Australian Human Resource Institute (AHRI) - "The AFP: workforce planning for international deployments"
Commissioner Mick Keelty APM
Melbourne Convention Centre
Cnr Spencer and Flinders Streets
Melbourne VIC 3005
Thursday 22 May 2008
1400hrs – 1500hrs
E&OE
(Check Against Delivery)
At the outset I’d like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which we meet today, the Wurunjeri Tribe, and acknowledge their elders, both past and present, and their connection to this land.
Not a lot of you will know everything about the AFP. We are a force of nearly some 7000 now. We have domestic responsibilities here in Australia. We are situated in every capital city in Australia. We do community policing in Canberra under contract to the ACT Government and we have a sizeable presence overseas, and that includes not only peacekeeping work but our presence in some 29 cities across the world where we work as liaison officers. I will talk more about that shortly.
We are quite a diverse organisation but we are the only policing organisation in Australia that has a local, national and international role and one of the very few in the world. And it is often forgotten when discussing our role in peacekeeping operations that it is a role that was hitherto fairly restricted to the deployment of the Australian Defence Force. But we have been involved in peacekeeping for over 40 years. The Australian Federal Police and its forerunner the Commonwealth Police have been, for example, sending people to the United Nations mission in Cyprus since 1964 and since that time our involvement in the United Nations missions has included areas such as Haiti, Somalia, Cambodia, we now have people in Sudan and in Afghanistan. You would have seen from last week’s Budget that we are going to increase our presence in Afghanistan. You might have picked up in last week’s Budget that we are now going to also commence a program of training the Iraqi National Police here in Australia, rather than Iraq itself.
We also provide people to the Regional Assistance Mission to the Solomon Islands (RAMSI). We have several hundred people attached to the RAMSI mission and that mission has been going for some years now. We have been contributing to the development of some 15 countries across the Pacific and again in last week’s Budget was an announcement to increase funding to continue and build on that program.
We have been involved in sending people to Tonga at short notice, East Timor at short notice and Solomon Islands at short notice and one of the things I will talk to you about is how you actually prepare those people for the short notice deployments.
Again, harking back to the Defence role, Australia has the only police force in the world with a standing capability to go to these missions. And we have learned many lessons over the past 40 years to help us focus on how best to approach these jobs. As is always the case we need good people in the organisation and for us that has not been a hard thing to do. The average age of our recruits is 29, which indicates that they have other careers before coming in to the organisation. Each month we have some 220 people apply for a job with the AFP without any jobs being advertised, they come to us over the net. In 2006-07 our total attrition rate of sworn and unsworn staff was 9.4 per cent, this year it will be around seven per cent of total staff. Sworn members are less than four per cent and that is a very favourable figure if you compare it to attrition rates of other police forces not only around Australia, but around the world.
And that means the investment in recruitment and training when they graduate with a Diploma of Public Safety is actually returned to the organisation because we are not losing people out the door.
One of the ways we endeavour to meet the challenges of a growing human resource function within the AFP is a 5-point plan that begins with boosting the number of sworn police officers. We will also be part of a federal audit of police capabilities. You might have seen some publicity about people drifting into the AFP from the State police forces which is something that the government and ourselves have got some interest in because we don’t want to ‘rob Peter to pay Paul’ but at the same time we want to be able to offer people opportunities that not a lot of other people can offer. For example, many police, nurses, teachers, people in all walks of life have professional partners and when professional partners move around the country one of the things we offer as an organisation is that we can move partners with them in terms of a role as a police officer in some other part of Australia.
We are also establishing a national database to share resources information and we are creating a federal police retention and recruitment Program. In fact, in the Federal Budget we were provided with $20 million to work on a retention and recruitment program.
And we are also expanding the recruitment of Indigenous Australians into the AFP. One of the things you might not be aware of is that we are a major contributor to the Northern Territory intervention, which was a whole-of-government response to the needs of the Northern Territory, driven by FaCSIA (Department of Families, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs), but we are very much a part of that, working with the Northern Territory Police and other police forces.
As I say, I could spend a lot of time talking about various aspects of our workforce but I’ll try and restrict my remarks this afternoon to two areas. One is international deployments and how you can prepare people for that. The other one is how do you support people during their deployments and after their deployments?
In February 2004, I asked the then government to consider establishing this standing capability for police to be able to be deployed offshore and we were able to then establish what we call the International Deployment Group. It has made a fairly valuable contribution to the missions in East Timor but also those missions not necessarily on people’s radar. In the Sudan we look like we will appoint the Commissioner of the Sudanese UN Mission. We have had a Commissioner to Fiji, you may have seen the publicity; the Commissioner was asked to leave the country after the military coup. And of course we had the Commissioner for the Royal Solomon Islands Police up until about 15-16 months ago.
But in order to meet the challenges the International Deployment Group, a group that as I say will be in excess of 1000 by the end of this year, it divides its work into three areas. One area is the Australian based personnel, the other is the development of an Operational Response Group, and that is code for less than military response to give the government an opportunity, rather than deploy a fully-kitted military force, to go to a civilian force that is at a higher level of preparation and training than probably what you will see as a community policing force. And then there are people who work in the actual missions offshore.
In the Australian-based personnel, we have a big area in contracts and logistics, previously the domain of Defence. Some of our largest contract work now in the AFP is with companies like Patricks or Toll and they provide for us the catering, the housing. We actually have intensive care hospitals in both the Solomon Islands and East Timor. You would have seen the use of that intensive care unit in East Timor after the shootings of the Prime Minister and the President just recently.
We also obviously have a large HR and Finance area, a marketing and public affairs area, mission administration, training, strategic planning and occupational health and safety. And I might add that on the strategic planning side we have actually been doing a lot of work at the academic level on what we call the Rule of Law Index where we are making predictors about the appropriate time and the appropriate size of an intervention force and that is receiving a lot of attention internationally.
And examples of the sorts of things that can happen to the IDG happened earlier this year in February when the shootings did occur with the East Timorese President and Prime Minister. We were able to put 70 members, including forensics people, in country within 36 hours of the shooting. That is in addition to the staff we already had on the ground.
And whilst our primary focus is on offshore operations in the IDG, there are also opportunities for us to provide support to domestic issues here at home when the need arises.
The mission component of the IDG is some 750 men and women and they are deployed in a voluntary capacity. So, unlike the Defence Force, I can’t say to people you will go to the Solomon Islands or to East Timor. We actually ask for volunteers and ‘touch wood’ we have never had a shortage of volunteers even to some of the most difficult missions such as Afghanistan.
And mission members can be both sworn or unsworn. We have a single workforce approach at the AFP where we don’t discern between sworn police or unworn personnel. In fact, in our joint counter-terrorism teams in Indonesia, some of the expertise provided by our engineers and tacticians are unsworn personnel but are at the forefront of the work that we are doing in counter-terrorism operations.
And we are trying to generate the right people to go into these positions which is the area of interest that you might have.
Members are required to undertake medical testing to determine their physical capability to undertake duties in another country, particularly given that in some countries the medical facilities are not what we have here in Australia.
And we also pay a lot of attention to pre-deployment preparation in terms of adequate supplies of medical products in-country.
And a vitally important ‘Gateway’ for members is their psychological testing. It is very crucial to us that people are mentally prepared for their deployment. That includes members of their family who are prepared for the realities of their deployment. And so during their training, these members are given a ‘Deployment Guide for Families’, which outlines details of the deployment and the support services available to them. Family members receive regular updates and particularly when activities are given high publicity here in Australia we up the tempo of the contact with the family members who are left behind.
The psychological testing includes an extensive personality questionnaire. The questions provide an evaluation of the person’s overall functioning in a computer-generated report that is provided to a psychologist for evaluation.
Members also complete a set of three self-report questionnaires designed to measure the negative emotional states of depression, anxiety and stress.
The psychological testing also includes a set of questions on reactions and experiences towards stressful and traumatic situations; and a questionnaire on the consumption of alcohol.
As a matter of course, and as a condition of employment, all AFP staff, including myself, are subjected to regular drug testing.
Members must hold, or obtain prior to deployment, a current First Aid qualification that is not due to expire during their deployment.
For many years now we have been conducting pre-deployment training. The training course has built a strong reputation over the course of several years now and last year we were the first foreign police organisation to be formally recognised by the United Nations in our pre-deployment training.
At the AFP we believe we’ve developed a fresh and innovative approach to preparing members for deployment.
It takes 35 days to go through the course. For ten of those days members undertake very tailored and specific training in the appropriate use of force. The remaining 25 days of the program are concerned with ensuring participants receive the skills to live and work in a mission environment.
In fact, we have built a third world village using modern materials in a training centre just east of Canberra city, in a place called Majura, where we have 200 hectares.
Conceptually, the program is made up of three broad areas: Capacity Development, Personal Safety and Cultural Sensitivity.
The training program covers a wide range of issues relating to the work and living conditions that you might expect to find in a mission and that is why we built a third world village. In the third world village you will see that we have actually got a cemetery there and you might say, ‘why would you have a cemetery?’ One of the reasons you have a cemetery is because a lot of the work we do in post-conflict states is exhuming bodies and investigating war crimes which was part of our role when we were first deployed to East Timor. And if you think about it, not every culture bury their dead under the ground. Some people bury their people above the ground. So there is this little cemetery as you drive into the village that has both types of burial techniques. And it is just an example of trying to get people to think in a different space and a different place to work and operate.
I have to say that having been across the Northern Territory and looking at the intervention there, that is some of the toughest policing and policing conditions that you would ever come across. You are in remote locations where there are no other facilities around, indeed in many cases no electricity in very stressful heat conditions with absolutely nothing to do after hours unless you make your own activities. In that sense, that is where we have been able to provide some opportunities for distance education and also some community programs along with teachers and nurses.
It is important that we get our members to gain a realistic perspective of the world and particularly the country of their deployment. To achieve this, we work with people such as the Red Cross and Greenpeace. In fact, when we were first deploying to Papua New Guinea several years ago and to the Solomon Islands, one of the first people I engaged was Greenpeace. We all joked when sitting in the boardroom at Greenpeace headquarters that for all the times that police and Greenpeace might have got together no-one would have thought that the Commissioner would have sat in the boardroom talking about the in-depth knowledge that Greenpeace and other NGOs have of the local situation.
Here in Australia, we actively engage with the Sudanese community because we are deployed in numbers to Sudan. We don’t just do this alone. We have engaged the academic community to look at what we are doing and measure the performance of what we are doing to enable us to know what the difference is in the country where we have been, pre-deployment and post-deployment.
We have just won an Australian Research Council grant to go in partnership…and we are in partnership with the University of Queensland; we are in partnership with Macquarie University, Melbourne University. Flinders University and the Australian National University have been involved in a longitudinal study looking at the work we have been doing and we have also got a program with Griffith University in their Centre of Excellence in Policing and Security Studies where were joint applicants for a research grant.
I will just talk to the point of what we do for our staff, we actually won the Australian Business Councils’ Work and Family Award a couple of years back and part of that was because of the way we were able to engender flexibility into the workforce particularly during periods such as the Bali bombings where we had to deploy many of our staff offshore into those environments.
One of the phenomena of our education system here in Australia is that young girls are taking up sciences in a much greater number than young boys and that translates into university and translates into academic qualifications. So it will come as no surprise to you that something like 85 per cent of our people in the forensics area are women.
When something like a Bali bombing happens, how do you deploy those women to the scene of the bombing? One of the things we did was introduce childcare to enable the women to go offshore, at our expense. Part of the reasoning for that is if you have got somebody who is a trained forensic scientist you don’t want to lose the opportunity for the individual, nor do you want to lose the opportunity for the organisation to deploy that person purely and simply because we have not got enough family support at home. It is a much greater economic benefit for us to pay for the support of the family, using Dial An Angel and other programs, so that we all get the benefit of it. And it actually helps our attrition rate. If people can use the skills for which they have been trained and academically qualified, then we are in a much better place to deal with it.
Our Wellbeing Services provide comprehensive and multi-disciplinary integrated services including psychologists; Chaplains; family liaison officers; wellbeing officers; and, an external Employee Assistance Program.
These services are integrated under one banner to facilitate a service that is proactive and responsive in meeting the needs of our members and their families.
Our Professional Services are provided within a governance framework outlined by the Australian Public Service Commission. We combine that with the Australian Association of Social Workers, the Australian Psychological Society and appropriate ecclesiastical authorities.
We have taken a leadership role with other jurisdictions by initiating and hosting the ‘Australian Psychology in Policing’ forum for the past two years. This has drawn together psychologists from a range of locations involving law enforcement.
Our Wellbeing Services are provided by qualified and registered psychologists, social workers, accredited chaplains, and internally trained Family Liaison Officers.
Some of the services they provide include:
- Psychometric testing for entry into specialised employment;
- Individual counseling for members and their families for either work-related or non work-related issues. To me, it is important that we recognise as an organisation that the individuals in the organisation are part of a wider family and unless everything is right there we are not going to get the performance at work. So we offer those opportunities for family members as well as the individuals employed by us.
- We have education sessions and training throughout members’ careers and some of those are quite diverse. For example, in an unrelated area we have just transferred somebody to Microsoft to work for 12 months; we have people working with Qantas and other areas of the private sector in order to let them develop in a much better way than perhaps people of my era were developed.
- Pastoral care is provided for members and professional response is provided and we up the ante if there has been a critical incident.
I might just elaborate on that, since 2004 there has been a number of high profile international critical incidents that we have had to respond to. They have included the bombing of our Embassy in Jakarta, while our staff were in the building, which occurred in September 2004. Another critical incident was the murder of one of our officers in the Solomon Islands in 2004. We responded to the Asian tsunami disaster and victim identification effort in December 2004 and January 2005 and more recently two of our people were killed in a plane crash in Yogyakarta and we have also had the medical evacuation of several of our staff after the riots in Honiara in 2006. And each of these critical incidents requires us to deploy a number of people and I’d just like to touch on a couple of them.
Following the bombing of the Australian Embassy in Jakarta, a psychologist was deployed to support both our local liaison staff and the deployed contingent from Australia. The contingent comprised forensics specialists and disaster victim identification specialists. We also needed to reassure staff deployed to Indonesia who had to continue the work of the joint counter-terrorism team that they were fit and able to continue their work despite their workplace being subjected to a bombing attack.
The psychologist’s role, once on the ground, was to provide ‘psychological first aid’. This is an evidence-based approach designed to reduce the initial distress caused by traumatic events, and to foster short and long term adaptive functioning and coping. This included meeting with local AFP Commanders to explain the role of the psychologist and offer assistance to them and their staff, as well as liaising with other local government agencies’ mental health providers to develop an integrated plan for service provision.
Both the AFP psychologist and the Department of Foreign Affairs psychologist worked very closely during this period.
Six weeks after the Embassy bombing a psychological follow-up was conducted in Jakarta to ensure that any members who had suffered significant trauma responses were appropriately reviewed and supported.
Following the Asian tsunami disaster, an AFP psychologist was immediately deployed to what was called ‘Site 1’ – the primary body collection site in Phuket, to assess the situation and provide appropriate professional advice, support and feedback to commanders.
Following an initial psychological first aid intervention after attending Site 1, a group session for AFP members in country was facilitated. This provided information on the likely stress or trauma response people could expect.
The local AFP Commanders were advised to send only the most experienced and most essential staff to the body collection sites. Having been there, I have got to tell you that no matter what life prepares you for...having been in Phuket and seeing something in the order of 5500 bodies in various states is something that no matter what you have done at home would never have prepared you for that. And unlike other countries that were also affected by the tsunami, the Thais were very careful to have in place a proper, functioning governance process to deal with each of those bodies. Many of the victims were from Europe and other places and many were local. Of those 5500 I think all but about 500 have been formally identified. Obviously in a crisis like that, a natural disaster like that, you will come across people who should not have been in the country in the first place so their families are not going to own up to the fact that a relative has been deceased.
But one of the most pleasing things about that work up there, if I can describe it that way, was they actually thought to build a temple so that as local families were coming to identify their loved ones they could go straight to the temple immediately after and say a prayer there.
We had never done this before, but we developed colouring-in books and sent them over there so that when families were coming to the site waiting for the identification of their relatives they’d often bring their children with them, as they had no other choice, as they had no other family members. So to occupy them and create an environment for the family we gave them the AFP colouring books, which was just a little touch…but it was something that probably would not have been thought of 10 years ago in terms of response.
The psychologists tell me, or tell the commanders, what the temperature is in a place in terms of when we have to replace people, and how often to leave them exposed. And of course that is critical when it comes to places like Afghanistan because you have not only got to work out how long to leave them in a restricted environment but you also have to think that every time you make a movement and go from A to B there is a security issue. You are actually endangering their lives by moving them outside of a secure zone. So there are a lot of things to be balanced.
Following the Garuda plane crash in March last year, we deployed a psychologist to Yogyakarta with the initial Disaster Victim Identification and medical team. This allowed us to not only look after our own people but the other Australians who were killed in the plane crash from the Department of Foreign Affairs and AusAID. And it was a whole of government response. One of the things we did was, and we hadn’t thought of this 5 or 6 years ago, when we employed our first Imam as a chaplain, but of course one of the victims here was an Australian Muslim. So it enabled us to have a proper service on the ground in the proper faith and that was something that we wanted to do as an organisation despite the fact that the person who was a Muslim was not part of the AFP. But having done that, it had an unintended consequence that we had not thought of, nor planned for and that was the respect that we gained from the Indonesians about having an Imam as part of our chaplaincy service. And that was beamed right throughout Indonesia and people from Indonesia got in touch with me later and talked about the powerful impact of that. But I stress to point out that we didn’t do it for that reason. It was a consequence of having done it than having properly planned for it I guess.
AFP members involved in the post-crash investigation were also provided with psychological assistance and follow-up debriefs and monitored as appropriate. This was important because as we had developed considerable disaster victim identification expertise through the Bali bombings I and II, the Jakarta bombing of our Embassy and the tsunami despite the fact that we developed quite an expertise in Disaster Victim Identification, this was the first time that we had had to go offshore to identify our people who were killed in the crash.
During the investigation we learned more about how people react and anticipating how they can react. All of that is fed back to pre-deployment training that we give people before they go offshore. The important thing is that we don’t just go and do these jobs but we actually feed the learning back into the preparation for people before they go, and their families, so that we can be quite frank with families about the deployments and the risks that they face.
In conclusion, I will take some questions shortly but our overseas deployments contribute substantially to our philosophy of taking the fight against crime offshore. The whole idea here is that the more we do offshore the better we are prepared in our own country for what crime comes here and that includes narcotics activities, people smuggling activities, terrorism activities and now includes cybercrime, which we can probably do more from home than we can offshore. But the whole raison d’être for taking the work in this fashion is to try and provide a much more secure environment for Australian people here at home.
And in closing, we believe that to be successful as an organisation we have to give a lot of attention to the people in the organisation because they are the ones who deliver the services. So we try and provide that type of support not only through formal educative programs before they join the organisation but, once they are in the organisation, that they are well catered for through our Wellbeing Services, and as I say, which is provided by both professionals and also outsourced personnel.
So with that I will close and I think you want to open it up to questions….