Jim Molan (NSW, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

This is a very good bill, and one of my favourite committees, the Legal and Constitutional Affairs Legislation Committee, has produced a very good report. The Transport Security Amendment (Testing and Training) Bill 2019 is a key bill in the way that we guarantee what is fundamentally the most important thing that we do. National security, of course, remains the first priority of the Morrison government. You've heard many of the previous speakers, many of whom are my colleagues, explain the nature of this bill to you in some detail. They have given you an indication of what the bill is about. They have stated what the bill does. They have said what changes were made in response to the Scrutiny of Bills Committee inquiry. They went through the changes in the bill and what they mean for the conduct of systems tests, and they spoke about systems tests in great detail. They mentioned the screeners training and accreditation scheme. They went in and explained from beginning to end what a systems test is, and they also explained what test pieces are currently used for system tests. So we've well and truly gone through the bill, and we've well and truly gone through a number of explanations of every single part of the bill.

Let me talk in a very general way about the bill and what lies behind training. This is not revolutionary by any stretch of the imagination. It will probably astonish most Australians to think that we aren't already doing what we are proposing in this bill. It's a simple bill, and it's a simple procedure. It's something which is absolutely essential to an activity that many of us do all the time, which is entrust our lives to fly in a terrorist environment. It's functional. It lays down the conditions that must be met before these kinds of tests are conducted. I have to say, given my background, that the military do it every single day. It can be dangerous in a military environment. It can be dangerous in war, when you still must train and you use a weapon which must be both a training weapon and a functional weapon. This, of course, is not what we are proposing in this bill. We are proposing something quite different.

Still, things can go wrong. Many years ago, as a very new helicopter pilot, I was involved in a search-and-rescue exercise off an Army training area near Tin Can Bay in Queensland. In order to 'test the system', as it was explained to us, one of our pilots was put in a raft and put in the sea and we were to find him. Things can go wrong and you've got to take risks if you're going to train well. This was not good training, because it started to get dark, we couldn't find the pilot and he spent the whole night out there in a raft in shark infested waters.

This kind of bill, if it is followed seriously and if the moderation and the supervision of the screeners is allowed to happen, will not result in such exercises. Going back some decades now, one of our intelligence agencies was involved in a raid on a hotel which went wrong. They were testing the system, of course. That went badly wrong—to everyone's embarrassment—and changed the nature of that security organisation. Again, this bill should prevent that kind of thing from happening.

In Iraq as the chief of operations for the war in Iraq, I was responsible for the security of Baghdad International Airport. The movements in and out of Baghdad International Airport were extraordinary. Hundreds and hundreds of flights per day were bringing in and taking out weapons, equipment and personnel. We discovered by sheer accident that an Iraqi baggage handler, who was in fact working for the insurgency, had decided to put an explosive device onto a pallet that was about to be loaded into a wide-bodied aircraft. What we're proposing in this bill is a little bit different from the situation in Baghdad International Airport, for the simple reason that half the people who were screeners and baggage handlers were actually working for the insurgency. That explosive device would have blown the aeroplane to bits, and that's exactly what this bill is trying to prevent. Fortunately for us, the explosive device that was placed on a pallet to be put into the aircraft actually fell off the pallet through sheer accident and didn't explode in the aircraft. The lesson, of course, is that you can be lucky. But your luck is increased if in fact you have system tests, you have screeners who do realistic training, and you can supervise and conduct tests that are realistic.

Back in 2017, there was a certain amount of luck involved in the prevention of a bomb being placed on board a wide-bodied aircraft out of Sydney. The aim of this bill is to minimise the role that luck plays. The harder you work and the smarter you operate and the more realistically you train and prepare, the less the role luck will play in any situation which is critical to all of us, such as boarding an aircraft and flying and hoping to be alive at the other end.

I would like to move slightly off this now and address an issue that Senator Rice raised when she spoke. Good on her for giving support to the bill, but she equated this bill with a need to achieve zero emissions in the airline industry. Well, that's fantastic. But I just wonder, regardless of how clever we are, what will actually achieve efficiencies in relation to the airline industry and in relation to climate change. It's not going to be wishful thinking or a statement of an objective that does this, for example, zero emissions by 2030. It's not going to be by holding the view that we should destroy the economy by going to zero emissions by 2030—because if the economy is not functioning, the airline industry will certainly not be functioning. If we remove the need for aviation because we've removed the economy we have certainly not achieved an awful lot at all. We will create development in aviation in exactly the same way as this government addresses climate change—through technology. If it can be done it will be done through technology and not by wishful thinking, and this is the approach that I would recommend to Senator Rice. She should look at the coalition's technology roadmap and apply it if she thinks that this is relevant in relation to this bill.

Senator Brockman, of course, brought up the subject of national security. He was quite right to point this out. National security in relation to the aviation transport system is where the rubber hits the road. National security is not something which is conducted only by the military, the police or Home Affairs; national security is something which everyone, every element of the nation, is responsible for. National security applies to all of us. I often say that security of the nation takes a whole nation. In relation to this bill, where the rubber hits the road is where you can achieve security yet still allow the nation to function, still allow us to achieve prosperity through the market and still allow us to progress in a number of different ways. The reason that it takes a nation to secure a nation is that if we think that just one part of this nation, such as the military, will give us a security then we are going to forget that a critical part of national security is self-reliance.

Self-reliance, of course, is the basis of our very sovereignty. Sovereignty is critical to us. We really are only just learning, and being reminded by COVID, how incredibly important our sovereignty is. Sovereignty is not something which exists in one point in space; sovereignty is something which you can have more or less of in accordance with the forces that act on you as a nation. The self-reliance that we need doesn't apply just to manufacturers or weaponry or spare parts; it applies to the processes and the culture in your nation. As I said before, most Australians would be astonished to discover that we weren't already doing the activities that are permitted in this bill. So, when you get down to the bottom level, the most detailed level, national security depends on aviation screeners being very well trained and very capable.

I speak about self-reliance, and self-reliance is critical in manufacturing in relation to defence, cyber and a thousand different areas. Self-reliance in this nation is being able to do what we need. It's not what we would like to do; we don't need to do everything. If we did everything we'd be like North Korea—not trading with anyone, developing everything internally. And some people call that self-sufficiency. Where we are at the moment, and not just in relation to screeners at airports and manufacturing, is that market forces deliver prosperity. But isn't it strange that the market forces within the aviation industry have not delivered the kind of security that we are talking about in this bill? Only authorities or governments can deliver security, and that's what this bill is all about.

As I said before, this is a good bill. It's not revolutionary but it is a good bill. This can be achieved without great disruption to what's going on and by accommodating individuals. This bill is essential. It can be done safely, and it must be done, given the importance of the aviation industry to us, in an environment replete with terrorism. We should do it now, because we have a hiatus in the aviation industry where we can make change, and when we come out of that change we should come out of the change roaring. We owe this to the travelling public and we owe this to the screeners, of course, who use this on a daily basis. This is a very, very serious business and we must make it a safety business. I commend the bill. I see the need for it. I think there are very, very good reasons for proceeding with it.