Bob Debus (Macquarie, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Home Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the honourable member for her question. It was just a few months ago that a ceremony was held in Sydney to mark the 30th anniversary of the bombing of the Hilton Hotel in Sydney, an event often described as the first act of terrorism on Australian soil. Images of that time shocked the nation—the scene of devastation that left three dead and a public in disbelief that it could happen here. Following the bombing, former commissioner of the London Metropolitan Police Sir Robert Mark was engaged to report on Australia’s national policing needs, and the result was the formation of the AFP in 1979. There is an often quoted statement from the Mark report:

Arrangements for the governance of States which were adequate for trade, public order and the social requirements of the nineteenth century are not appropriate for dealing with serious wrongdoing which transcends State jurisdictions and affects the interest of the Commonwealth as a whole; terrorism, narcotics, and organised crime being perhaps the three most obvious examples ... There is today an undoubted need for one federal agency to coordinate the efforts of all police forces against interstate crime and terrorism.

On the AFP’s first day of operation, drug liaison officers were attached to Australian embassies in Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, London and Wellington. Officers were also attached to Interpol and Scotland Yard. And, a month later, the AFP’s first headquarters opened in Canberra. Australian peacekeeping duties in Cyprus became the sole responsibility of the AFP, marking the beginning of its International Deployment Group, which has now got 385 people deployed in eight countries.

Over the past few years, against the backdrop of September 11 and the Bali bombings, the AFP has had to adapt. Like all law enforcement agencies, it has had its share of fierce criticism, but it is fair to say that a lot of the AFP’s quite extraordinary work and success has often gone unnoticed and little reported. For instance, after the 2002 Bali bombings, the AFP with Indonesian police coordinated identification of more than 200 victims, and it did the same in 2005 at the time of the tsunami and after the plane crash in Yogyakarta where officers had to identify two of their colleagues. In 2002, there was no model for disaster victim identification. Today, the process developed by the AFP, learnt by trial and error and dedication, is contributing with Interpol to the development of an international benchmark.

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