundancies would not lead to increased outsourcing, Ms Foster said.
"If we're talking about filling gaps, it's by reallocating priorities rather than bringing in external," she said.
The agency's approach was to "look really hard at if a job looks and smells like an APS job, how can we make sure that it's being done by an APS officer?"
Home Affairs had "a very constructive relationship with the CPSU," the secretary said.
"One of the items on our regular catch-up is usually how we're going with the outsourcing numbers."
First published in The Canberra Times on 21 September 2026 as 'Union blasts Home Affairs for spending millions outsourcing 'critical operational roles'' by Dana Daniel
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