Arch Bevis (Brisbane, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Aviation and Transport Security) Share this | Hansard source

The report from Sir John Wheeler pointed out the problems at regional airports and the need for an urgent upgrade, particularly in those airports in regional Australia that have flights directly into major airports: Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne—the major counter-terrorism response airports. The simple fact is that they do not check people. That does not happen. At the moment you can hop on a plane without having your baggage checked, without going through any X-ray scans or metal detections. You can hop on a plane and fly directly to Sydney, Melbourne or Brisbane and be airside on a secure part of the tarmac without any security check ever having been done on you.

The minister may well say, ‘Yes, but there are procedures put in place for people who actually fly to those airports to then be checked.’ That does not always happen, sadly, because what ends up occurring is that when flights are delayed from those locations—and there are plenty of people we can produce to attest to this—passengers are ushered quickly to the new aircraft they are getting on, which then takes them to the next port of their destination, which can be another capital city. So there are plenty of people who are leaving from places like Dubbo, flying to places like Sydney and going on to subsequent jet flights without going through any check of their baggage or of themselves and their carry-on baggage.

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