Rudd to abandon Homeland Security Dept.

SYDNEY, Nov. 27 (UPI) -- Top officials in Australian Prime Minister-elect Kevin Rudd's Labor Party say a proposal to create a homeland security department may be abandoned.

Officials expect the decision to abandon the proposal to be confirmed when Rudd announces his front bench. The proposal would have brought together Australia's intelligence agency, the federal police and the coast guard among other national security and border protection agencies, the Sydney Morning Herald reported.

Critics are calling the about-face the recently elected government's first broken promise, but Labor Party supporters argue that the creation of a department of homeland security would be disruptive.

Many critics of a centralized homeland security department fear it would face similar problems that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security struggled with in its creation.

"It's a proposal that needs to be looked at very carefully," Hugh White, head of the Strategic and Defense Studies Center at the Australian National University, said in a statement.

"The experience in the United States has been so negative and it's not clear that it would do much to improve the co-ordination of Australia's agencies. There are a number of things to be done, but setting up a department of homeland security may not be one of them."