A little under a year ago, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese appointed Peter Khalil as Australia’s special envoy for social cohesion.
“Peter Khalil will have the resources across government,” Albanese said, according to his office’s transcript of the 29 July press conference. “I want him reporting directly to me about social cohesion and its [sic] important.”
Khalil was elevated to assistant minister for defence in the reelected Labor government’s post-election reshuffle, and the special envoy for social cohesion role was eliminated.
Albanese explained that the responsibility of improving social cohesion was now on the “whole of government”. He spoke highly of Khalil’s performance in the role.
“Peter Khalil had that role and performed it well,” the prime minister said at the 12 May press conference.
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It’s unclear what formed the basis for the prime minister to deliver such high praise. A freedom of information request to the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet seeking all reports received from Khalil in his role as special envoy for social cohesion returned just two documents.
“The office has identified two (2) documents that fall within the terms of your request,” wrote a senior adviser in a letter dated 3 June 2025 that responded to the 2 April FOI request.
These documents comprise a calendar entry for a meeting with Khalil the week after he was appointed to the role, and a September email.
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On 10 September, a staff member in Khalil’s office sent an email to someone in the Prime Minister’s Office with notes from a meeting with Khalil the previous week.
“I know some of these are ongoing, but I wondered whether you had a chance to lock in a time for us to meet with [redacted] about the stakeholder engagement side of things this week?” the email said.
The notes outlined plans to hold a multicultural stakeholder meeting, to speak to each state premier and territory chief minister to find out about their efforts, and to glean information about the government’s social cohesion grants.
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Beyond that, the FOI request returned no reports to the Prime Minister’s Office, nor are there documents from any time after 10 September 2024 until the role was abolished this year in May.
A spokesperson for Khalil said that he was “engaged in a significant body of work which has driven significant progress in a relatively short period of time”.
The spokeperson cited engaging with “multicultural, faith and community leaders, business leaders, grassroots community groups, VCs and academics, sporting clubs, NGOs, state and territory premiers, ministers and relevant state agencies, special envoys, and worked across federal government departments including the Department of Home Affairs”, as well as working with state governments on social cohesion.
The Prime Minister’s office did not respond to questions about whether any reports were filed.
In one of Khalil’s last interviews as special envoy, the member for Wills spoke to SBS Hebrew about some of the advocacy and stakeholder coordination he had done.
“I work with the minister for home affairs and the Prime Minister’s Office in advocating for various policy ideas and also programs … the main parts, too, of what I’ve been tasked to do is ensuring that there’s a nationally consistent approach between state and territory governments and federal governments, as our policy and our programs working with communities,” he said in the interview broadcast on 26 February.
When the role was abolished, chair of the Anti-Defamation Commission Dr Dvir Abramovich wrote about the importance of the “small role”:
The role wasn’t about headlines. It was about listening. Visiting. Reassuring. Showing up when things felt tense and fragile, and reminding communities that someone in Canberra still cared about the common thread.
Abramovich lamented the role’s elimination, saying, “The idea of a national role focused on social cohesion was not just symbolic. It was wise. It quietly affirmed that the project of holding people together is worthy of its own voice. That it is not incidental to good governance, but essential to it.”
In 2024, the Scanlon Foundation Research Institute’s index of social cohesion in Australia was stable from the year before, when it was at its equal lowest since the first survey in 2007. The next report is due in November.
