February 20, 2024
Home Affairs Minister Clare O'Neil is preparing a major border security funding package in the May budget following warnings from Australian Border Force and Operation Sovereign Borders commanders that an ageing fleet and a lack of pilots have slashed aerial and maritime patrols.
The Australian can reveal the government is working on a budget boost to upgrade the OSB fleet after ABF Commissioner Michael Outram outlined critical deficiencies including pilot shortages, "blowouts" in deep-level maintenance time frames and increasing reliance on Defence assets.
Mr Outram's revelations, made several weeks before a vessel dropped off 12 illegal maritime arrivals in an isolated and rugged stretch of Western Australia's Kimberley coastline on November 22, came amid a surge in illegal fishing and decreasing aerial and maritime patrols.
ABF figures show a 20.7 per cent decrease in aerial flying hours and 12.2 per cent fall in maritime patrol days in 2022-23, compared with surveillance hours logged in 2020-21.
The Australian can reveal Indigenous residents in WA's Dampier Peninsula, where 39 asylum-seekers were apprehended on Friday, have observed fewer aerial patrols in recent years and pitched to consecutive governments their interest in operating drones to help thwart peoplesmugglers and illegal fishers.
A senior Indigenous man used an inexpensive drone to alert ABF to both the asylum-seeker boat landing site and the campsite used by the arrivals.
A total of 62 asylum-seekers mainly from Pakistan and Bangladesh have been sent to Nauru after the September interception of a people-smuggling vessel off WA and the rounding up of two groups of illegal maritime arrivals who made landfall in November and this month after being ferried to the state's north coast.
Sources on the Dampier Peninsula said the second group of men found at Pender Bay told the campsite owner they had spent 30 days at sea. Locals believe this could mean the men travelled on different vessels over a longer voyage and potentially transferred boats at sea.
Ms O'Neil, who says Labor is spending $470m more than the Coalition over the forward estimates based on the Morrison government's final budget, including $252m extra this year, said the government was committed to upgrading the Border Force fleet.
"We are working with our agencies on plans to update a fleet that is critical to our national security and which the former government had no plan to maintain," the Home Affairs Minister said.
In an October 23 Senate estimates hearing last year, Mr Outram revealed he was working with Defence, the Department of Home Affairs and other central agencies about future capability amid concerns aerial surveillance contracts ended in 2027.
Contacted on Monday, Mr Outram did not repeat his warnings and said ABF funding was the highest since the agency's establishment in 2015.
"In the last year the ABF has received additional funding totalling hundreds of millions of dollars to support maritime and land based operations," he said.
Mr Outram, whose seven-year term as ABF Commissioner ends on November 9, conceded at the October Senate hearing there was no current plan but a strategy was being developed. "I haven't got any immediate solutions other Continued on Page 2
Budget cash to fill people-smuggling holes at borders Continued from Page 1 than to highlight that, with an ageing fleet and an aerial surveillance contract coming to the end of life in 2027, clearly we need a plan going forward, and that's being worked on as we speak," Mr Outram said.
"We're actually out to market now with a request for expressions of interest. That closes in December, so it'll be interesting to see what industry comes back with in terms of the expression of interest, and that of course will inform decisions going forwards." Mr Outram said "the primary driver for the decrease in aerial surveillance flying hours" was difficulties with recruiting pilots.
"In relation to the sea patrol days, it is a combination of factors relating to the age of the fleet, deep-level maintenance and blowouts in time frames to do deep-level maintenance," he said. "We're on a campaign to continue to recruit and backfill gaps . in relation to the fleet." Residents in communities and outstations on the Dampier Peninsula said the frequency of planes they recognised as surveillance aircraft had fallen away in recent years. One aircraft that locals described as "coastwatch" passed over the remote community of Beagle Bay on Sunday, two days after the asylum seekers arrived undetected.
Opposition home affairs spokesman James Paterson, who grilled Mr Outram and former OSB commander Justin Jones at last year's Senate hearing, said the government had allowed the first line of defence against people smugglers to "decay".
Senator Paterson said Ms O'Neil must provide Border Force with resources it needed to ensure borders were secure.
"The Albanese government was publicly warned last October by their own head of Australian Border Force that maritime surveillance operations were in a dire state," Senator Paterson said. "Four months on, we are seeing the fruit of that weakness: at least two boats making it all the way to the Australian mainland, something which used to be extremely rare." Under attack from the Coalition less than two weeks before the March 2 Dunkley byelection, Anthony Albanese rejected claims by Peter Dutton that Labor had cut border protection funding.
The Prime Minister, who held a cabinet meeting in Perth on Monday, dismissed the Opposition Leader's claim that abolishing temporary protection visas and releasing 149 dangerous non-citizens had emboldened people smugglers.
"Are these people on temporary protection visas?
No, they're on Nauru. People who arrive by boat get sent offshore. That's the measures we're put in place together with boat turnbacks, redepositing people back in other places.
Those measures are all in place," Mr Albanese said.
