Australia's border security was put at risk by Immigration Department managers acting as strike breakers at the nation's airports in recent days, the department's main workplace union alleges.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
In one case cited by the CPSU, an Immigration manager acting as a stopgap for striking front-line officers, allowed a passenger who fronted up to Darwin airport with a gun in his bag to handle the weapon "to check if it was loaded".
The union says its members are worried that dangerous individuals on watch lists, drug couriers, terrorism suspects and other criminal elements might have been missed as the department used untrained and inexperienced desk workers in a bid to keep the airport queues moving.
CPSU national secretary Nadine Flood says it would have been safer to accept delays and make sure all inbound passengers were processed properly by experienced officers.
The department and Border Force drafted in managers, mostly to Sydney and Melbourne, in what it called "surge deployments" as thousands of its rank-and-file public servants staged stopwork actions during the past 10 days.
The CPSU says "dangerous shortcuts" have been taken in the past 10 days, with alerts on incoming passengers missed and arrival cards processed long after passengers had entered the country.
"Border Force staff are deeply concerned that watch-list alerts have been missed due to the department's decisions, when they committed to dozens of restrictions on strike action to ensure that exactly this situation did not arise," Ms Flood said on Wednesday.
"The alert system is there for a very important reason – to keep Australians safe."
"In Darwin, a management strike-breaker dealing with a gun in a bag allowed the passenger to handle the weapon in a crowded public area of the airport, to check that it was unloaded, totally breaching protocol on gun handling and potentially putting the public at risk."
The department was approached for comment on Wednesday but did not respond.
Border officials are being advised by their union not to co-operate with attempts to process arrival cards after the fact, or follow-ups on missed alerts about incoming passengers, and to report any misconduct through official channels.
A bulletin sent by the union to its members at the department says the department's use of its managers, many of whom were flown out of Canberra to work at Sydney and Melbourne airports, was a huge risk taken to minimise the effects of the strike action.
"DIBP's chosen response of using strike-breakers to try and minimise the impact of our industrial action may have compromised the integrity of departmental policies and procedures, particularly at airports," the bulletin reads.
"It now appears that DIBP [or the government] have decided that minimising delays is a bigger priority than doing the job properly.
"If management was not confident it could maintain standards, it should have copped the two-hours delays."
The bulletin states that officers have been pressured to rubber-stamp incoming passenger cards (IPCs) that have not been "live processed" in the presence of the arriving traveller.
"You should not process IPCs after the fact unless you are 100 per cent confident that the information on the card matches the passport presented at the ECP and the passenger presenting at the entry control point."
The union also advised that the department's strict disciplinary code, sharpened as part of the merger between Immigration and Customs, contains punishments for employees who fail to report misconduct.
"This includes reporting actions of management strike-breakers that have the potential or actual risk of breaching border security, whether knowingly or unknowingly, including the incorrect exercise of delegations," the union bulletin states.
