I have personally been witness to the abuse the Darwin security personel recieve. One coach driver parked in the ambulance bay and was not available to remove the offending coach. As soon as the ticket book was produced he miraculously appeared for the deep dark depths of the terminal building.
The story was we had a critically ill patient to be transported by the flying roo to Adelaide. The patient was on a ventilator and totally reliant on the machinery he was attatched to. Time to transfer from the ambulance to the aircraft is to be minimal.
For all those patient Q staff (thank you for your patience as we dont have a neurosurgeon in darwin) it takes time and usually we have 15 - 20 mins of oxygen to transfer the patient to the facility in the aircraft.
We had to take our patient through customs (one of those domestic / international flights) and wait until the stretcher and oxygen fixture was fitted into the aircraft. Oxygen was running dangerously low so I went back to the truck (ambulance ) to get our 2nd cylinder. On trying to pass security on return to the aircraft, I was abused by security staff because I wouldnt wait in line. I had already stated I had to come back through and it was an emergency.
Our patient had literally seconds of Oxygen left before we managed to swap the cylinders.
So you see security etiquette goes both ways... Darwin still has to come up with a safer (and a less public) more expedient way of tranferring these patients. This way the attending medical staff, the security staff and the patient would be under a whole lot less stress.