Jason Clare (Blaxland, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Home Affairs ) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

by leave—In December last year four people were arrested on offences relating to the importation of narcotics into Australia, including one Customs and Border Protection officer. I said then: expect more stings, expect more arrests.

Today five people have been arrested, including two employees of the Australian Customs and Border Protection Service, and their employment has been suspended. It will be alleged that those arrested today are part of the same drug importation ring. Seventeen people have now been arrested as part of a two-year investigation codenamed Operation Marca, headed up by the Australian Federal Police; the Australian Commission for Law Enforcement Integrity, ACLEI; and the Australian Customs and Border Protection Service.

I would like to use this opportunity in the House to congratulate the officers of this task force. You find corruption when you hunt for it—and they are hunting. They are doing a very good job, but their job is not yet done. The acting chief executive officer of Customs has also made the decision today to suspend two officers for potential breaches under the Australian Public Service Code of Conduct. I have said: expect more arrests. I have also said: expect more reform. The reforms that were put through the parliament last year come into force this week. That includes drug and alcohol testing, mandatory requirements to report serious misconduct and the power to terminate officers for serious misconduct. I am advised that the first drug and alcohol testing will start next month.

The task of root-and-branch reform of Customs has now also begun. Major structural and cultural reform of Customs and Border Protection is required. This includes its law enforcement capability, its integrity culture and business systems.

Late last year I announced the establishment of the Customs Reform Board. I take this opportunity to thank the opposition for their support of the establishment of the board. The board is made up of three distinguished Australians: the Hon. James Wood AO QC, former Royal Commissioner of the NSW Royal Commission into the New South Wales Police Service; Mr Ken Moroney AO APM, former Commissioner of the New South Wales Police Force; and Mr David Mortimer AO, former Chief Executive Officer of TNT, former Deputy Chairman of Ansett, former Chairman of Australia Post and Leighton Holdings.

The board met for the first time this month and it will meet every month and report directly to me. Its top priority is to provide me with advice and recommendations on further reform to aggressively target corruption, weed it out and prevent it from coming back. It will provide me with an interim report mid-year.

Justice Wood and the other members of the board have already provided me with a number of valuable ideas, which are being worked on right now.

Mr Deputy Speaker, let me make this point: the overwhelming majority of our Customs and Border Protection officers are good, honest and hard-working people. They want corruption weeded out, and let me assure them that that is happening. After the announcement of the arrests in December, my office received a phone call from a serving Customs officer. He said that he had been a Customs officer for 30 years and that he got his cup of coffee from the same cafe every working day. He said that he always walked into the shop wearing his Customs uniform; he was proud to wear it. That day, for the first time, he wore a T-shirt over his uniform. Customs officers want us to weed this out. Over the Christmas break, I was at Sydney airport and spoke to a number of Customs officers, and their message was the same: good on you; go get them. And that is exactly what we are doing.

I ask leave of the House to move a motion to enable the member for Stirling to speak for five minutes.

Leave granted.

I move:

That so much of the standing orders be suspended as would prevent the member for Stirling speaking for a period not exceeding five minutes.

Question agreed to.

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

The revelations that we have what can only be described as systemic corruption within a federal law enforcement agency should shock all Australians. The fact that we could have organised crime infiltrate this agency to such an extent that serving officers have been arrested today, and that is subsequent to arrests that were made late last year, should give all Australians pause for thought about what is going on within the Australian Customs and Border Protection Service.

We have had the minister announce what he is going to do in the future to address these issues, but the threshold question we must ask ourselves today is how this has been allowed to occur in the first place. How is it that a federal law enforcement agency can be so systemically penetrated by organised criminals, and why has this been allowed to occur under the watch of the Labor Party? The hard questions that the government will not ask themselves revolve around the way they have treated Customs and border protection since they came to office. They have systematically attacked Customs and Border Protection Service since the government changed in 2007. We know that when they came to office they had an agenda where they thought that Australia's law enforcement agencies had been too heavily funded by the previous Howard government, and they were going to do something to rectify that—and haven't they got about doing that!

They have attacked every single Commonwealth law enforcement agency in a way that goes to their effectiveness, and there is no doubt in my mind, and I think in any fair-minded person's mind, that the cuts that have been made to Customs and Border Protection Service have contributed to the sorts of things that we are hearing about from the Commissioner of the Australian Federal Police and from the acting CEO of Customs today. These cuts have resulted in 750 staff being taken from the agency. That is in an agency that only has 5,000 staff, so you can see that that is a very significant reduction in the number of Customs officers that we have policing our borders. This reduction is occurring at a time when Customs are well and truly preoccupied with dealing with Labor's border protection crisis, created because of Labor's lax immigration policies.

These staff cuts have been matched by significant funding cuts. On almost every single Labor budget, we have seen the Customs budget significantly reduced. A total of $64.1 million has been removed from Customs and Border Protection Service since the Australian Labor Party came to office. This has resulted in the former CEO of Customs reducing his senior executive service by 20 per cent. We had $9.3 million cut out of so-called low-risk activities in previous budgets, and we have had $34 million cut over four years for passenger facilitation at Australia's major airports. Astonishingly, we have had $58.1 million cut from the budget that Customs has to inspect cargo as it comes into Australia. That means that Customs officers inspect significantly less cargo than when the government changed. At our airports, we inspect less than 10 per cent of cargo that crosses our borders now. Under the Howard government, we used to inspect up to 60 per cent of cargo as it crossed our air borders. What this means is that organised crime has a much better chance of infiltrating Customs and Border Protection Service because of the resource and personnel cuts that have been inflicted on them by the Australian Labor Party.

I believe that the vast majority of personnel at Customs and Border Protection Service are hard-working officers who are doing the best that they can while they are not being supported in an appropriate manner by their government. They have the job of protecting Australia's borders, yet the government does not seem to value what they do, and the government does not support them in a way that the Australian people would expect. That has given criminals a better chance of infiltrating the agency in the way that was revealed in December last year, and has been further exposed today.

We still do not know the full extent of this, but what we do know is that for 5½ years the Labor Party have been asleep at the wheel. They have allowed a culture within a particular part of Customs to fester. We will address this is when we get into office by giving Customs and Border Protection Service the support it deserves. (Time expired)

Debate adjourned.