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

I agree with the comments the member for Banks just made about outsourcing. We should have trained public servants in our airports and our ports rather than outsourcing for contracted workers. But he was too kind about past and current problems. As is my wont, I will go much further than the member for Banks and say there are people who are still conducting criminal activity at Kingsford Smith airport. They have been doing it for decades. They have been doing it in such a way, across a series of areas, that they have been undetected. They will not be broken up unless we have an activist Australian government willing to go into Sydney Airport and the other major airports and break the cabals that have been operating without proper scrutiny for years now. There has been so much movement of illegal drugs Australia-wide, undiscovered through major airports. Certain people have not been pinged because we do not have a dedicated police force.

The general approach has been that the state police force and state detectives should not be involved in our major airports. I think they should be, because the Australian Protective Service, no matter how good a job it does, is not made up of professional policemen trained in this area to pick up criminal activity and chase it down. Police should be involved, as long as we have got the normal regulation and control to ensure that there is not a corruption of those officers working in this area. The money is so great because of the amount and value of the drugs and other contraband that are moved through there that we need a dedicated force that will go in practically and crack the back of this. This is because there is also another fundamental connection here in our ports and our airports that the state police, the Federal Police and our security agencies are concerned about. What this bill is striving to do by getting a better picture of it and a better hang on it with the AusCheck proposal—which I am fully in favour of—is to underline the fact that we need to look at the deadly combination of criminality and terrorism.

We have already seen that there have been people with active terrorist contacts working in Sydney Airport. One of the first people taken out of the place was a baggage handler at Sydney Airport. In terms of the potential for terrorist activity in Australia, you could not get a much more vulnerable situation than having people inside, working in the baggage area. We know from the terror plots that have been discovered so far that there has been a concentration on aviation. The undiscovered areas are maritime and rail, as we had with Madrid. But we also know that what has been done so far to try to crack the problems, particularly at KSA, is not enough. And we are trying to drive the government harder and faster to address these problems, because there is not that much time. You cannot step back and do it in a fashion where you just expect that things will go your way. You cannot just take partial measures here.

I know the normal response is to look at something and say: ‘Well, there might be a few problems here. You know, it’ll be blown up in the media; it’ll be blown up whether it’s in print, radio, TV or whatever else.’ But the member for Lowe—who sits next to me in this House and has an adjacent electorate—has, by working day in and day out asking questions to ministers, pinned down exactly what the situation was with security cameras in Kingsford Smith airport. One security camera was out of focus, and another was turned against the wall. They just happened to be in those areas that were most vulnerable.

You need an active Customs Service and an active Australian Protective Service, and I think we need to engage in this area with the state police. We need a state police presence, with people who are experienced in detective work, to really go in and clean out these areas so they will not be as vulnerable as they are.

I will say here again, as I have said previously on questions of security at Kingsford Smith airport—and I know that the Attorney takes these matters very seriously—that there are significant problems that have not yet been got at. And the reason they have not is the nature of the whole process. The member for Banks alluded to this when he spoke about the outsourcing. I know outsourcing is the flavour of the decade: walking away from government responsibilities and deciding that we will not have government staff do the work and that we will not have all of the on-cost involved in that. That has happened at federal, state and council levels. People have made all sorts of savings—big savings—and efficiencies.

But I can only say that in the most capitalist country on the planet, the United States of America, you will not find them outsourcing their security service, their baggage-handling service, their customs service or their protective services. There is a whole range of fundamental security mechanisms that are in place in the baggage and cargo checking and handling. You will not find local, private security companies involved. You will not find Wackenhut involved in this.

Prior to September 11, 2001, that might have been a bit of the flavour of the US. It may have made some inroads. I do not really think so, though, because the culture in the United States is that—whilst they are entirely capitalist and in some cases have untrammelled capitalism at its greatest, as we saw in the 1860s and the 1890s—they have a strong sense of government responsibility and a strong sense that the government is there to protect the people of the United States of America. That is its chief task, and it will not be assured that if it gives the job to other people it is really going to be done.

I have been through the United States. I have been through the upgraded checking at their airports. Years before, I went through Los Angeles or Kennedy airport in the United States and I discovered that before there was any evident or extant problem with terrorism there was a really significant process for getting into the country. US citizens were in one line and whole queues of aliens were in another. That was the first time I found out that I was an alien but they still tend to treat people in that way—rather brusquely.

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