Clare O'Neil outlines the Home Affairs Department will change ahead of 'very difficult period'

The department's overhaul coincides with the country entering a "very difficult period", Home Affairs Minister Clare O'Neil said, issuing a warning about the years ahead in a new episode of the National Security College's podcast released on Thursday night.

The once-super department, which was formed in 2017 under prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, held many of the federal government's national security and law enforcement agencies before it was stripped back under the Albanese government.

The Australian Federal Police and other law enforcement agencies were moved to the Attorney-General's Department with the Home Affairs Department retaining the Australian Border Force and the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation and gaining the National Emergency Management Agency.

But Ms O'Neil said it held "a much too narrow lens of domestic security" under the former government, focusing on stopping boats and protecting borders, instead of looking at how Australia will deal with ongoing geopolitical issues on its own turf.

"When the crisis comes, Home Affairs is going to play a key role in the domestic implications," Ms O'Neil said.

"One of the surprises that I had coming into this portfolio was that [the threats were] not already part of the work of Home Affairs, because for me, that's just so logical.

"We're about domestic security and these are domestic security risks."

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Those risks, as outlined by host Professor Rory Medcalf, include conflict breaking out in the Taiwan Strait or South China Sea.

Ms O'Neil said while Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong was working on preventing such events happening on the global stage and Defence Minister Richard Marles was reshaping the military to deal with the risk, her work was to make sure Australians fared well.

"This has huge domestic security implications that Home Affairs wasn't designed to be addressing," she said.

"One of the things that my secretary, Mike Pezzullo, and I are working on is how do we restructure the work of this department to tackle the real challenges here?

"That is around foreign interference, around democracy, national resilience and cybersecurity to name a small handful."

The department's reshaping will need to match a changing environment, Ms O'Neil said.

On the threat of foreign interference - coercive, clandestine actions seeking to undermine Australian sovereignty or values - the minister warned it was "relentless, egregious and happening in every community every day".

Ms O'Neil last month revealed Iranian agents had targeted activists in Australia as part of a foreign interference plot that was eventually foiled by ASIO.

The Home Affairs Minister said she had asked both Home Affairs and ASIO to undertake outreach programs to diaspora communities to mitigate the threat.

"Part of the work of these agencies, which are typically not necessarily engaging with community every day, is to kind of open the doors a bit and really go out there and talk to people about how we can help try and protect them," she said.

"It's going to be critical to get that system working because when we look outside Australia, and everything that's happening in the world, we know that that problem in particular is going to get a lot worse as the decades progress."

Terrorism would also top the department's list of duties with Ms O'Neil saying it would always be central to its work.

The department's approach, too, will need to change as the scope and organising of terrorist activities shifts, she said.

Over the last decade, the probability of organised, complex terrorist attacks has been usurped by less sophisticated, lone actor attacks.

The speed at which people were accessing radical content and becoming prone to violent attacks was also faster than ever, she said.

Ms O'Neil also warned a "very large" number of minors were now in focus.

"Someone will become radicalised, and then move from a willingness to commit violence to committing violence in a terrifyingly short period of time and this obviously creates huge issues in public safety," she said.

"I think the big question for the Australian government now is, is the apparatus that we built for that earlier problem fit for purpose for what's happening now?"

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