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

I am happy to follow the member for Tangney. He gave a very considered speech. The first part of his speech dealt with the broad situation in regard to Iraq and Afghanistan and the problems of terrorism generally. The latter part of his speech dealt with the particularities of this bill and the necessary situation we face as a result of potentially one of the most enormous attacks on people travelling by air—a series of attacks that, if they had come off, would have had a greater impact than what we saw on 11 September 2001.

Equally, I am happy to follow the shadow minister and support every single one of Labor’s amendments to this bill. I say at the start that we support the two specific provisions of the bill but there are key questions to ask about how the government has gone about this.

I just do not understand this mob sometimes and why they make decisions in the way they do. If you have a look at the second reading speech by the member for Dawson on the Aviation Transport Security Amendment (Additional Screening Measures) Bill 2007 and compare it to the explanatory memorandum you find an interesting difference. The first two paragraphs are fundamentally the same, but I would like to know, from whoever is going to make a response to this, why we have a government which, when they put this bill forward, say in the explanatory memorandum:

The International Civil Aviation Organization recommends the introduction of security control guidelines for member countries, by 1 March 2007. The Australian Government has taken the decision to introduce these measures for international inbound and outbound flights from 31 March 2007.

As far as I know, everyone in the world has complied with the 1 March 2007 deadline. As the shadow minister said in his speech, there will be one month more of insecurity for Australians. Why leave a window of opportunity for terrorists in the year in which we are hosting APEC, the biggest set of meetings for the Asia-Pacific that one can imagine? Those meetings are not just held in September when the 35 leaders roll up and have the summit at the end of that APEC process; in the month beforehand, ministers, ministerial officials and departmental officials will meet to prepare for that summit. In fact the process has already started. We have already had meetings in Perth. There have been Comcar drivers going over there from here to undertake work. They will be doing that all over Australia. Australia is the centrepiece of the Asia-Pacific this year. So in the war on terror—and we have just dealt with the Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Financing Amendment Bill—we have had to wait five years for the government to bring these matters to the parliament. That delay is utterly unconscionable.

If you look at the member for Dawson’s contribution, you see that she does not actually make the point that it was recommended for 1 March 2007. She says instead that on 8 December the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Transport and Regional Services announced that from 31 March there would be enhanced security measures to limit the amount of liquids, aerosols and gels that can be taken through an international screening point by people who are flying to or from Australia. Why is there that difference of a month? It is unimaginable. The airline business is international in scope, and Australia is entirely dependent upon it. You have a network that in fact works together.

In the aborted attempt by terrorists, and there were up to 50 of them, to use liquids and gels to blow up a whole series of intercontinental aircraft from a series of American providers—US Airways, American Airlines and Continental Airlines—we know that action was immediately taken by the homeland security chief of the United States. We know that, despite the fact that the President was on vacation, the US acted. We know that, despite the fact that Prime Minister Blair was on vacation, the plot was foiled because of fundamental antiterrorist work in the United Kingdom of the highest order and quality. We know that they tracked up to 50 people, some in the area of High Wycombe. They were not yet on planes; they were at the point where they were moving towards the execution point for this plot.

The government entities moved quickly. They still could not be sure, even after they had arrested people and put them into secure circumstances to interrogate them, that they had got everyone because the number of people involved was substantial. The British acted. There was complete and utter chaos at Heathrow. There was chaos in the United States, in Singapore and worldwide. I thought, ‘Why aren’t we taking the same sorts of measures here in Australia on our inbound and outbound flights at the same time?’ We can only guess that they made their minds up and said, ‘Well, they were headed from Britain to the United States so they wouldn’t have been planning anything here, would they, so we really don’t need to worry too much.’ You have to ask: why have Australians been put at risk through all that period of time? Is it because they think they nabbed everyone in one quick go?

We know that in 1995 or so Ramzi Yousef had a go at blowing up a plane. He had some liquid on him. He attempted to blow up a plane. He was nabbed and taken into custody. So there was a bit of a trial run there. Then there was the case of Richard Reid the shoe bomber. After the al-Qaeda attacks on September 11, Richard Reid was grabbed on a flight—I think it was a flight out of Manchester, from memory; I could be entirely wrong, that is not novel—bound for the US. People grabbed him because he had a lighter and was down at his feet trying to light his shoes. He was going to not only blow his feet off but also blow the bottom out of the aeroplane. He was taken into custody. He had come from a mosque in London that was a haven for people—as we have certain havens here in Australia—with a fundamentalist bent. These people are hell-bent upon destroying not only the West as we know it but also the Islamic countries as we know them in order to set up an older version of what life should be like—fundamentally a medieval approach to what the world should be like: a caliphate. They want to do that in the Asia-Pacific. One of the methods they use is blowing up planes. We know that in the Lockerbie incident there were plastic explosives hidden in a transistor radio. That destroyed the lives of hundreds of people. It did immense damage to families across the world.

So what are we faced with here? As the member for Tangney pointed out quite rightly, and I think he understands this better than the Prime Minister does, the war in Afghanistan is absolutely fundamental. This government has taken its eye off the war in Afghanistan. In fact it cut and ran from Afghanistan and left Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda and the Taliban to rebuild their capacity on the border with Pakistan with the tribal groups that have supported those terrorist organisations and to build back up towards the Taliban taking control again. The southern regions are extraordinarily difficult to monitor. The Australian soldiers who are there now, and the Australian soldiers going into Afghanistan, have a much harder job because of the excursion that the Bush administration took to Iraq—and he took the British and the Australians with him in that excursion. That is the dumbest thing I can ever imagine anyone doing. There was zero understanding shown of the creation of Iraq in 1924 from disparate elements, which would naturally shatter and fragment once you took the stopper out of the top of the bottle. Since then we have faced a situation of civil strife and civil war. That has endangered not only Iraqis but also our troops who are there.

The concentration on Iraq, whether it was for oil, for HallHalliburton getting control of the contracts or for whatever reason—at least the Yanks had five declared reasons; this mob over here, the coalition government, had one—was dead wrong. In 1991-92, sure, Saddam had a lot. In, I think, the greatest con job in modern history, for 12 years he convinced everyone that he had the big show—the chest punched out and the gorilla beating the chest—that, yes, he had all these sorts of things. How poor was our intelligence with regard to that? How appallingly bad is our understanding of that region? Well, maybe it is not ours. Maybe it is the US administration. Maybe it is their blinkered view. Maybe it is this government and this Prime Minister and his cabinet who just do not understand the Middle East and do not fundamentally understand what drives terrorists. I hope that ASIS, ASIO and the Federal Police have a better handle on it than this mob.

There are measures involved here with regard to aerosols and other carry-ons. We still remember the transparent bags people had at Heathrow, not just the lines. For some people, the worst thing they faced was the fact that their personal computer was in the back of the plane or their iPod was gone for eight hours. People could not even take a book on board. But the danger was so clear and present that extraordinary measures had to be taken. What is most instructive about this was the scale of the activity—dozens of people, if not up to 50 or so and possibly more, prepared to undertake their journeys on a series of flights. It was not one person wandering on board, like Richard Reid with his shoelaces ready to go, and it was not like Ramzi Yousef. This was a coordinated attempt to put a number of different people on a plane in different places. One person would have an aerosol, another person would have a gel and another person would have a computer or an iPod. The actual weaponry to destroy the plane would be dispersed across the plane, and it would be brought into effect only by the combination of those items when people got together on the plane. Then they would be able to obliterate everyone on the plane.

The fundamental thing we need to understand is the amoeba-like changes that will affect us in terms of national security and antiterrorism. What the terrorists have done before they will not do again—at least not in the time frame we expect. Part of the enormous problem our security agencies have is that we have to cover the entire field, and that is extraordinarily difficult. That is where we need the cooperation of every person in the travelling public. I know that a lot of people will not like that aspect of this bill and the idea that people could get frisked. The member for Tangney talked about random frisking on a continuous basis. I think that is a bit over the top. If you look at the bill you will see that if an officer is of the opinion that, after initial screening, someone needs to be frisked then there are a series of provisions in the bill, and we can support these because they go to sensibly dealing with this situation. Firstly, the officer would have to have the apprehension that there is something that is very wrong and, secondly, the permission of the person to be frisked would have to be sought, and if that is not given then they would not get the go-ahead. Proper protocols would have to be undertaken. Whether or not it is a bit over the top, people do not like the idea of that being in the bill, and they certainly do not like the idea of being impelled to do things in a dramatically different way. But, if their life depends on it, people will make these changes and they will be more willing than they otherwise would be because of what we saw on September 11: the enormous carnage of people who were entirely innocent. The victims of these fundamentalist terrorists are just that: innocent, voiceless victims. We have to never forget that fact when we are dealing with this problem.

We also have to understand what drives these terrorists. We have to cut off, as the shadow minister and I did in the last debate, money laundering and the ability to shoot funds from one end of the world to the other. It has taken five long, full years to bring that into this place, which is extraordinarily dilatory and extraordinarily dangerous for the Australian people. This legislation is quick compared with what they did with that. But we need to be aware of this as well: as these changes are made, and the disparate materials that could be used are identified, we need a better, upgraded screening process—and that has been hard enough to achieve over time. As the shadow minister and others have pointed out—we have two shadow ministers here: the member for Batman and the member for Brisbane—our regional airports still do not have adequate screening, and that is dealt with in this amendment.

We have the farce of the 400 missing aviation security cards, the very basis of the new regime for trying to ensure that people working at our airports and ports are the people who they say they are. You do not readily accept that these things will go missing. It is not like forgetting your Medicare card when you left it to make a claim, or your licence or a series of other relatively unimportant things; they are important enough, because someone can nick your identity. But when you are going to Sydney (Kingsford Smith) Airport you want to be assured, given what we know has happened before, that everybody in that joint has been through the screening process and that security officers know who they are. As I have pointed out time and time again, this government cannot be sure of that, because it has allowed private security operators in. It is like taking a head rent: you lease and sublease and sublease under that. With whoever has the security contract, the people they finally employ are way down the track, and we have no certainty about who the casuals are who work for them. That is a glaring security hole that has to be fixed, and it has not been done. There is an easy way to fix it: sack all the private security people and put Commonwealth government employees into our airports and ports to secure Australia’s national interest.

A government that were not just concerned about benchmarking and auditing—and they do not even do that very well, I have to say, on looking at the previous bill that I spoke on and this one. We need to be as sure as the Americans are that the people who are working in and securing these places can be relied upon as much as they can, that their identities are secure and that they are directed towards helping their fellow citizens. So it is vitally important that this is gone about in the right way. That is why Labor’s amendments are forceful and strong.

The implementation of civil aviation safety is enormously important. We still have not fixed the regional airports. Bankstown Airport, which is close to KSA and close to the CBD, is still not secured strongly enough. We know not only that the September 11 people got a run at this in terms of doing their training at GA airports like Bankstown but that you can pick up an aircraft there and fly it into any building you want to relatively easily. We need to do a hell of a lot more there because of its proximity.

We also need to be aware that we have to be flexible and fleet-footed, and we have to rely very strongly on the Australian community at large, particularly those elements of the community in which people have their ear to the ground. They are close to the people who are potentially our home-grown terrorists—as were the terrorists in the United Kingdom. That plot was about people who were home-grown, people who had grown up in Britain, people whom they should not otherwise have suspected. They were from a different background to others who had been previously involved.

Our fundamental security rests upon the willingness of an engaged citizenry to protect themselves. That goes to the very core of the Muslim community in Australia. The vast majority of those people want to do exactly that because they know that they will be under attack or they will be under pressure unless they help other Australians to secure themselves. They want their families to be secure when they travel. We need people, particularly those from other language backgrounds and with access to the community, to be our eyes and ears.

We all need to do this. Whatever has been done in the past, terrorists will try a whole range of other things. We need to have our intelligence feelers out and to have them as strong as possible. That is a measure that should be introduced on 1 March 2007. We should not have one extra month of uncertainty, delay and insecurity in 2007, which is the year of APEC. That is dumb. It is another example of the government quixotically doing something. We do not even understand why. Let them answer now. Let the parliamentary secretary tell us, after the member for Batman has finished, why the government has imperilled the community for another month. (Time expired)

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