Michael Keenan (Stirling, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Justice, Customs and Border Protection) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Customs Amendment (Export Controls and other Measures) Bill 2011. The Australian Customs and Border Protection Service are responsible for managing the security and integrity of Australia's borders. Customs officers work hard day and night to detect and deter unlawful movements of goods and people across the border. Customs have responsibility for protecting Australians through the interception of illicit drugs, weapons, unauthorised arrivals, and postal items, and they also target high-risk travellers. Australian Customs officers do a great job under tough circumstances, day in and day out. Unfortunately they are being stretched due to the government's mismanagement of our borders, which was particularly evident in the Labor's latest budget handed down last night.

I would like to note at the outset that the coalition supports the purpose of this bill which is to amend the Customs Act 1901 and the Customs Depot Licensing Charges Act 1997 to strengthen the extent of Customs controls over export cargo and ensure consistent depot and warehouse licence conditions.

As noted in the bill's explanatory memorandum, the bill will:

(a) allow Customs to give directions relating to goods in the export environment;

(b) allow Customs to seek additional information in relation to goods being exported;

(c) ensure continued Customs control of goods at a prescribed place for export;

(d) ensure depot operators do not breach licence conditions when complying with a direction of the Secretary of the Department of Infrastructure and Transport;

(e) allow Customs to impose new conditions on depot and warehouse licences at any time;

(f) address breaches of the conditions of a depot or warehouse licence;

(g) strengthen the powers of officers to give directions to depot licence holders;

(h) allow the Chief Executive Officer of Customs (the CEO) to suspend or cancel depot licences;

(i) set out the timeframes within which the CEO must decide whether or not to grant a warehouse licence;

(j) allow the CEO to vary the place covered by a warehouse licence;

(k) refund the warehouse licence fee on cancellation of a warehouse licence;

(l) remove references to redundant provisions, and

(m) remove the requirement to make a report of cargo in certain circumstances concerning lost or wrecked ships or aircraft.

While this bill makes some technical amendments which the coalition supports, the government has significantly fallen behind in the crucial area of national security, which was demonstrated in yesterday's budget which leaves Australia less secure than Labor has already made it. Among the vast array of cuts to Australia's national security agencies, it included a $9.3 million cut to the budget of the Australian Customs and Border Protection Service. Labor have also axed a further 90 staff from Customs, on top of the 250 cut in the 2010-11 budget. In an extraordinary move, the Labor Party have cut $6.9 million in funds to ASIO for their security checks of unauthorised arrivals at a time when they are being pressured to get through vast numbers of arrivals in an increasingly short space of time. To improve the budget's bottom line, the government have slashed $34 million from Customs in their passenger facilitation function at Australia's eight international airports. Clearly, that is going to make those airports less safe.

These funding cuts will put immense pressure on our front-line border protection agencies that are already struggling to do more with fewer resources under this incompetent Labor government, who do not view Australia's national security as an important priority. This bill is being debated the day after it was revealed in the portfolio budget statements that the government is deceiving the Australian public on security at our ports and airports. It was revealed that the numbers of reported consignments of air and sea cargo have gone up significantly and are forecast to go up over the next four years. However, Labor has not increased the amount of air and sea cargo that is inspected or examined, which means that even less cargo will be properly checked under the new pared down regime.

In the 2009-10 budget Labor cut the budget for Customs for cargo screening by a staggering $58.1 million. This cut to screening by the Rudd-Gillard government reduced the number of potential sea cargo inspections by 25 per cent. Labor's cuts also resulted in a staggering 75 per cent reduction of air cargo inspections. In the recent Customs annual report it was revealed that only 4.3 per cent of sea cargo is X-rayed and only 0.6 per cent of sea cargo is physically examined. It was also concerning to find that 95.7 per cent of all sea cargo consignments are not being X-rayed. With the latest budget predictions, these figures will be even worse, with higher volumes of sea and air cargo consignments expected to come into Australia through our ports and airports in the coming years.

Customs officers have suffered at the hands of this government as they redirect scarce resources to pay for the government's border protection failures. We witnessed yesterday a staggering $1.7 billion blow-out in Labor's asylum seeker budget, which has exceeded even our worst expectations. I make the point that, very importantly, this is not money that enhances our border protection; this is money that is only being used to maintain the failure that has already occurred. It is just money to manage the people within our detention network.

In just four years Labor's border protection failures have taken the costs of managing asylum seekers from less than $100 million per year under the coalition to more than $1 billion per year under Labor. That is a staggering 1,000 per cent increase. Coming into this budget, asylum seeker costs have already risen by more than $1 billion since Labor abolished the strong border protection regime they inherited from the coalition when they came into office.

As we have seen, this year's budget takes these cost blow-outs to a whole new level of failure. The budget blow-out on asylum seeker costs has meant that other agencies—and, most importantly, our front-line national security agencies—have been forced to suffer. The cuts, coupled with the increased workload due to the flood of unauthorised arrivals, put extra strain on Customs officers working under border protection command. With myriad cuts to Australia's front-line border protection agencies, including Customs, it has become very clear that the Gillard Labor government are happy to let Australia's border security slip even further into the abyss of chaos that they have created, and they are not giving our front-line agencies a helping hand when they need it most.

Border protection and national security remain at the forefront of the coalition's priorities. We support the progressive enhancements to security being made at Australia's ports and airports every day. As I said, the measures in this legislation are relatively technical and the coalition supports them. Quite frankly, what is happening on our borders and the cuts that the national security agencies have had to endure under this budget are nothing short of a national disgrace. The coalition will be saying substantially more about these cuts in the days ahead.

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