Mr McCLELLAND (Barton) (10.09 p.m.)—In speaking on Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2005-2006 and related bills, my focus is on national security. Essentially, Labor would summarise the 2005-06 budget measure on national security as a missed opportunity for the enhancement of Australia’s domestic security and national security. For instance, the majority of the government’s spending in the area of domestic security—some $522 million—is directed towards diplomatic guarding and the protection of Australia’s representatives overseas.

While unquestionably the government has an obligation to protect those Australians who provide such a valuable service to the nation, the question must be asked whether this massive increase in expenditure on protective security to date, as a result of the increased security threat faced by Australians and Australian interests overseas, is as a result of our involvement in the war in Iraq. I think it is fair to say that both the retiring head of ASIO and indeed the Prime Minister have recognised, at least in respect of those Australians and Australian interests overseas, that our involvement in the war in Iraq may have increased the risk.

In the crucial area of maritime security and border control, the measures announced in the 2005-06 budget remain basically inadequate to address the raft of systematic maritime security failures that the opposition has been highlighting for many months. While the opposition supports funding the arming of the eight vessels operated by the Customs National Marine Unit—an initiative which Labor has been calling for for literally years—on the whole the Australian maritime border control arrangements remain hopelessly fragmented.

At least eight government agencies—including Defence, Customs, Coastwatch, the Department of Transport and Regional Services, the Australian Fisheries Management Authority, the Australian Maritime Safety Authority, the Australian Quarantine Inspection Service and the Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs—administer at least 11 pieces of legislation relating to maritime security. Those acts of parliament include the Customs Act, the Migration Act, the Fisheries Management Act, the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act, the Torres Strait Fisheries Act, the Crimes Act, the Defence Act, the Petroleum (Submerged Lands) Act, the Maritime Transport Security Act, the Quarantine Act and the Navigation Act.

Under those respective pieces of legislation, the powers and authorities given to officers of the Commonwealth vary enormously. There is no dedicated chain of command in the preparation of briefs of evidence. Who is a prosecuting authority? What powers of coercion are exercisable and when? That is a completely unsatisfactory state of affairs for the legislative and legal framework that applies to border protection. Yet the government has failed to provide any comprehensive review to examine those inconsistencies across this raft of legislation and to assess what needs to be done to coordinate them.

These powers are fragmented and overlapping. No doubt this has given rise to confusion that surrounds the rules of engagement, for instance, of our naval and Customs maritime surveillance vessels. Under present arrangements, Customs and Fisheries vessels are specifically empowered by legislation to fire into the propulsion mechanisms of fleeing illegal vessels in Australian waters, but they are without the weaponry to do so. On the other hand, our naval vessels have the weaponry to undertake that task but their rules of engagement constrain them from doing so. While the government has sought to greater coordinate the interaction between our Customs vessels and our Defence vessels in the establishment of the joint offshore protection unit, clearly much needs to be done in coordinating our law enforcement capability and response in the area of maritime security.

At the heart of Australia’s maritime security concerns there is, in any event, a fundamental lack of resources available to these agencies to patrol Australia’s maritime borders. With some 37,000 kilometres of coastline, the maritime unit vessels—eight Bay class patrol boats and the Navy’s 15 Fremantle class patrol boats, which will be replaced by 14 Armidale class patrol vessels—are being asked to perform the task of securing the nation’s borders with nowhere near the resources needed. Indeed, one expert has said that to cover the same amount of land as they are required to cover of the ocean would be equivalent to having something like only 50 police cars to patrol the whole of Australia. We are totally under-equipped in our ability to fight illegal activity in our maritime zone.

For instance, every year thousands of illegal fishing vessels sail into Australian waters. Recent reports demonstrate that these vessels are becoming increasingly bold. In some instances, these vessels are now fishing in the river systems of the Australian mainland. They are landing to obtain water and are now searching for crabs in our inland streams. These illegal vessels are not only plundering Australia’s exclusive economic assets but represent a significant threat to Australia’s national security by exposing the Australian people and our aquaculture to new forms of disease—let alone raising the spectre of illegal drug trafficking and people-smuggling. Indeed, there is the potential for a catastrophic release of a biological disease. I understand that most of these vessels have chickens on board for food and, quite frequently, dogs for companionship. With the possibility of the release of bird flu, for instance, on our shores or, even worse, rabies we cannot dismiss that as a fanciful possibility. For so long as we permit these vessels to land on our shores that is a significant risk. Nor can we dismiss the fact that perhaps the most damaging form of terrorist assault on our nation would be through the release of some exotic disease, such as foot and mouth disease, that could easily be transmitted through these vessels.

This is a problem that the Minister for Justice and Customs has admitted, at least in terms of his admission that the problem of illegal fishing is getting worse. It is instructive to note that in its response the government has set a precedent of directing private fishermen to interdict and detain suspected illegal vessels in circumstances where Customs or naval vessels are unavailable. Essentially, the government’s response is that, if incidents occur in the north-east of Australia in the Gulf of Carpentaria, they will receive reports of illegal fishing and our 15 patrol vessels and our eight Customs vessels will swarm to that area, leaving the north-west coastline exposed to illegal fishing and compensating by directing Australian fishermen to conduct citizens’ arrests. That is a totally unsatisfactory state of affairs. The government repeatedly lauds its border protection credentials to the people of Australia, but, when you actually look at the resourcing and the empowering of our maritime zone law enforcement capability, it is entirely lacking.

In port security the situation is no less alarming. We have recently heard the Deputy Prime Minister remonstrate about regulating Australia’s ports, at least from the point of view of infrastructure planning, but nowhere has a corresponding argument been presented regarding the need for national supervision of our port security. In our ports we presently have a situation where hundreds of thousands of empty cargo containers are shipped into Australia without being screened and in some instances, as in Sydney, are stored adjacent to a major international airport—in fact, on the border of my electorate. There is a failure to prevent cargo ships entering our ports that do not report the contents of their cargo, despite legislative requirements to do so. One recalls the Prime Minister in a fanfare announcing a reporting zone. In fact, there is effectively no interdiction capacity for these vessels, meaning that all too frequently potentially dangerous cargo is being unloaded at Australia’s docks and left, as we have been advised by government officials, for a couple of days before Customs establishes the contents of that cargo—at least, from the documentation, let alone conducting any sort of basic security assessment to identify the source of the cargo and the identity of the ship and then make a determination as to whether the material should be X-rayed.

As has been identified by expert advice, there is also a lack of specialised port police such as those operating in the United Kingdom and the United States, which operate a very successful sea marshals program. There is also a conspicuous absence of land transportation initiatives to ensure that security arrangements are in place beyond the points of arrival at Australia’s ports and airports. I think it is quite shameful—and here I condemn not only the federal government but also the state governments—that rail security has been virtually unchanged other than some basic education and surveillance installed at railway stations. Essentially, there has been no real drive to protect public transport.

I note the government, in a measure we would recognise, announced in the budget the creation of additional bomb detector dogs for Customs. It seems to me entirely reasonable that the Australian people be entitled to that sort of protection on our railways. It would not be an overly complex or expensive arrangement for the Commonwealth and states to combine their resources to initially have dog bomb detection teams available to patrol our railway platforms and trains for the purpose of giving passengers greater security, given the ability of those dogs to sniff passenger luggage that may potentially, as we found with the Madrid bombings, carry explosives.

In terms of the fragmentation of law enforcement, we see, when looking at maritime interdiction responsibilities and port security, that the government is all too content to leave arrangements to state police forces. For instance, we saw in New South Wales the announcement in the Sunday papers that the New South Wales government is introducing new boats for its state water police force. But maritime security involves risks to Australia generally, particularly its infrastructure and economy, and you cannot sensibly have in this day and age a situation where the degree of security at any particular port is dependent upon the affluence or determination of a state government. Clearly, this is a federal government responsibility. Just as the Minister for Transport and Regional Services, John Anderson, has said that port infrastructure is of such significance that it is a national government responsibility, so also, we believe, is the security of our nation’s ports.

We note that the fragmentation of Australia’s security arrangements is not limited to the maritime environment. The responsibility for aviation security is spread across a myriad government departments, including Customs, the Department of Transport and Regional Services, the Australian Quarantine and Inspection Service, the Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, the Australian Federal Police and a whole range of state government agencies. It has been three years since the September 11 attacks, yet the 2005-06 budget fails to address the systematic aviation transport security weaknesses that remain and that threaten Australia’s national security. Australia’s aviation industry services approximately 50 million international and domestic passenger movements each year, yet the government cannot assure the Australian public that they are safe when travelling through our airports.

Although the issue at the forefront of the current debate concerns allegations that baggage handlers at our airports are involved in an elaborate drug-smuggling operation, the concerns of airport security do not stop there. While it is inappropriate to pass comment on the merits or otherwise of the decision of the Indonesian courts in the case of Schapelle Corby, I think it is fair to say that most Australians would accept that there is at least a possibility that is not a fanciful possibility that her bags were meddled with and drugs were placed in them. Irrespective of competing arguments and competing obligations in respect of the onus of proof in that case, the mere fact that there is an acknowledgement—and I understand it was an acknowledgement that was contained in official correspondence between the Australian government and court officials—that we recognise the potential for such meddling with passenger luggage is quite alarming.

In that context, last week we saw the minister for transport dismiss the relevance of removing from office at least temporarily the Inspector of Transport Security, saying that the inspector’s role was to examine terrorist acts after they had occurred, as opposed to systematic security breaches. If there is evidence of systematic criminal breaches, it is in respect of workplace disciplinary actions and admissions by baggage handlers that they have indeed meddled with passenger luggage to the point where we have seen photos of a baggage handler driving across an airport wearing a camel outfit. While that image is comical, the prospect of passenger baggage being meddled with is not. What the minister for transport has not acknowledged is that if, as we all accept, it is possible that a passenger’s bag has been meddled with and indeed drugs have been placed in that bag, it is illogical to also dismiss the possibility that an explosive device could be placed in a bag. So for the minister to dismiss the significance of that meddling as mere criminality, as opposed to criminality that in fact could be replicated in a terrorist event—which is of course the worst form of criminality—is naive in the extreme.

The bottom line is that Australia’s travelling public cannot be satisfied that the government places a priority on their security interests. The government is all too keen to laud its security credentials, but when you analyse and dissect what it is actually doing you find it to be sorely wanting. There have been a range of breaches since July 2004, with at least 15 breaches of airport security being publicly recorded. They range from the early morning sabotage of Victoria’s air ambulance fleet at Essendon to the theft of a light aircraft from St George aerodrome in south-east Queensland. They include a whole range of allegations about tampering with passenger baggage. But rather than acknowledging these failings and the need to conduct a proper audit of what is wrong at our airports, the government dismisses these as not being of any significance, other than saying that they are criminal events and require investigation by state law enforcement authorities. The government justifies our remaining in a situation where we have no-one presently occupying the office of Inspector of Transport Security. This typifies a government that is all too keen to speak of its national security credentials but is found wanting when it comes to actually delivering the goods. (Time expired)

Debate (on motion by Mr Pearce) adjourned.