Sussan Ley (Farrer, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Justice and Customs) Share this | Hansard source

I am pleased to speak on the Customs Legislation Amendment (Name Change) Bill 2009. This is a very simple, straightforward bill because it changes the name of the Australian Customs Service to the Australian Customs and Border Protection Service, which is actually the same name as Customs has in the US.

It was interesting that the subject of this bill was really the first broken promise of Labor’s campaign. It cancelled its national security policy launch during the campaign, probably in preparation for the inevitable decision to abolish the idea of a department for homeland security. This is something which our leader, Mr Turnbull, talked about in his response to the national security statement. I think he said that it was a promise we were very pleased to see broken, because a giant, bungling bureaucratic department for homeland security would not have been in Australia’s interests. I do not mean to be impolite by saying ‘bungling’, but sometimes when bureaucracies get to a certain size they get very confused. The other policy that Labor had for a long time was to introduce a coastguard. This renaming of the Australian Customs Service, with some of the changes that will happen as a result of that renaming, is the fruition of that promise to have a dedicated Australian coastguard.

I want to outline what I see are the principal responsibilities of the government in protecting our borders and to assess how the current government is addressing those responsibilities. As I said, the objective of this bill is to amend the Customs Administration Act 1985 to rename the Australian Customs Service as the Australian Customs and Border Protection Service. This was first announced on 4 December 2008, when the Prime Minister issued his first national security statement. The Prime Minister said:

Let me return for a moment to the serious matter of people-smuggling, that is, the organised, unauthorised arrival of people by boat to Australia.

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The Government has decided therefore to move quickly to better enable the existing Australian Customs Service to meet this resurgent threat to our border integrity. To this end we will in coming weeks establish new arrangements whereby the Australian Customs Service is augmented, re-tasked and re-named the Australian Customs and Border Protection Service. This arrangement will create in the Australian Customs and Border Protection Service a capability to task and analyse intelligence, coordinate surveillance and on-water response, and engage internationally with source and transit countries to comprehensively address and deter people smuggling throughout the operating pipeline from source countries to our shores.

These were the words the Prime Minister used in his national security statement, but I make the point that the statement does not offer any direct linkages between the priorities that the Prime Minister outlined and the dollars. This is where the rubber certainly hits the road in this bill—I cannot think of a maritime analogy! It is all very well to talk about the dawn of the Asia-Pacific century and various strategic policy ideas, as the Prime Minister is so fond of doing. But if it comes down to our border and maritime security—and our country controls an unbelievably vast amount of ocean—then the issues, and the issues for the opposition, are how the dollars will flow and how the job will get done.

We should be clear about the border security threats that we face today. People-smuggling, of course, is very much in the news, and this name change for Customs obviously has to do a lot more than just change the name. To be fair, it is about bringing the attack on people-smuggling under one agency, even under one roof. This is a new role for the service that was previously shared with the Department of Immigration and Citizenship, so a portion of that department’s function and strategic policy is coming into Customs and will have a maritime border protection focus.

I note that after maritime arrivals peaked in 2001-02, they dropped off. But they have started to rise again, which is a worrying trend, and one I am sure that my colleague the member for Murray and shadow minister for immigration will discuss further when talking about this bill. What it comes down to is anticipation on the part of people smugglers that by getting to Australia’s shores there will be a migration outcome, or there is more likely to be a migration outcome than there was under the previous government. Of course, we know that illegals arrive by air as well as sea, and the Department of Immigration and Citizenship will still handle the air arrivals. They are better placed to do that. This is about goods, people and trafficking that happens over the ocean.

As the situation deteriorates in different countries we see, of course, the landscape change and more people-smuggling taking place. As the Sri Lankan government becomes more successful against the Tamil Tigers, more refugees are coming, including direct departures from Sri Lanka—although there are still people smugglers who work groups of people through the landmass of Asia, down through South-East Asia and departing from Indonesia. They are not always refugees. The issue is that once people arrive in our exclusive economic zone, 200 nautical miles out, the people smugglers can say they have achieved their aim and the problem becomes ours. The problem for the poor trafficked people is unbelievable, and we should not always assume that they are typical refugees with no resources at all. Some of them have paid very large sums of money and expected a flight and have arrived in a desperate situation in a leaky boat.

Once people arrive, the smugglers have had a win: they have collected the money and the people are our problem. This initiative will see the Customs and Border Protection Service leading a whole-of-government strategic policy approach. It will provide oversight and direction, engaging internationally with the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and our heads of mission overseas to prevent and disrupt people-smuggling, to undertake maritime surveillance and to provide the necessary response. Customs, of course, has the ability for interdiction on the sea and will continue to do that.

The AFP people-smuggling strike team will now be located within Customs and the people-smuggling intelligence and targeting unit, coming from various agencies, will be co-located within Customs. With analysts co-located in this way, information can move much more quickly not just within the agencies but also to offshore teams. Doing this as a nation is about establishing the capability not only here in Canberra but also overseas and building that up so that we can improve and enhance the capacity of overseas nations to deal with this problem. Building capability with our South-East Asian partners means that we can target people smugglers by stopping the boats being launched, and this is the humane and appropriate response—it really is. It is not about saying that our territory extends to 200 nautical miles and then losing interest. I applaud any initiative, and the coalition are entirely bipartisan with the government on working with the countries that the boats are launched from to prevent boats leaving in the future. We rely very much on the goodwill of our South-East Asian neighbours. People-smuggling is not a crime in Indonesia but the Indonesian authorities are proactive in cracking down on it. We must build these regional partnerships. We must enhance our regional intelligence so that we can prevent the boats actually leaving.

New arrangements will see the coordination between our intelligence agencies, including the AFP and the Department of Immigration and Citizenship, under Border Protection Command in Canberra. It will give this Canberra central group direct connection with the agencies overseas in the countries where people-smuggling is a problem. It is a single point of accountability and a whole-of-government approach. Having said that, in support of the announced measures I remake the point that it is about the resources and it is about the government allocating the necessary resources to do this job, because it is an enormous job. We can put the architecture in place, but we must follow it with the dollars. So far, I understand that the equivalent of 20 full-time positions have been allocated to move from the department of immigration. That is a start, but the test will come with the May budget when we will see whether this government adequately resources the new Border Protection Command to do the very big task that it has been set. As an opposition, we will be working very hard to make sure that the government gives this effort the priority that it needs.

The opposition support the move to bring the people-smuggling effort together because combating smuggling is something that Customs know how to do. People smugglers are in business smuggling other things too—goods and money as well as trafficking people for other purposes—and Customs know what to do and how to detect illegals. Customs know the importance of evidence and are trained in collecting evidence and preparing a brief of evidence so that a legal case can be brought against a smuggler. Defence, Immigration and the Federal Police know how to do this, but it is a Customs specialty and it should be with Customs.

What I now call for is a proper written protocol between the AFP and Customs, indeed between all the agencies, so that the rules can be followed when priority needs to be given to access information that is being collected. For example, the closed-circuit TVs that we see at airports are accessed by Customs, the AFP and ASIO. But, if there is an urgent situation, the question is—and I think this is something that was dealt with in the past by the Minister for Justice and Customs in the last government—who has priority over that camera? Who has authority to turn it to what they want to view when there is a conflict? Unless there is a protocol in writing and it is clearly understood, there will be problems. Every agency needs to know its responsibility to other agencies. With the new Border Protection Command enhanced role for Customs, it is vital that written protocols follow. They may seem tedious and bureaucratic at the time, but they are absolutely essential. When different agencies with different responsibilities and reporting lines work together, they need to have clearly outlined rules of engagement, if I can call them that.

With the latest illegal boat of asylum seekers arriving on our shores, I do not believe the government is doing enough to ensure the security of our borders, to police the seas around us and to ensure we know who is coming and going and what they are bringing with them. On Saturday, 14 March, it took four children under the age of 12 to spot a boatload of 54 people headed into the harbour at Port Essington on the Coburg Peninsula. The vessel, which was about 20 metres long, came to rest in the harbour about 500 metres from land. A park ranger who was with the children alerted Customs to the vessel’s whereabouts, after which it was intercepted by a Navy vessel. If we are relying on four children under 12 to spot an illegal vessel that has come so close to land, I question whether enough is being done to police our 37,000 kilometres of coastline.

It is clear that an entire organised criminal industry of people smugglers is beginning to take advantage of this government’s lax approach to unauthorised arrivals. The threat to our border security is clear but so is the remedy. I need to mention the former coalition government because we did deter illegal immigration by legislating to allow offshore processing, by excluding from asylum processes those who have access to effective protection elsewhere, by maintaining mandatory detention and by excising from our migration zone those territories off our coast that were magnets for people smugglers. Our uncompromising approach to border protection worked, and in the years after these legislative changes the traffic in illegal people-smuggling vessels all but stopped. As I said earlier, the message must be out there that there is a possibility of a migration outcome if you can sit through at least 12 months of processing once you arrive. That is bad news, but the humane thing to do is to prevent the boats from leaving in the first place.

I would now like to touch on the illegal movement of goods across the border. Serious and organised criminal groups pose a significant risk to Australian border protection by engaging in illicit, cross-border trafficking of a range of goods. Such goods include drugs, precursor chemicals, tobacco, cigarettes, performance- and image-enhancing drugs, counterfeit goods, wildlife and currency. Wildlife deserves a special mention. Because of the conditions that birds, lizards and reptiles are placed in, this is indeed a heinous crime, yet the fine for smuggling wildlife is probably no more than $30,000—certainly a lot less than the value of the creatures on the black market. The penalty for wildlife trafficking does need to be increased, as anyone who has seen some of the instances of it would certainly agree.

Mr Jeffrey Buckpitt, the National Director, Intelligence and Targeting at Customs, outlined to the Joint Committee on the Australian Crime Commission on 29 September 2008—and these remarks are on the public record:

Customs’s role in combating serious and organised crime at the border encompasses the detection and interdiction of illegal movements across the border, investigation of certain border offences and cooperation and collaboration with partner law enforcement and regulatory agencies to disrupt and dismantle serious and organised criminal activity.

I think that that captures the importance of the role precisely.

The Australian National Council on Drugs has warned that Australia is at risk of an influx of heroin, thanks to a surplus in supply from Afghanistan and Burma. This is of serious consequence to Australian parents. We have enormous architecture in place, with maritime security, port security and airport security and a large slice of the Australian government budget devoted to this, but if we do not succeed the result will be heartache on our streets for children—and they are, in many cases, only children—who become addicted to drugs and whose lives are ruined in the process. Like many others, I was most concerned to read of the sudden spike in the arrival of heroin.

People imagine that a lot of smuggling takes place at airports. High-profile cases—I am not going to mention names—and shows on television that demonstrate how people are intercepted at airports make us think that is where the action is. But it is not. Airport smuggling is for the small-time and the desperate. The smuggling effort of organised crime, with networks around the world—linking into governments, in some cases, in Third World countries, as the Australian Crime Commission has described to us—is done through our ports. Containers at our ports are the transmitting weapon of choice.

I return to heroin seizures and make the point that in 2006-07 the weight of heroin seizures increased by 79 per cent compared to the previous year. That year it was the highest on record. Considering that opium cultivation in neighbouring South-East Asia has increased by 22 per cent after six years in decline, it is of grave concern that the government is not taking tough measures to stem the flow of drugs onto Australian streets. The coalition stand for a Tough on Drugs strategy. It has been proved that harm minimisation has not succeeded. This is not about coming from the Left or Right of politics, about being a big ‘C’ conservative or a small ‘l’ liberal; it is about using strategies that work to protect vulnerable Australians from drugs. I have a table that shows that, two years after the coalition introduced the Tough on Drugs strategy, heroin use plummeted and the use of marijuana, methamphetamine, cocaine, hallucinogens and ecstasy was also in decline. I know that in some cases the demand-supply equation relates to price and availability, but we did have a proud record and we do stand by our Tough on Drugs approach. We saw evidence of illicit drug use dropping.

I am most concerned that Labor is now softening its stance on drugs. In yesterday’s Australian newspaper Paul Maley and Adam Creswell reported:

The Rudd Government has moved to reassert the role of controversial harm-reduction strategies in the fight against the illicit drug trade …

I shall certainly be watching every move it makes in that area, because if the Labor government does not continue the coalition’s successful Tough on Drugs strategy it is possible that we will fall back to pre-1998 levels of drug use. I urge the government not to take this soft approach. We must maintain appropriate resources needed to ensure that fewer drugs slip through our borders, and that includes in the sea cargo screening process.

Total Customs sea cargo detections from 1 July 2007 to 30 June 2008 include 25 kilograms of heroin, 116 kilograms of ecstasy, 531 kilograms of cocaine, 869 kilograms of ephedrine, 186 kilograms of amphetamine type stimulants, more than 102 million cigarette sticks, more than 258 tonnes of tobacco leaf and more than three tonnes of molasses tobacco. I want to make the point that Customs does a very good job of detecting these illicit goods. But, considering the percentage of containers checked, it is concerning to think about just how many drugs are slipping through the screening process and arriving on our streets. The figure, I believe, has moved from five per cent to 7½ per cent of containers being X-rayed, and that is simply not enough.

Mr Buckpitt, whom I mentioned earlier, explained to the Australian Crime Commission committee that Customs employs an intelligence based risk assessment approach to screening cargo and passenger movements at the border. That is entirely appropriate. But five per cent of 20-foot-equivalent containers equates to only 134,000 containers per year, and only one-tenth of those X-rayed are actually subject to some form of physical unpacking. Due to its lack of resources, Customs is forced to rely on intelligence led examinations and profiling more than it should do. For those who may not be aware, one of the first actions the government took in its first budget was to cut the Customs budget by $51.5 million.

It is interesting to note the measures taken by our close trading partner the US in this field. Australia’s trade and security developments cannot ignore the US Security and Accountability for Every Port Act 2006, the SAFE Port Act, which was an act of congress in the US covering port security. The SAFE Port Act requires 100 per cent screening of sea containers destined for the US, a departure from its current risk based inspection and examination approach. As I said in the debate on the AusCheck Amendment Bill in the House yesterday, I think it is going to be extremely difficult to screen 100 per cent of containers, especially given the tension in Customs’s role between preventing goods coming across the border and facilitating the free flow of goods for trade. Small businesses rely on their goods getting to the shop on time and not being held up on the docks.

So it will be interesting to see what happens in the US. The legislation has been passed through congress, but it is still in a trial stage. Our CEO of Customs, Mr Michael Carmody, has stated that Customs has raised concerns on behalf of Australian industry, is liaising with US officials to clarify the proposed arrangements and is examining potential implications for Australian traders. So it is certainly an area that the coalition will monitor closely.

In conclusion, I say that it is encouraging to see the Prime Minister and the Labor government place emphasis on the border protection role of Customs by changing its name to the Australian Customs and Border Protection Service, but the cost of changing the letterhead, the talk about strategic policy, the numerous diagrams that will be drawn on envelopes and the considerations that people will make about how resources are moved are not nearly as important as the quantum of those resources. We will watch with great interest to see how this government allocates the customs function appropriately in its next budget, because it does need to work harder against smuggling, trafficking and illegal immigration.

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