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

This is a tired and lazy government. If you look at the speaking list for today, it is apparent—as the member for Brisbane pointed out before. The Customs Legislation Amendment (Augmenting Offshore Powers and Other Measures) Bill 2006 is the sixth bill before the House today, and you can count on one hand the number of government members who have stood up and actually attempted to explain what those bills were about or spoken to the government legislative program. This is my fifth speech today out of the six bills. I had eight on my list, but I had to knock off two in the Main Committee because they clashed. Minister Nairn knows full well the importance of actually doing the job and being part of this. I want to make a couple of critical points in the very short amount of time I have before the adjournment debate starts, and I will continue my remarks in a couple of weeks time.

The critical thing here is that there are four measures that need to be taken in order to improve the ability of our Customs Service to keep Australia safe. I know how important this is because, as deputy chair of the defence committee, I have been on Australian warships in Australian waters off Darwin doing an exercise where they were assisting Customs officers to look for illegal vessels. They have a very comprehensive program. They have a very comprehensive set of skills in order to board vessels and then detain them. It is a very dangerous job. It is prescribed by a set of protocols as to how people ought to go about their actions.

The crew members and the Customs officers I dealt with told me that there were fundamental problems with the search powers. That is the key thing addressed in the first part of this bill. If you have an apprehension, currently, where a person has a weapon hidden either on himself or somewhere else on the boat, or where there are documents that might in fact be used in evidence against people and so on, you cannot nab the bloke, do a quick frisk, get the weapons—which might be used against Customs officers or other Australian forces—and secure the vessel. You are left with the situation that relevant evidence may in fact be destroyed and you may be unable to prosecute later people who have been detained.

The key element here, and this is long overdue, is to say that, in terms of the offshore powers—that is, a vessel not in Australian waters but a vessel which has been interdicted and detained—when there is boarding of that vessel by Customs officers they will now, when this bill goes through, be in a position to better defend themselves and to better secure the country. The fourth matter is what is called SmartGate. This is not a TV show but rather an Australian invention worked up by a very clever set of people at CSIRO. That is in operation not only at Australian airports but also at ports. Fundamentally it is about facial recognition. In one of the other bills in the last couple of days we dealt with the whole question of having an access card and having a digital image of a person’s face as well as a digital signature. SmartGate operates on the basis that, if you are flooding through a port or an airport, this technology will actually be able to identify you out of all the other individuals that are in that airport or port.

Debate interrupted.

See this speech in context