Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Immigration, Integration and Citizenship) Share this | Hansard source

The Migration Amendment (Border Integrity) Bill 2006 proposes measures to enhance identity verification at Australia’s immigration clearance points and to streamline immigration processing. The purpose of the proposed amendment to the Migration Act 1958 is to enable certain persons with an eligible passport to choose an automated system or a clearance officer in immigration clearance and to identify who may use an automated system.

The bill also seeks to amend the Migration Act so that a special purpose visa may cease at a time specified by the minister, whereas currently the visa would only cease at midnight on the day of the ministerial declaration. The special purpose visa regime was designed to facilitate lawful travel and entry for low-risk groups of travellers. Persons eligible include crew members of non-military ships, air crew, foreign dignitaries and visiting members of overseas armed forces. The bill remedies the current situation where a declaration is made by the minister that a noncitizen should not remain in Australia, but action to detain that person for removal cannot occur until midnight on the day on which the declaration is made. Labor will be supporting the bill.

The bill allows for the expansion of the government’s voluntary SmartGate system—that is, facial recognition technology—to all Australians citizens and selected noncitizens, provided they hold an eligible e-passport. While Labor will be supporting the bill, and while we support measures to enhance security verification and the speed of passenger clearance at Australia’s immigration clearance points, we are not convinced that the SmartGate system as proposed will actually deliver on those aims. I will discuss this in more detail later.

The Australian Customs Service’s annual report of 2005-06 states that SmartGate is an automated passport-checking system which enables travellers with the appropriate eligible passports to move through passport control. Following a trial of the system, which was completed in June 2005, the version of SmartGate is to be progressively implemented throughout 2007. The system will only initially be available to holders of Australian e-passports, although it is planned to subsequently make it available to holders of eligible passports from other countries.

The use of SmartGate is dependent on having, as I said, an eligible passport which at first, in other words, is an e-passport. This bill refers to the fact that an eligible passport will be determined by the proposed new section 175A, and the use of these automated systems by travellers will rely on the e-passport. Launched on 25 October 2005, the biometrically-enabled e-passport has a microchip embedded in the centre page which contains the digitised facial image and personal details of the passport holder. The microchip can be read electronically by facial recognition technology. When launching the e-passport the Minister for Foreign Affairs stated that, as the processing facilities are progressively introduced in Australia and at overseas airports, the new technology will strengthen border security and streamline the movement of passengers through airports. The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade states on its website the advantages of the e-passport over the Australian passport, including that it provides greater protection against fraudulent misuse and tampering, that it reduces the risk of identity fraud—currently estimated to cost the Australian economy more than $1 billion each year—and also that it enhances the protection of Australia’s border through speedy and secure verification of incoming Australian passport holders.

The introduction of e-passports internationally will continue to assist in streamlining international travel. For example, the Australian e-passport complies with changes in the Visa Waiver Program. The Visa Waiver Program in the United States enables travellers from certain countries who travel to the United States for tourism or business purposes and who stay for 90 days or less to do so without a visa. The Australian e-passport also complies with the United States’s requirements for e-passports introduced in October 2006 and has received initial United States Department of Homeland Security certification.

The automated system will temporarily store the data electronically read from the embedded information stored on the microchip in the e-passport. This is only while it is used to process the relevant passenger. The information is then destroyed shortly after. The automated system will not collect—that is, permanently store—the relevant personal identifiers from these passports. This remains in keeping with the current policy intention, where passengers are required to present identification rather than have it collected. This creates a problem with the bill which is now being sought to be rectified through government amendments. The problem, where you set up the precautions that you will not actually collect personal identifiers, is that the signatures contained on passenger arrival cards are identified as being personal identifiers. Certainly it is not the intention that those passenger cards will be automatically destroyed in the same way that that computer information will be. With that in mind, the government has indicated it will be moving its own amendments to the bill, as certain amendments contained in the bill as it stands have that unintended consequence of actually preventing the collection of passenger cards from citizens and noncitizens arriving and departing Australia because they contain signatures. Signatures are defined, as I said, to be a personal identifier for the purposes of the Migration Act.

The amendments being moved by the government to this bill preserve the current policy intention by allowing the collection of a person’s signature, but not any other personal identifier. The amendments also clarify that clearance is not restricted to wholly one or the other of the automated system or the immigration clearance officer. This clarifies that a passenger can hand their passenger card to an officer and still be cleared through the automated system. In accordance with this, Labor will be supporting those amendments.

As I mentioned earlier, Labor supports the move towards the use of biometric technology for the purpose of identification. However, Labor does note that there has been some teething problems with SmartGate, the automated processing system to be used by the Australian government. The reliability of the technology, such as that used in the SmartGate system, has not been without criticism. On 5 September last year, the Australian Financial Review noted that industry insiders had identified:

... gaps in biometrics such as excessive error rates, a poor ability to find database matches and high sensitivity to varying conditions.

The article referred to a senior policy analyst at the White House Office of Science and Technology that has estimated that the accuracy rate for facial scanning is in fact only 90 per cent, whereas for fingerprints it is 99 per cent and for iris scanning it is 97 per cent. This 90 per cent accuracy for facial recognition carries the understandable problem that when you are checking facial recognition the expression somebody is holding on their face is going to be relevant to whether or not it is in fact recognised as matching the data that are being stored.

The reliability and effectiveness of the SmartGate system was directly questioned by Dr Roger Clarke, a visiting fellow in the Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology at the Australian National University, on ABC radio’s PM program back on 5 May last year. Dr Clarke stated that SmartGate will face difficulties because it is built on the assumption that a person’s face will always appear the same, when in reality that is rarely the case. He stated that this is particularly challenging when you are trying to do it in volume with large numbers of people passing through—and that is assuming that a person is not actively trying to confuse the machine.

In the 2005-06 annual report, Australian Customs maintained that, although there were problems initially, by the time SmartGate comes into full operation next year, all the creases will be ironed out. Hopefully that statement was not unduly optimistic. To that extent, the Howard government is asking us to take the Customs assurances of successful IT contract management on faith and on face value. The problem is that we have just had the release of an audit report into Customs’ last IT project, which was the Customs cargo management system. That project was approved without a financial management plan, costed on the basis of a stab in the dark, and delivered years late and approximately $200 million over budget. Labor has good reason to question the government’s ability to manage the implementation of systems technology in this area.

Risk profiling people coming into this country is critical for national security. We need to know who is coming into our country so we can do the background checks before they arrive. The same is true for sea and air cargo. Customs analyse sea and air cargo in Australia by computer to look at the cargo reports and check them against risk profiles. They have risk profiles for quarantine threats like fire ants and foot-and-mouth disease; there are health threats like anthrax, Ebola virus and bird flu; there are criminal threats like child pornography, cocaine, heroin, guns and ammunition; and there can be terrorism threats like nuclear material, precursor chemicals and bomb components.

I would imagine, therefore, that the Australian people would be more than a little horrified to learn that the Howard government had actually disabled the security profiling for 12 days. Unfortunately that is precisely what happened. We heard in Senate estimates last month that, for 12 days, the Howard government turned 3,200 separate risk profiles off—they flicked the switch—when the Customs computer crashed as a result of the minister ordering that a half-ready and inadequately tested IT system be turned on. When Customs went back and risk profiled the sea cargo reports after the event, an indeterminate number of air cargo reports and import declarations were never checked. Whether or not they were valid, we just do not know. Is it any wonder that the Australian National Audit Office found that:

6.31         The deactivation of over 4,000 risk profiles over a period of several days presented a considerable risk to Australia’s border security and Customs’ revenue collection responsibilities. These profiles covered areas such as counter terrorism, illicit drugs, revenue, prohibited items and compliance.

The rush to introduce technology to streamline processes such as this instance surely is a warning to the government about uncertain technology in other areas. The concern over the cargo risk profiling technology that left the security gates wide open for 12 days is that it was clearly implemented before it was ready. The government cannot tell us what might have got through because they do not include themselves. With a track record like that, it is very difficult for Labor to accept the government’s assurances that the same thing will not happen again.

As international travel increases and security becomes more demanding, streamlined processing, while also enhancing identity verification, is clearly something we ought to be pursuing. However we have to ensure that it is accurate, feasible and robust. The national director of border intelligence for the Australian Customs Service commented in May 2006 that the biometric technology is urgently needed to deal with the increasing number of people arriving at Australian airports. The director stated that facial recognition technology has high accuracy levels. Unfortunately what the director would not reveal at Senate estimates was exactly what the level was during the SmartGate trials. In fact the director added that the system has been set so that it is more likely to reject somebody who should have been accepted rather than the other way around. You can understand those parameters being set. You want to make sure that people who need to be rejected in fact are.

It was around this question of robustness that Senator Joseph Ludwig, then shadow minister for justice and customs, raised concerns that SmartGate may actually run the risk of causing undue delays to processing rather than alleviating congestion. SmartGate is intended to be an automated processing system to provide a voluntary alternative to manual processing at the border. The concern is that if this expensive technology is so sensitive to being confused and therefore more likely to direct people to manual processing than to automated processing then it does not actually appear to be that much of a ‘smart gate’ at all. In answers to questions on the implementation of SmartGate following the trial, an Australian Customs Service official stated during Senate estimates on 31 October last year:

The idea is, at this stage, that the first implementation will be at the end of February next year in Brisbane. As I said, it is a development implementation to develop the model fully. Then we intend to move to Sydney and Melbourne after that. But that will be a few months off. It will probably be in the latter part of the next calendar year.

So following the trial, the implementation of the system is, and I quote:

... a development implementation to develop the model fully.

So we have had the trial and the implementation will be ‘a development implementation to develop the model fully’.

The question is: why has the government chosen to proceed to legislation without having a fully developed model first? It is true that, despite concerns with the technology more generally, governments in countries such as Britain, the United States, Germany, Israel, Brazil and Singapore are rolling out biometric authentication systems in customer-facing departments such as customs, social services and health. Why, then, are we reinventing the wheel here? The government has to explain whether these models have been tested by Customs for effectiveness and efficiency.

The other main purpose of this bill is with regard to special purpose visas. The bill will enable the minister to specify a time when a special purpose visa will cease to be in effect. Currently, if the minister declares that it is undesirable for a person or persons to travel to, enter or remain in Australia, the visa does not cease until midnight on the day on which the declaration is made. Labor supports this amendment. The ability to cancel a special purpose visa immediately, however, is unfortunately overdue. Currently, foreign non-military maritime crew and their families are not required to make a formal application for a visa before coming to Australia. Special purpose visas are currently granted by operation of law. At present, maritime crew are granted the special purpose visas on arrival in Australia following checks against the Department of Immigration and Citizenship’s movement alert list. This process does not permit security checks to be conducted before the crews of these ships are allowed to enter Australia—an issue that Labor has been saying for some time needs to be addressed.

While the government introduced the Migration Amendment (Maritime Crew) Bill recently, which allows the government to introduce a checked visa for maritime crew, Labor questioned why it had taken almost 6½ years since 11 September 2001 for the government to introduce it. The government only recently adopted what has been a longstanding Labor party policy—to vet foreign maritime workers. During the debate on the maritime crew bill, I pointed out that Labor has consistently raised concern with foreign vessels, whose crews had not been security vetted, carrying thousands of tons of explosives around coastal Australia.

In 2005, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute published a damning report on the state of Australia’s security arrangements called Future unknown: the terrorist threat to Australian maritime security. That report identified the danger of foreign-flagged vessels carrying dangerous goods around the Australian coastline. This is a warning Labor has repeatedly made to the government. We have specifically warned about the dangers of foreign-crewed, foreign-flagged vessels for which there has been no security check carrying ammonium nitrate around Australia’s coastline.

Labor have also pointed out that Abu Sayyaf and Jemaah Islamiah have acquired the skills and opportunities to launch a maritime terrorist attack. These groups operate in South-East Asian waters, near to our borders and in waters in which the incidence of piracy is the highest in the world. On the latest available figures, there are two acts of piracy per week in the waters just to our north-north-west—exactly the area in which those terrorist organisations operate. The measures in the maritime crew bill were another example of the government adopting longstanding Labor policy in order to address a security related issue.

This government continually neglects to monitor and regulate necessary micro-national security issues. The government is spending considerable money on immigration and customs related IT systems. However, based on the IT systems contract management we have seen to date, it is simply not up to scratch. Simply spending money does not address a problem or an issue. It must be targeted, robust and effective.

While Labor supports the move to biometric authentication systems, we do have concerns with the government’s approach to go it alone internationally and to iron out identified problems with the SmartGate system during its introduction. While Labor supports the bill, as it will facilitate the ability for people with eligible passports to choose to use an automated processing system for immigration clearance to Australia, it remains wary of the system the government has chosen and of the government’s ability to administer that system. Labor will be monitoring the performance, cost and international compatibility of the SmartGate system closely. We support the bill and the government amendments to it.

See this speech in context