Kym Richardson (Kingston, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr Deputy Speaker, I was saying before the debate on the Customs Legislation Amendment (Border Compliance and Other Measures) Bill 2006 was interrupted that this bill simply seeks to make necessary minor amendments to ensure that our Customs personnel are equipped with an appropriate level of power to do their jobs effectively. It is necessary to alter this legislation to keep up with and adapt to the ever-changing circumstances our Customs organisation is forced to operate in.

I would like to take this opportunity to commend and congratulate the men and women of the Australian Customs Service for their hard work and for the exceptional job they have done and continue to do to protect our nation. Again, these amendments are commonsense. These cards are necessary for airport employees to undertake their jobs. However, it is necessary that, if these people are to be granted access to areas which are tightly controlled by the Customs Service, Customs is able to obtain up-to-date information about who they are. This is simply a commonsense amendment to ensure the integrity of those areas of international airports under the control of the Australian Customs Service. For those reasons, I commend this bill to the House.

Bob Katter (Kennedy, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Customs Legislation Amendment (Border Compliance and Other Measures) Bill 2006. A lot of the officers will have facilitated and made easier a lot of the jobs they are currently doing and would agree with the bill. However, in a port like Cairns or Townsville, fairly typically we have Customs boats, police boats, national parks boats and fisheries boats. There is a ridiculous waste of money and duplication here. The Americans have a single, integrated coastguard service that covers all of those things. They have a boat that can do the job adequately and quickly, and that is the sort of approach that should be used here. I truly believe that the government’s reluctance to move in that direction is simply a matter of politics—it is because the ALP came up with the idea of a coastguard.

I do not profess to be an expert in sea warfare—anything but. However, I would flatter myself enough to say that I know plenty about land warfare, having been a platoon commander for a long time. But the assertion by the government that the 10 frigates that we have—I think eight are built and two are on the way—are an adequate defence of Australia is an appalling assertion. I do not want to speculate here on the circumstances in which we might find ourselves needing a naval force, but we may have to confront a naval force at some point, and there is an assumption that the Americans are going to come and save us. You really want to read your history books if you think that the Americans are going to come and save us. Quite frankly, they were bombed into the First World War and they were bombed into the Second World War. They had the strongest possible reluctance to go into either war.

Whilst they are doing a bit of international police work, it is to look after their oil interests. I am not condemning America for that. Maybe that is something you do have to fight wars over. However, where their vital interest is concerned they will act, but where their vital interest is not concerned they are historically consistent in not acting. When England was bleeding to death in the Second World War, and despite the fact that the people there had a common racial background and in every respect had a strong relationship with the United States, there was no way the United States were going to buy into the Second World War. It was only when the Japanese bombed them that they came in.

The people who lived in Northern Australia in the last war will recall that they were actually handed over to the Japanese with the infamous Brisbane Line. It was not actually a Brisbane Line for those people who came from Western Australia—it was a golden boomerang, and the rest of us were handed over. General Mackay’s proposal to the federal cabinet said that all they could defend was a line that went from Brisbane through to Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide and that the rest of it could not be defended. Whether it was a good or bad idea, it was the only possible way that they could approach the situation that very rapidly arose. One moment they were yawning and not very worried about a war that was far away in Europe, and the next minute they were fighting for their lives with the Japanese six weeks away from invading Australia.

We need provision of enough patrol boats to do this job. Over the last three or four months, I have run into three people who work on patrol boats. I cannot say where I ran into them, but they were very far away geographically. Each of them gave me exactly the same story. They sit out there, at the edge of our territorial waters, and there are Indonesian and foreign vessels fishing just beyond the territorial limit. When they have finished their patrol duty and return to their base, whether it be Cairns, Darwin or wherever, the Indonesian vessels come straight in. When the new patrol boat goes out, those fishing vessels leave our territorial waters. It is a game of cat and mouse.

It is no news—or it should not be news—to this House that, tragically, in 2005 there were 13,018 sightings of foreign vessels. I have come into this place having taken riding instructions from the fishermen at Karumba. They said that they sight them all the time. Quite frankly, I had my doubts as to whether the boys were having me on a bit, but I did my job—thank goodness. It was disclosed on 60 Minutes and has not been denied by the government at any stage—in fact, effectively it has been affirmed by the government—that there have been 13,000 sightings. If there have been 13,000 sightings, I think we can safely conclude that there are 20,000 vessels in our waters.

The Australian government have decided that, to keep our fish stocks, we should allow only 6,000 vessels to fish in our waters. But they will come into this place and effectively affirm that there are some 20,000 foreign vessels fishing in our waters, and we are going to build two destroyers to rein them in. I cannot see two destroyers running around the perimeter of Australia—the 12,000 or 15,000 kilometres of coastline.

There is an ideological fanaticism which started in the ALP under Keating, and the disease has spread to the other side of the House, who are now occupying the government benches, that you must not do anything to adversely affect trade—we must have free trade. It is a unique occurrence. I do not think it has ever happened in the history of the country, but most certainly no other country on earth is carrying out this experiment, with the exception of New Zealand, which is rapidly becoming one of the poorer countries on earth.

We have a huge coastline to look after, so, if a five or 10 per cent customs duty that does not breach WTO regulations in any way, shape or form is imposed, it might give a tiny bit of relief to some of our manufacturers and other people. That money can then be turned over into building patrol boats. I am told that we need a hundred patrol boats. To properly police 10,000 kilometres of Northern Australian coastline, you would most certainly need dozens and dozens of patrol boats. But I do not like to come into this place and say: let the government find an extra $1,000 million a year. I want to say how you are going to find—

Honourable Member:

An honourable member interjecting—

Bob Katter (Kennedy, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

You will find that I have never done that. You will find that that would not be a part of what I have said. I was a senior minister in a government for the best part of a decade, and I will stand on my own record as far as government expenditure goes. But, if those patrol boats can be paid for and manned by people, they will project this country back onto an industrial base once again because the building of those patrol boats over an eight- or nine-year period would give us the technological base which we now do not have. It is very heartbreaking for us Northern Australians—and I think also for the people of Fremantle, who had this great technological base which has just dissipated. The company concerned, the NQEA, does not operate as a shipbuilder now, I am informed. Most certainly Don Fry, the principal, has retired.

So back to a cost estimate for those patrol boats, with interception capacity and missile capacity. I was quoted in the media as advocating that the patrol boats should run around with the missiles on and assail Indonesian fishing vessels, which I derived a lot of humour from. Obviously you do not go running around with missiles on when you are in a patrol boat role! But you can very rapidly convert from a patrol boat role to a very serious naval presence that can defend this country. It is not good for offence—I hope that we are not running around picking fights with anyone—but if anyone tries to pick a fight with us then we would be well capable of looking after ourselves.

I would like to mention the issue of border patrolling. Our territorial waters extend 23 kilometres—that was the reach of a cannon. That water, which we can control, is ours. If there are 20,000 foreign fishing vessels in our water and only 6,000 of our own vessels in our water then I think we would be hard put arguing in the international courts that we are in control of our waters—that they are under our cannons and not somebody else’s.

This proposition has been put forward so many times to me by the most serious people with naval experience in Australia—I cannot say anything more than that. I said: ‘Why are we putting all of our eggs in the destroyers basket?’ For those who are not familiar with the Falklands war, the Falklands had just five Exocet missiles. That is all they owned. But, with those five missiles, they took out two destroyers. Say we have a potential enemy. Say Indonesia, for example, one of our neighbours, had a contract signed for the purchase of Exocet missiles when their economy collapsed; I presume they would go back to that contract. Say there are five Exocet missiles—and that was the mark I; the mark III Exocet is an infinitely more sophisticated weapon—and you have two destroyers, I do not think you are really in a very happy situation at all. But, if you have 100 patrol boats, they might knock out 10, 20 or 30 of those and you would still have 70 or 80 hurling cruise missiles. It is not a very happy event at all.

On the issue of border patrol, we have here a cost-effective way of protecting Australia in times of warfare. Just this week I was reading the story of Holden’s Hartnett. He said, ‘We were producing Wirraways, and actually it was quite a simple task to switch the Wirraways over to Beaufort fighters. But we needed the tools, the dies and the casting, and we could not get any of them. In a two-year period, we were still left with nothing.’ One of the reasons that John McEwen was such a strong man on tariffs was, as he said to me personally, ‘I will never see my country placed in a war again without the ability to build a battle tank.’ I doubt we would be able to build a machine gun at the present moment. All of our technology is simply dissipating and vanishing.

So I would urge the government in relation to the wastage at the present moment with these silly little boats that Customs, the police, National Parks and Fisheries have. I have been out fishing on a couple of these boats in days past. I am not denying the boys the right to have some nice fishing boats to use of a weekend! But, in terms of effectiveness, having all this government duplication is colossally wasteful. These patrol boats can service our Defence, our Navy and our fortress walls. They can also serve to win back Australia’s fisheries for Australians, to give our own fishermen a fair go out there. We have a saying in the bush: good fences make good neighbours. It would be very good if we used those patrol boats to establish our fences, which are well and truly down at the present moment.

Greg Hunt (Flinders, Liberal Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for the Environment and Heritage) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In rising to sum up on behalf of the government for the Customs Legislation Amendment (Border Compliance and Other Measures) Bill 2006 I want to proceed in three short steps. Firstly, I want to outline the core measures within this bill; secondly, I want to address some of the comments made by honourable members; and, thirdly, I want to address very briefly the context in which this bill and other border protection measures advanced by the government are being taken forward.

The measures are simple. Firstly, they deal with the disposal of dangerous goods in providing appropriate mechanisms under circumstances where such goods have been obtained by the Customs Service. Secondly, they outline new steps in relation to the access of security identification card holders to section 234AA places, ships, aircraft and wharves. In effect, they help deal with the regime for securing critical sites for Customs activities. Thirdly, there are minor corrections to provisions implementing the Australia-United States Free Trade Agreement. Fourthly, there are activities and changes in relation to the provision of information in respect of security identification cards to Customs. Fifthly, there are amendments in relation to the implementation of the accredited client program. Sixthly, there are amendments in relation to the protection from criminal responsibility of Customs officers handling narcotic goods in the course of duty. Finally, there is an amendment in relation to remaking a misdescribed amendment to the Customs Act—a house-cleaning exercise.

All of those amendments have been largely uncontroversial, but I want to acknowledge and very briefly respond to the comments by honourable members. The member for Brisbane on behalf of the opposition raised one concern—that is, while the opposition generally supports the measures in the bill, it had concerns in relation to the scope of the accredited client program. I thank the member for his general support and I note that we seek to take initial steps in this area. We are not closed to the notion of proceeding further at a later stage, but we think that this first step is an important base. It proceeds as far as we want to proceed at this time, but it will allow us to assess the long-term requirements. If we see that it is workable and if we see that it is necessary to expand it, then we would be happy to consider it. But at this time we have set out a limited and prescribed range of activities in relation to the accredited client program.

The second speaker, the member for Kingston, spoke with great passion on this issue. I think most importantly he established a framework for the necessity of broader border protection measures in a global context, where there are real issues of security and real issues of protection of our resources. In particular he noted his support for the brave and strong men and women of the Australian Customs Service.

The third speaker, the member for Kennedy, gave us his unique interpretation of the global history of the 20th century. I thank him for that and seek not to interpret it myself. However, I note, in relation to one point he made on illegal fishing, that the government introduced a $380 million illegal fishing protection package in the May budget. Amongst the many things that that does, most critical is the engagement of the Indigenous population as sentinels, as guides and as people who will play an active role. It is good for those people and it is an important role. It is backed by real dollars and real military expenditure and enforcement, and I argue that it is the most significant package for the protection against illegal fishing in Australian history.

In summing up this bill, I want to note the context. The context is two great challenges. The first of those challenges is that there are real issues in relation to the illegal movement of people and the security elements that come from that. What we have seen in the last week in the United Kingdom is that there are those who will seek to destroy the fundamentals of the society in which we live. We as a government make no apologies for laying down a regime which is about protecting borders, which is about ensuring that there is genuine security and which makes it as difficult as possible for those who would seek to defraud or bypass the system for whatever purposes.

The second contextual point that I wish to make is that there are real concerns about our fishing resources. The role of the Australian Customs Service, in conjunction with the Australian Defence Force, is fundamental in that, and we take every step we possibly can. We will be vigilant and unrelenting in protecting those resources. I commend this bill to the House. I thank all of those officers and staff of the Australian Customs Service and the different government departments involved in the bill’s creation. I thank them and pay particular tribute to the men and women of the Australian Customs Service. Once again, I commend the bill to the House.

Duncan Kerr (Denison, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The original question was that this bill be now read a second time. To this the honourable member for Brisbane has moved as an amendment that all words after ‘that’ be omitted with a view to substituting other words. The immediate question is that the words proposed to be omitted stand part of the question.

Question agreed to.

Original question agreed to.

Bill read a second time.