Huge breach’: MPs fume over email transfer during investigation
Jaala Hinchcliffe’s under siege at DPS, inside the building where politics and public service collide in the most combustible way.
What makes the federal Department of Parliamentary Services such a fiendishly difficult organisation? And what makes it so notoriously unhappy?
The clue might be in the name. The department that runs Australian Parliament House (APH) is a pressure cooker of epic proportions.
From the overly generous sale of billiard tables to the commissioning of artistic photographs, the misuse of parliamentary security cameras and bullying and harassment to perennial whinges about the IT system and office furniture, nothing has been historically too small or trivial for the microscopic examination visited on DPS, usually by senators on behalf of the 227 parliamentarians of all hues, at times hilariously and at others viciously.
In short, the burning self-interest among the politicians who scrutinise DPS creates an especially diabolical kind of pressure.
And nothing enrages them more (other than perhaps having their expenses claims disputed) than the possibility that the sacred principle of parliamentary privilege might be compromised.
It is this that threatens to engulf yet another secretary of DPS, Jaala Hinchcliffe.
A former Integrity Commissioner and agency head of the Australian Commission for Law Enforcement Integrity (ACLEI), which was subsumed into the National Anti-Corruption Commission (NACC) along with its secretive, far-reaching, intrusive powers, Hinchcliffe is no stranger to pressure.
Yet in DPS, it tends to become highly personal and very public, not least when senators are on the hunt for prey.
Since its formation in 2004, a succession of secretaries has departed DPS under less-than-optimal circumstances. Two have been sacked outright: Carol Mills in 2015 and Rob Stefanic in 2025, while Alan Thompson retired early in 2012 after a number of problems, not least the aforementioned case of the bargain-priced billiard tables.
Now Hinchcliffe, appointed substantively in March after acting in the position since November 2024, is herself under massive scrutiny and likely facing an investigation by the powerful Senate privileges committee over the use of private contractors to search and store data that very likely includes, unintentionally, multiple emails between parliamentarians and DPS staff in 2023.
First, some history. The department was created in 2004 from a merger of three (also largely unhappy) parliamentary services departments, after a 2002 review by then parliamentary and public service commissioner Andrew Podger.
DPS is the largest of four departments in the Australian Parliamentary Service, the others being the departments of the House of Representatives and the Senate and the Parliamentary Budget Office. The excellent Parliamentary Library is under DPS, but its head, Steven Fox, is a statutory officer, and it sits to one side.
They all answer to the presiding officers of the Senate and the House of Representatives, currently Senator Sue Lines and the Hon. Milton Dick.
DPS has an average staff level of 1,000 (approximately 1,200 people) and total resources for 2025-26 of $315.73 million, including $70.6 million in “administered” expenses (money it pays out).
It provides or facilitates multiple services, including the library and research, ICT, security, building, grounds, and design; audio-visual and Hansard; art; visitor services; food and beverage; retail; health; banking; childcare; and corporate, administrative, and strategic services.
During sitting weeks, the occupants of APH swell to some 3,500, along with associated visitors and hangers-on. So, it is quite the ecosystem in a building where the walls not only have ears but seethe with gossip, which is a political currency.
Even before she had her feet under the secretary’s desk, Hinchcliffe was, as deputy secretary, dealing with the fallout from Stefanic’s troubled tenure. This culminated in his sacking in February 2025 after a period of leave. She is still dealing with it while engineering a major “cultural change” in DPS.
That this is much needed is underlined by this year’s Australian Public Service Census, in which DPS took part for the first time (props to Hinchcliffe for doing so). DPS results across the board fell short of APS comparators by considerable gaps in percentage points. It also had a response rate of just 65% compared with the APS-wide 81%.
Anyway, Stefanic had a “close friendship” with his former deputy, Cate Saunders, who then moved to Services Australia for some months, after which she was given a redundancy from DPS in October 2023 to the tune of $315,000.
Stefanic denied they had been involved while she was his deputy, and said he made a declaration of conflict of interest because the gossip and innuendo had become so rife. Whatever the truth, ultimately, Lines and Dick lost “trust and confidence” in him, which are the magic words enabling a secretary to be sacked.
After controversy erupted over Saunders’ redundancy, Hinchcliffe ordered an independent review of the payout, which is also being investigated by the National Anti-Corruption Commission. The review by Sydney barrister Fiona Roughley SC found “multiple failures” of due process.
Hinchcliffe is now under fire over her decision, after internal IT searches failed to provide sufficient material, to allow DPS’s lawyers, HWL Ebsworth Lawyers, to contract a forensic IT specialist firm, TransPerfect, to conduct a third search, collecting data from the email boxes of DPS senior executives (not parliamentarians).
Unfortunately, HWLE, which has many government departments as clients, had previously suffered a ransomware attack by a Russian group that resulted in the theft of 3.6TB of data in April 2023.
Once this was pointed out in the Nine newspapers by Andrew Probyn, along with the suggestion that more than 100,000 emails had been gathered in the search, senators fumed over the risk that parliamentary privilege may be compromised, should any emails either to or from them have sat in the searched caches.
Hinchcliffe told the Senate finance and public administration committee on Friday, October 31, that any such emails were quarantined by HWLE and not sent to Dr Roughley or the NACC:
Hinchcliffe: I don’t accept that it’s a breach of the privilege of parliamentarians, not because I don’t respect the parliamentary privilege, or I don’t see the vital importance of it, but I don’t accept that there’s been a breach because it is not clear whether there’s any material in there that parliamentary privilege applies to.
Liberal Senator James Paterson: Exactly. That’s the problem.
Hinchcliffe: And none of that material has been read. It has been quarantined —
Liberal Senator James McGrath: — secretary, how do you know it hasn’t been read?
But in a spill-over estimates hearing on Tuesday night, Hinchcliffe, who looked as if she could see a chasm opening beneath her feet, conceded that she should have consulted the presiding officers and the clerks of both chambers on privilege and would do so in future.
The presiding officers took the unusual step of writing and tabling on Tuesday night a letter requesting her to work with the clerks to ensure all the data files (which Hinchcliffe had said were stored offsite in an Australian data centre) are returned as soon as practicable, to be held in APH.
Lines was at pains to insist that she and Dick retained full confidence in Hinchcliffe and believed the data had been handled properly, but opposition senators sniffed blood in the water.
McGrath, quite the antagonist, had called for disgruntled staff to come forward anonymously in the wake of the APS Census with their complaints, which he promised to air on Tuesday evening.
In the event, he did not get the chance because his colleague, Senator Jane Hume, soon lunged for Hinchcliffe’s jugular by declaring that she would refer the matter to the privileges committee for investigation.
The end-of-year killing season is well underway at APH. But politics and public service are not the same thing. Liberal senators, fuelled by their own party’s existential problems, might be well advised to think very carefully lest they take the wrong scalp.
About the author
Verona Burgess is a former government business editor and senior columnist for the Australian Financial Review. She has been writing about the Australian Public Service since 1990. A former Jefferson Fellow, she was also joint winner of the inaugural Richard Baker Senate prize an