Consular services

Program 2.1

Overview

The department provided assistance to 15,824 Australians in difficulty overseas in 2014–15. The downing of Malaysia Airlines MH17 and our response to assist the families of the 38 victims who called Australia home was a major focus of our consular work during the period.

The department concluded work on a Consular Strategy, launched by the Foreign Minister in Canberra on 3 December. The strategy sets a three-year framework for the delivery of world class consular services and is the first of its kind for the department. At the same time, Ms Bishop launched an updated Consular Services Charter.

We also worked with the Australian National Audit Office (ANAO) over the course of its 12-month performance audit of the delivery of consular services. The ANAO concluded that the department’s administration of the consular function was appropriate and effective.

We expanded our public messaging in innovative ways, including cooperation with the production of an observational documentary series The Embassy and an expansion of social media activities. The successful launch of the new Consular Information System was a major achievement.

Consular services

At 30 June 2015, Australians had access to consular services through 166 diplomatic and consular missions and honorary consuls managed by the department and Austrade. Australians also had access to consular services from Canadian diplomatic missions in a further 16 countries, under a reciprocal consular sharing agreement.

The department’s Consular Emergency Centre (CEC) received 50,525 calls, a five per cent decrease from 2013–14. The centre provides public access to consular services from anywhere in the world, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. In addition to calls received by the CEC, our Emergency Call Unit took 5516 calls over the year in relation to the downing of MH17, Tropical Cyclone Pam in Vanuatu and the earthquakes in Nepal.

Assisting Australians overseas

In 2014–15, consular staff managed a total of 15,824 cases of assistance to Australians in difficulty, an increase of nine per cent from the previous year.

The department continued to provide strong consular support to an Australian journalist imprisoned in Egypt, and engaged intensively with the Egyptian authorities on his case until his release and departure from Egypt on 1 February 2015. We provided extensive consular assistance to two Australians sentenced to death for drug offences in Indonesia and to their families.

Travellers’ emergency loans

We reviewed procedures for managing disbursement of emergency financial assistance to Australian travellers and tightened our debt recovery procedures, including updating and simplifying the legal documentation which underpins the loans.

Consular emergency services

The department also granted payments totalling $443 to two Australian travellers under the consular emergency services financial support mechanism. This enables the extension of financial assistance when it is not practical or legally possible for individuals to sign an undertaking-to-repay.

International dialogue and cooperation

We continued work with consular partners to strengthen multilateral, regional and bilateral cooperation and information exchange on consular matters, including as a member of the Steering Committee of the Global Consular Forum. We participated in the forum’s second officials’ meeting in Mexico in May, with a particular focus on the international legal and policy framework for consular work, including family law.

The department enhanced crisis cooperation with Canada under our bilateral consular sharing agreement, added new countries to the consular sharing schedule and improved guidance to Australian and Canadian posts delivering consular services on behalf of the other country.

We also strengthened crisis cooperation with the United Kingdom. At the AUKMIN meeting in February, the Foreign Minister and UK Foreign Secretary signed an MOU on the reciprocal use of diplomatic facilities at times of crisis or major international incident. This step built on our close cooperation with the United Kingdom in response to MH17.

We hosted the 10th annual bilateral consular consultations with Vietnam in Perth on 10 December and the 13th Australia–China consular consultations in Adelaide on 25 June. These bilateral consultations provide important opportunities to address issues of mutual concern in the delivery of consular services in each other’s countries.

Consular policy

On 3 December 2014, the Foreign Minister launched the department’s first three-year Consular Strategy, together with a revised and updated Consular Services Charter. The strategy provides the framework to ensure that the department continues to deliver world class consular services to Australians overseas. This includes a stronger focus on those who are most vulnerable or involved in very serious cases. It also foreshadows strengthened messaging to promote a culture of self-reliance, personal responsibility and self-help among Australians travelling and living overseas.

By the end of the reporting period, we had begun or completed action on 90 per cent of the strategy’s recommendations.

Another significant achievement was the rollout of the new Consular Information System underpinning the management of assistance to Australians in difficulty. The new system provides greater functionality in managing and recording our consular work, enabling us to further improve quality assurance. It will also significantly enhance the collection of relevant consular statistics, improving our capacity to model future consular trends and demands.

Consular Information Systems Project Officer, Karen Collins (left), provides training on the new system to Consular Operations officers, Gail Banks (centre) and Nataly Miranda-Veloso, Canberra, May 2015.
[DFAT/Nathan Fulton]

We undertook a stocktake of Australia’s network of honorary consuls, which led to new policies and procedures to strengthen our oversight of the network, improve recruitment processes, enhance training and strengthen reporting obligations. These changes will support efforts to ensure the network aligns with our foreign and trade policy priorities.

Consular training

In keeping with the commitment in the Consular Strategy to have in place professional, trained consular staff to deliver services and assistance effectively, we developed a comprehensive consular and crisis management training strategy. We delivered over 120 training sessions to over 1600 staff in Canberra and overseas, a significant increase from 80 sessions delivered to just over 1000 staff in the previous period.

Responding to and preparing for crises

The downing of MH17 over Ukraine was the most significant crisis to affect Australians and Australian interests overseas during the period and called for an extensive and complex response across the department. We conducted a ‘lessons learned’ exercise on our response and began implementing a number of strategic and procedural improvements to help guide future crisis responses.

As part of our ongoing contingency planning, we conducted Contingency Planning Assistance Team visits to five posts. We implemented a Single Crisis Response Protocol, combining consular, humanitarian and other elements from across the department, to maximise the department’s crisis response capabilities. The effectiveness of the protocol was demonstrated in response to Tropical Cyclone Pam in Vanuatu and the earthquakes in Nepal. In each case, we deployed specialist consular, humanitarian and policy officers to support the posts in the affected countries. Our teams provided professional, timely assistance to those in need, supported in Canberra by our Crisis Centre and Emergency Call Unit and overseen by an Inter-Departmental Emergency Task Force chaired by the department.(See also figures 29 and 30.)

Following Tropical Cyclone Pam, the Emergency Call Unit handled over 1000 calls, helping us to confirm the welfare of approximately 1800 Australians and permanent residents. We updated travel advisories and issued regular travel bulletins for affected Australians, including on arrangements to depart the affected areas. With the assistance of the Australian Defence Force, we evacuated 242 people to Australia, including 208 Australians.

After a 7.9 magnitude earthquake struck Nepal on 25 April 2015, we moved quickly to confirm the welfare of 1525 Australians who were in the country at the time and activated our Crisis Centre and Emergency Call Unit (which took 2422 calls). We deployed a Crisis Response Team (CRT) to help with the consular and relief effort on the ground, including in areas outside the capital, and assist with evacuating Australians to Bangkok. One Australian was confirmed dead and we hold grave concerns for a second.

We undertook comprehensive contingency planning and deployed teams to provide consular support for the Australian Government commemorations of the Gallipoli Centenary and other World War I anniversaries in France.

The department conducted a joint exercise with Qantas to test preparedness for the possibility of an international aviation crisis, including a mock activation of our Crisis Centre. This strengthened cooperative arrangements with Qantas and with a range of Australian government agencies.

We also pursued innovative strategies to enhance our international crisis response capacities. In March we signed an agreement with France that commits us to work towards stronger cooperation in consular crisis response, including by assisting each other’s citizens during crises in certain locations.

Keeping Australians informed

The department provided accurate and timely travel advisories and other travel information to assist Australians to make safe travel decisions. The Smartraveller website attracted over 16 million page views in 2014–15.

We increased the number of destinations for which we issue travel advisories to 171, adding the Republic of the Marshall Islands and the Seychelles. We issued 778 updates to travel advisories during the period. We also issued 62 travel bulletins on a range of subjects, including the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, the global terrorism threat and the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus (MERS).

We enhanced the readability of the travel advice by including colour-coded maps showing risk levels for all country-specific travel advisories. We also revised and updated our ‘travel advice explained’ page, to help travellers understand and use the information in the advisories. We published tailored advice for young travellers and Australians studying abroad.

In October, the Foreign Minister launched a travel insurance buying guide, which we commissioned from the consumer group CHOICE to assist travellers to identify the travel insurance policy that best suits their needs. This resulted in more credible, independent advice to consumers to guide their travel insurance purchasing decisions.

Another innovation was our cooperation with Embassy Productions on a four-part observational documentary series aired by Channel 9. The Embassy focused on the work of the consular section of our embassy in Bangkok, our busiest consular post. The series enables the department to convey key consular messages on travel safety, including the limits of our consular role. The Embassy won a People’s Choice Award in 2014 and achieved consistently high ratings. We took advantage of the success of the series to host a live Facebook forum on 1 November. We reached an audience of 18,688 Facebook users, answering 60 questions and responding to many more comments.

We continued to enhance the Smartraveller social media presence, with Facebook ‘likes’ increasing by 20,000 to almost 60,000 and Twitter followers by 2600 to 8758. Social media was particularly important in providing information to Australians overseas and their loved ones back home during crises, with some individual messages during crises reaching up to 200,000 Facebook users.

Building on the success of the former Smartraveller Consultative Group, we hosted the first meeting of the new Consular Consultative Group. This group brings together a wider range of travel and industry representatives to promote dialogue between industry and the department on the Smartraveller campaign, consular policies and crisis management.

Our staff participated in a number of major travel expos across Australia in early 2015, providing an opportunity to promote key safe travel messages to around 100,000 intending travellers. We enhanced partnerships with volunteer groups such as Red Frogs and the Nicole Fitzsimons Foundation on outreach to young travellers, including during ‘Schoolies Week’ events in Bali and Fiji.

An interim Smartraveller print and digital campaign ran from February to May 2015 and work continued on the next phase of the Smartraveller campaign.

Consular Services Charter

In conjunction with the Consular Strategy, we revised and updated our Consular Services Charter. The new version, launched by the Foreign Minister on 3 December, sets out more clearly the consular services and assistance provided by the department. We updated internal procedures for management of feedback on consular services, to ensure that any complaints are dealt with promptly and that both positive and negative feedback is shared with relevant staff.

We received feedback on our services through the Smartraveller website, via email, in writing, over the phone, in person and through social media channels. Most communications were requests for further information or comments. Use of social media increased: we received 264 Facebook messages seeking information, five providing comment, five complimenting us on our services, and two complaints. We also received 29 formal compliments and responded in writing to 42 complaints received, up from 34 received last year.

Outlook

The department will report on progress in implementing the Consular Strategy 2014–16.

We will revamp the Smartraveller website to make travel advice more reader-friendly. We will start Phase IV of the Smartraveller advertising campaign and launch an Android app to complement the existing iPhone app. We will continue our cooperation with Embassy Productions in advance of the screening of the second season of The Embassy observational documentary in the latter part of 2015.

We will continue our program of Contingency Planning Assistance Team visits to posts, with a strong focus on regional crisis preparedness. We also will improve our CRT capability through the training, briefing and equipping of specialist officers, ready to be deployed to crisis locations overseas at very short notice.

The department will continue engagement with the private sector and increase cooperation with the Australian Defence Force (ADF) on evacuation planning, including utilising the new ADF Amphibious Task Group capability.

We will deepen cooperation with other countries to further improve consular services for Australians.

We will streamline the delivery of notarial services through our state and territory offices in Australia and implement changes to increase the number of staff able to issue apostilles at our posts overseas.