After allocating half a billion dollars — without justification — in national security spending in the budget, the government today ramped up its security theatrics with an unprecedented attack on basic civil rights. The Prime Minister and Immigration Minister Peter Dutton announced that federal police would be given the power to demand identification documents from anyone in an airport.
“You don’t have to, there’s no law that requires you to but it’s hard to think of anyone that wouldn’t have some ID and wouldn’t be able to say a bit about themselves,” Turnbull said in justifying the new laws.
In most jurisdictions in Australia, police have no right to ask for identification or your name and address unless they have a reasonable suspicion you’ve committed an offence, or you’ve witnessed a serious offence, or you’re driving. This will now be completely suspended at airports. Abuse of personal information by police is a continuing problem across different jurisdictions as police have ever-greater powers to obtain, store and access the private information of Australians.
The laws take Australia further down the US path, where airports and other border points have become null zones for civil liberties, with some basic rights suspended within 100 miles of US borders. It’s not clear from the government’s announcement today how broadly “airports” will be defined.
The government will also roll out new body scanning equipment at airports, costing up to $300 million. Body scanning and other forms of security theatre at airports perform poorly in cost-benefit analyses of security measures, and there is no evidence the Infrastructure Department or Immigration has ever carried out a full assessment of body scanners, including the cost and security risks of long queues of airport users at security choke points.
The Productivity Commission recently criticised additional national security regulation and expenditure without transparency and proper analysis. “With around 60 million domestic and 40 million international passenger trips per year, delays in security require people to spend up to 17 million more hours in airports than otherwise, whose cost in dollars depends on how much that time is valued. Clearly, it would not be trivial.”
The PC particularly criticised scanners:
To ensure value for money for Australian passengers and taxpayers, it is important that the money spent on airport security is worthwhile, not just in aggregate, but for each incremental strengthening of arrangements. For example, full body scanners are now used in a number of Australian airports. They are costly and some argue not technically effective, though the technology may improve in accuracy over time.
The Australian National Audit Office has also criticised passenger screening. In 2016, in an audit that the ANAO is about to release a follow-up for, it concluded about the Infrastructure Department, “the Department is unable to provide assurance that passenger screening is effective, or to what extent screening authorities comply with the Regulations, due to poor data and inadequate records. The Department does not have meaningful passenger screening performance targets or enforcement strategies and does not direct resources to areas with a higher risk of non-compliance.”
What both the PC and ANAO don’t grasp, of course, is that the expenditure is about theatre and politics, not actually making anyone safer.
What do you think of Turnbull and Dutton’s new airport security plan? Let us know! Email comments and responses to boss@crikey.com.au.
Wow. There’s some great journalist meat on offer to find out who’s getting those contracts and what their relationship to the Liberal Party might be. Who’ll win the tray?
Spook the horses. Is that an election on the wind?
And is Turnbull buying Dutton’s loyalty with $500 Million and extra powers? Of course there won’t be any racial profiling though. Wink, wink.
“Ausweiss bitte” (Identity card please) the cry of the Gestapo in Nazi Germany. I have thought Dutton looks more like a hatchet faced disciple of Himmler everyday and apparently we are to have. Please I mean no disrespect to those who suffered under that regime, but this is how it begins and indeed how it began there, with small steps.
“The Prime Minister and Immigration Minister Peter Dutton announced that federal police would be given the power to demand identification documents from anyone in an airport.”
DFAT and ASIO have a fetish or, at the very least, an obsession as to security at ALL airports around Australia. It is also a very grave mistake to consider the obsession as abetted by the LCP. The same idiocy prevailed under Labur governments. There exists, in Australia, an Aviation Security Identification Card (ASIC) that is mandatory for anyone engaged in services germane to airports. There are three categories of card but the holder does not receive a card unless a “vetting” process has been performed on the applicant.
A “Red” card is necessary for access to a grass strip in the middle of nowhere that might incur two landings per month. A red card (with privileges) is also necessary for any of the airports at a capital city. The obsession is with airports and not shopping centres. Acts of terrorism have occurred in cafes (of late) but not at airports. Interesting huh?
Assuming that only Economy-class passengers will be confronted (and thier well-wishers) {terrorism tends to attract those from the lower orders} then, with regard to shopping centres, perhaps welfare recipients (including all pensioners) shall be compelled to display a symbol (yellow star? – na, that’s been used) so that the retailers can ascertain the latent risk to their businesses by the customers and ditto for the security staff pertaining to the shopping centre.
I hope someone is keeping a total of all this wasted cash – $100 million for a mausoleum in France; $400 million or so for Anzac centenary celebrations (more than all the other participants combined); $50 million for Captain Cook; another $500 million for the War Memorial – not mention ships and submarines and F35’s
Next thing you know we’ll be exporting military weapons.
The price of keeping Dutton from challenging the leadership, hey?
Leaving the defense budget to one side the money for icons does seem a but absurd. However consider the cost of the security fetish with airports.
The security at (regional) airports stuff got underway circa 2004/5. A playwright of some talent would be required to describe the time, travel, per dems and god knows what else to conduct utterly idiotic and ineffective meetings about the place. Is, for example, Grafton (
either location) ever likely to be a terrorist site? Yep, according to our betters.
As for security staff training – bottles of wine were confiscated at Newman (WA) but “approved” at Brome. Despite the training – to say nothing of the cost – there was not a shred of consistency as to what passengers could take on board. The matter is rather more uniform now but it did take a decade but the most important question is : “to what purpose and could the cost be justified for satisfying a figment of one’s imagination. “?
Prescient?? God, I hope not!!
Scaring the people then offering protection .. on their terms.