After allocating half a billion dollars — without justification — in national security spending in the budget, the government today ramped up its security theatrics with an unprecedented attack on basic civil rights. The Prime Minister and Immigration Minister Peter Dutton announced that federal police would be given the power to demand identification documents from anyone in an airport. 

“You don’t have to, there’s no law that requires you to but it’s hard to think of anyone that wouldn’t have some ID and wouldn’t be able to say a bit about themselves,” Turnbull said in justifying the new laws.

In most jurisdictions in Australia, police have no right to ask for identification or your name and address unless they have a reasonable suspicion you’ve committed an offence, or you’ve witnessed a serious offence, or you’re driving. This will now be completely suspended at airports. Abuse of personal information by police is a continuing problem across different jurisdictions as police have ever-greater powers to obtain, store and access the private information of Australians.

The laws take Australia further down the US path, where airports and other border points have become null zones for civil liberties, with some basic rights suspended within 100 miles of US borders. It’s not clear from the government’s announcement today how broadly “airports” will be defined.

The government will also roll out new body scanning equipment at airports, costing up to $300 million. Body scanning and other forms of security theatre at airports perform poorly in cost-benefit analyses of security measures, and there is no evidence the Infrastructure Department or Immigration has ever carried out a full assessment of body scanners, including the cost and security risks of long queues of airport users at security choke points.

The Productivity Commission recently criticised additional national security regulation and expenditure without transparency and proper analysis. “With around 60 million domestic and 40 million international passenger trips per year, delays in security require people to spend up to 17 million more hours in airports than otherwise, whose cost in dollars depends on how much that time is valued. Clearly, it would not be trivial.”

The PC particularly criticised scanners:

To ensure value for money for Australian passengers and taxpayers, it is important that the money spent on airport security is worthwhile, not just in aggregate, but for each incremental strengthening of arrangements. For example, full body scanners are now used in a number of Australian airports. They are costly and some argue not technically effective, though the technology may improve in accuracy over time.

The Australian National Audit Office has also criticised passenger screening. In 2016, in an audit that the ANAO is about to release a follow-up for, it concluded about the Infrastructure Department, “the Department is unable to provide assurance that passenger screening is effective, or to what extent screening authorities comply with the Regulations, due to poor data and inadequate records. The Department does not have meaningful passenger screening performance targets or enforcement strategies and does not direct resources to areas with a higher risk of non-compliance.”

What both the PC and ANAO don’t grasp, of course, is that the expenditure is about theatre and politics, not actually making anyone safer.

What do you think of Turnbull and Dutton’s new airport security plan? Let us know! Email comments and responses to boss@crikey.com.au.