Michael Hatton (Blaxland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am happy to support the shadow minister and the other Labor members who have spoken to the Law and Justice Legislation Amendment (Marking of Plastic Explosives) Bill 2006. Indeed, I support the government members who have spoken to this bill, because we are in agreement that this bill should be supported in its entirety. Where we differ is on the question of lag and delay in implementation of not only this measure but a series of national security measures. This measure involves the marking of plastics explosives in a particular way—putting an odorant in them so that they are more readily able to be identified and therefore cannot be used for terrorism or other purposes. If there is an attempt to use them, we will be able to get them before it happens.

At the moment, it is a bit of a hit-and-miss proposition. There are specifically trained sniffer dogs, and I know how well those dogs are trained and how good their handlers are in the operation here around Parliament House. In order to secure this house, there is a full-time operation, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, involving not only the security guards that we see on bicycles but also a dedicated dog squad, with dogs that are trained to sniff out plastic explosives, bomb-making materials and so on. They are dedicated to that task. What is the probability that they will ever find anything? Probably about zero or just slightly above, but that does not mean that the resources do not have to be put there to secure this house.

If it would have been easier to give effect to the work that was being done by ensuring that the United Nations convention in relation to the marking of plastic explosives was adhered to by this government then it should have been done. This is the last of 13 United Nations conventions in relation to terrorism that the government has signed up to. You would have thought that by now we would have had enough time to look seriously at these matters and to say, given that it is now 2006 and not 2001, that there was every good cause for the government to take ready, steady and speedy action in matters such as this. But over a whole series of bills brought before this House, I am sorry to report, as I have previously had to argue in relation to maritime security, transport security and security matters at Kingsford Smith airport, that this government has been laggard in terms of taking up the challenge that has been provided to us directly since 2001, with the attacks on the Twin Towers, the attempted attack on the congress building or the White House—we are still not sure what would have happened with that plane in Pittsburgh—and the direct attack on the Pentagon. They represent the biggest instalment up to 2001.

It is not as if we did not have forewarning that there was a significant problem here, and forewarning that certain measures needed to be made—not only made but then undertaken—in order to secure civil populations as well as congressional buildings, parliamentary buildings, government offices and everything else that needs to be made safe on a national security basis.

We know what the recent history has been—and I will come to this shortly in terms of transport security and other related matters in regard to the use not only of plastic explosives but of others. We know about the increasing tempo of the dangers that we face. There were clear and present dangers evident to authorities world wide, but although the clear and present dangers were there, although the United Nations suggested, in putting their convention together, that constituent governments should sign and put into effect those conventions, here we are dealing with the very last of the 13 antiterror bills. You have to ask why.

Let us look at the history of this matter. In 1985 there was the still relatively unexplained destruction of two Air India aircraft originating out of Canada. It is thought that plastic explosives were the cause of those planes being blown up. It is thought there was a direct connection with the religious rivalry between Muslims and Hindus in India. We have seen a series of events since then which would give that supposition greater force and weight. In 1988, an aircraft was brought down over Lockerbie, Scotland. We know without a shadow of a doubt whatsoever that Muammar al-Gaddafi’s government in Libya conspired to bring down that aircraft and that they used plastic explosives to do it.

The plastic explosives were placed on the aircraft which exploded over Lockerbie. In good part, the reason that people did not know they were there was because they had no ready identifiers. Plastic or sheet explosives are used world wide. We know that they are produced in relatively large volume. We even know the designations of those plastic explosives. You would very well know, Mr Deputy Speaker Haase, coming from Kalgoorlie, the biggest electorate in Australia, covering most of Western Australia—and you and I both know, from serving on the industry and resources committee—just how significant the use of explosives is within the mining community. We know that primarily the explosive of choice is ammonium nitrate. We are not dealing with that here. But the bills that we dealt with recently in relation to transport security and maritime transport security go to the issue of how to protect yourself against ammonium nitrate. One thing that was not involved in those bills was the question of whether you should mark ammonium nitrate out and whether you could easily find it. Why? Because ammonium nitrate is used in great bulk in terms of utilisation as an explosive.

The great danger with plastic explosives lies in two areas. Firstly, you do not need much of C4 or Semtex to blast a hole in an aeroplane and bring it down. Secondly, because of the shape and form that it takes, there is not the difficulty that you have to have a whole truckload delivered. You need only a small amount. Also, it is entirely malleable. This is a plastic explosive and, like the plasticine that children play with, you can mould it into different shapes and you can conceal it. These days, with the development of technology for batteries, mobile phones, PDAs or portable computers, one of the reasons they go through the scanners is the fact that you need to physically look at what is there. But what if there are materials within those particular items? What if there are plastic explosives moulded into those spaces?

The new batteries that are coming through are being moulded throughout the cases of computers, PDAs and phones. They are more potent than lithium batteries and nickel metal hydride; they are more potent than the NiCad batteries that were there in the first place. You can get a great deal more battery by using this plastic-like approach. So why is this bill significant and important? Why should it have been signed up to before? Because of the volume of malleable plastic-like materials that are now entering into mainstream use. Because they are going to be used a lot more, you need to say, ‘Whack something in this to make it readily identifiable so that it will stick out and announce itself.’

There could have been—except it would probably have been self-defeating—an associated part of this convention. There is a good reason that it is not there. This basically talks about odorants or other signifiers to indicate that anyone looking for plastic explosives will be able to find them more readily. This convention was generated in about 1991. Certainly the Attorney-General will remember, I have no doubt, that we did not lose office until 1996. So if Labor was tardy and had just short of five years to sign up to this convention, let Labor be condemned. There were enough signifiers in the early nineties that we had a problem.

Apart from the activity on those aircraft, where else have we seen a significant rise in terrorist attacks, and certainly those related to al-Qaeda? We know that the attack on the USS Cole, directed by a fast motorboat filled with a large amount of explosives, was a direct attack. We know that the 1994 attack on the twin towers, where they attempted to blow them up from basement level, failed, but that was an indication that we had a problem with the worldwide terrorist movement. We know that that lead-up to 2001 had larger scale utilisation. We know that ammonium nitrate was used in Bali. We have also had a security problem with ammonium nitrate in Australia, where a train just pulled up, stayed there for half an hour or so and a couple of blokes came along and lifted a whole truckload full of the stuff and took it off. The expectation from the security authorities—and we hope it is borne out—is that it is just common criminals utilising it for their own purposes and not criminals who are associated with terrorist groups. But that is an indication of just how much we have to do to overprotect.

Plastic explosives were used originally—and they were largely C4 and Semtex—during the Warsaw Pact era. The majority of those were produced in Czechoslovakia. They were very effective. The very fact that you could hide them made them a weapon of choice for a series of reasons. If you look at the period post 2001, what is the one major attempt that we know of to use plastic explosives to bring down an aircraft? It was by a fellow called Reid, a British bomber, who was caught trying to light his shoelaces. They stopped him from trying to give effect to using plastic explosives in his shoes to take down that aircraft. If this measure had been signed up to by everyone and if the existing stocks of plastic explosives that we still have now—that are unmarked by the odorant; that do not have significations—had been used up fully, there would be less chance for someone like that to be able to get access to it. We know—the Attorney-General will know this, and others dealing with it will know this as well—there is still a capacity to ‘roll your own’ in this regard and for people to produce their own plastic explosives. And, if that capacity is there in the terrorist organisations, no doubt they will attempt to use it. But the key here is the large-scale access to a source of explosive that is not only potent but relatively small, easily malleable and easy to hide. This bill is about making that much easier to pick up.

If this convention had not been thought up in 1991 but was being thought up now, in 2006, or even back in 2004, the other thing you might think of—and this could in fact go directly against the particular uses of these explosives—would be: why shouldn’t we have RFID, radiofrequency identification, tags in them? They are very small. They have the ability to be put into just about anything: an item of clothing like my suit, a handkerchief—you name it. You can actually have RFID tags, which are being taken up by manufacturers worldwide, in order to track a logistical train of manufactured items around the world. Maybe that is something we should be looking at here.

Whether we have been laggard or not in signing up to this convention—and I would argue that the government has been laggard in signing up to this, the last of the 13 antiterror conventions—it is based on odorant protection. It is a form that was available then, but the dramatic advances in RFID technology would indicate that this is something else we should be looking at. We have a body of plastic explosives that is still there to be used, so there is still a chance that people could get ready access to that. But this should be about going forward and saying to manufacturers what they should be looking to produce under this set of laws. I trust that the Attorney-General, being as open as he is in these areas, will look at ways in which we can better improve our national security. We should have a look at the technical possibilities. This is a most dangerous substance because of all its properties. It is one that has not been used as much by terrorist organisations as we might have expected. It used to be the choice of certain intelligence organisations and certain terrorist movements overseas. It fundamentally has not been used by the ones we have been most concerned with recently, and that is al-Qaeda and Jemaah Islamiah, but that does not mean they will not use it in the future.

So my recommendation would be that, while supporting the bill completely, we always need to look more broadly. We can secure ourselves in relation to the production of plastic explosives and making it easier to find them, but it would be a hell of a lot easier to find this stuff if we used a current technology that is extremely well developed and that is not totally standardised, where you have very small RFIDs which would enable you to track this stuff right around the world. You would be able to get, effectively, a tag in that plastic explosive to tell you exactly where and when it was manufactured, and you could then run that exploration throughout the course of its use. It would give us greater control and greater certainty. If the technology is available, let us look at being able to use it.

More broadly, our problems in maritime security, not only at our ports but on the high seas and as ships come into harbour, are fundamentally about the big stuff—ammonium nitrate and the potential for vessels that are not well enough controlled and regulated to come into our harbours where they could do a great deal of damage. I have spoken about that in relation to previous bills. With regard to transport security, I have spoken about Kingsford Smith airport with its myriad problems which are fundamentally historical; the embedded nature of the problematic way in which people do business, and hide criminality, within Kingsford Smith and other major airports; and the fact that getting those people out is not about identifying these sorts of things but, fundamentally, about getting a regime where you could put in a practised detective force. I think the New South Wales police force would be the best agency for this, to actually root out the difficulty and problem that we have with it. It is a massive job, but unless it is done we cannot be absolutely secure in terms of KSA.

The other great difficulty here, and one which could really be significant, is the issue of plastic explosives and their identification and use in attacks, particularly in our train networks. Sydney is highly vulnerable to terrorist attack on our train networks. We know how much damage was done in Madrid. We know how many people lost their lives there. We know how easy it was for them to bring Madrid to a standstill and for the shock waves of that to run around the world. If you look at Sydney’s geography—as the minister and I, coming from there, know very well—you see that Sydney is dependent on its railway lines running into the CBD. Those railway lines run west, they run south, they run north and they run east. The intersections between north and south in Sydney are very difficult. That is why we have used roads in particular to make those.

We have a fundamental problem. To bring down our train network, because of its very structure and the way it has developed historically, is not so difficult. This is an area that we really need to concentrate on and this is an area where the potential use of plastic explosives to create havoc on that train network is very significant. Why is that the case? It is pretty simple. It is the portability of them, that you could hide them relatively easily and that they could be the start point for using other sets of explosives to run off. We know from the London experience just how easy that is.

The last element is about these explosives being used in conjunction with others. Staying ahead of the game rather than being behind is extraordinarily important. We know from the recent changes in airline security that have had to be taken by the United States and the British governments that you can use very simple means: gels and other very simple things. You can put them together in a particular way and have an explosive that can do an enormous amount of damage, whether used in conjunction with plastic explosives or not. We have to be up to the game, fix this, put it through as fast as possible and implement it. Then we have to continue to take as many measures as we need to take to secure the public and our institutions against a very aggressive set of terrorists who understand the science and will put this into practice.

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