Tony Burke needs to step up border surveillance flights

After saddling the economy with a rigid and retrograde industrial relations system that is undermining productivity and small business, Tony Burke is off to a rocky start in his new Home Affairs portfolio. In Tuesday’s paper, Ben Packham revealed that surveillance flights to detect illegal boat arrivals off Australia’s northwest coast have slumped by 22 per cent in two years amid a surge in people-smuggling voyages. Mr Burke’s too-smart-by-half response to The Australian’s story was not in keeping with his promise to take on his new portfolios “with a deep sense of responsibility and resolve”. He declared he was satisfied with the amount of border surveillance being undertaken, dismissing the slump in contracted flying hours as the failure of “a single contractor”. He told ABC radio: “There are other security assets which we have, which have been deployed.”

Mr Burke’s answer had two problems. First, the “single contractor” he referred to is the only contractor, US defence company Leidos. It took over the Australian Border Force’s $1.5bn aerial surveillance contract in 2021. The company is supposed to undertake 15,000 hours of aerial surveillance a year using 10 civilian Dash-8 aircraft, but managed only 12,691 hours in 2022-23 – a 20.7 per cent fall on the previous year. Updated figures provided to the Senate last week revealed that had fallen a further 2 per cent to May 31. And second, the “other security assets” Mr Burke mentioned are Australian Defence Force planes. But every hour the RAAF’s submarine-hunting P-8A Poseidon jets and C-130J transporters were required to search for boats was an hour lost from their primary role of training for war, as opposition defence spokesman Andrew Hastie argues: “The RAAF should not be bridging a yawning capability and security gap caused by Labor’s weakness in securing our borders.” As Packham reports, the ABF’s own maritime surveillance, by Cape-class patrol boats and other vessels, also slumped by 19 per cent across the past two years.

Surveillance is key to the mission of Operation Sovereign Borders. And the latest OSB data shows the fall-off in surveillance has coincided with a worrying increase in arrivals. Three people-smuggling boats carrying 49 people in total were intercepted last month. This month, ABF personnel have turned back more than 70 people from at least two people-smuggling vessels. After his brief stint as immigration minister at the end of the Rudd-Gillard era in 2013, Mr Burke understands how such problems can get out of hand and how costly solutions can be. When he took over the portfolio, boat arrivals were at an all-time high. But such ventures plummeted after Kevin Rudd barred boat people from ever settling in Australia.

Like former immigration minister Andrew Giles, Mr Burke also faces a serious challenge in managing detainees released into the community as a result of the High Court’s NZYQ decision last year. Mr Burke says he will have no sympathy for criminal non-citizens and leave “no stone unturned” to ensure community safety. That approach is needed after the failure of Mr Giles’s milk-and-water weakness and mismanagement. The extent of the challenge Mr Burke and the government face was revealed on Tuesday. A quarter of the dangerous non-citizens freed by the NZYQ ruling, Rhiannon Down and Mohammad Alfares report, have been charged with criminal offences since their release. Of the 39 out of 159 non-citizen detainees charged, 10 allegedly breached ankle monitoring or curfew conditions imposed by their visas. Another 29 have faced state-based offences. Poor preparation for dealing with the High Court’s decision and mismanagement under Mr Giles exacerbated the problems. In May, we reported that at least two murderers and 26 sex offenders released from immigration detention as part of the NZYQ ruling were not wearing ankle monitors. One man charged with breaching his curfew is Sudan-born Abdelmoez Mohamed Elawad, who was granted bail in the Victorian Supreme Court on Monday. The serial offender has racked up more than 208 charges, including 18 for weapons possession, in his lifetime. Considering the circumstances, we doubt most Australians agree with Victorian Supreme Court Justice Michael Croucher, who slammed laws imposing a minimum one-year jail term on curfew-breaching detainees as “ridiculously harsh”.