The department (and therefore Minister) administering the ASIC and MSIC legislation recently changed from Infrastructure and Transport etc to Home Affairs. The “Cyber and Infrastructure Security Centre” is part of Home Affairs.
The Secretary of the Department of Home Affairs has been slowly building his own para-military force and accruing ever-more powers as he has been thwarted (so far) in his aspirations to be the Secretary of Defence. The Australian Border Force has its own internal system of medals and now gives more of them out than the Australian Defence Force does each year.
If you think the invocation of “safety” by CASA as a justification for its intrusion, restriction and destruction is wearing a little thin, wait until the Secretary of Home Affair’s sycophants get going on actions in the name of transport “security”. I’m guessing that the ‘alert’ to which extralite referred is a mere taste of an increase in the insults to our intelligence and integrity to come.
So don’t plan on celebrating the demise of the ASIC any time soon.
Pilots are just collateral damage in the response to the real current problem: Porous borders, now exacerbated by, for example, a baggage handling workforce which is in a state of constant flux. Some of the organisations issuing ASICs have a bit of a conflict of interest: They need as many warm bodies as they can get, doing work airside to keep the airports and airlines up and running again. Spotting the bikie associate (with no criminal history) in amongst the much-needed casual workforce can be difficult and inconvenient.
I just can’t wait for the “Cyber and Infrastructure Security Centre” to find out that when I and thousands of other pilots fly into somewhere important, Air Traffic Control does not know our identity, doesn’t know if we hold a pilot’s licence, doesn’t know if we hold an ASIC, doesn’t know if the aircraft we’re flying has an airworthiness certificate, doesn’t know if we are using the correct callsign and doesn’t know what we are carrying on board.
I shake my head and marvel at our capacity to create ever-more complexity and costs that inconvenience only the law-abiding, each time I fly over Commonwealth Parliament House or downwind over what is the Prime Minister’s or Governor-General’s or MINDEF’s or some other important person’s aircraft on the tarmac at 34SQN, knowing that an actual terrorist could actually announce his or her arrival at Black Mountain tower and intentions to do something nasty, and nobody could do anything practical to stop that happening or get anyone ‘out of the way’ of the damage about to be done. They could turn YSCB into a Romeo and ‘ban’ any aircraft other than State aircraft from entry, and it would make no difference to the actual risk (unless, I suppose, they mounted anti-aircraft weapons on various of the hills around YSCB and were ready and willing to use them immediately some unknown aircraft entered the Romeo - just like Pearl Harbour in '42).
What on Earth have we become?