Will Albanese follow the Coalition handbook of staying schtum over on-water matters?

The longstanding Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison era rebuke to journalists’ questions on issues relating to asylum seekers arriving by boat, particularly when Operation Sovereign Borders was announced, was that the government did not comment on “on-water matters”. As opposition leader, Dutton is taking a distinctly different approach, but as his talking points ramp up with each new boat arrival, will the government continue to stick with its no-comment approach?

The recent arrival in Western Australia of at least 40 men, believed to be from Bangladesh, India and Pakistan, has reignited the Coalition’s tried-and-tested political strategy of accusing the Labor Party of being soft on people smugglers. 

Opposition Leader and former home affairs minister Peter Dutton accused the government of having “lost control” of Australia’s borders. 

“I know exactly how these people smugglers work,” Dutton said over the weekend. 

“They will react to a weak prime minister and to a weak [home affairs] minister. If they see vulnerabilities, they will exploit them, and that’s exactly what has happened here.” 

Rear Admiral Brett Sonter, commander of the Joint Agency Task Force Operation Sovereign Borders, rebuked the opposition leader in a statement on Friday, saying the mission of Operation Sovereign Borders “remains the same today as it was when it was established in 2013”.

“Any alternate narrative will be exploited by criminal people smugglers to deceive potential irregular immigrants and convince them to risk their lives and travel to Australia by boat,” he said.

In a round of interviews on February 19, Dutton claimed the government had “ripped $600 million out of Operation Sovereign Borders and the department”, leading to a surveillance failure.

Border Force commissioner Michael Outram refuted these claims, saying Border Force funding is “currently the highest it’s been since [the agency’s] establishment in 2015”.

“In the last year the ABF has received additional funding totalling hundreds of millions of dollars to support maritime and land-based operations,” he said.

In enforcing the military-led response known as Operation Sovereign Borders, the previous Coalition governments adopted a media strategy of refusing to comment on on-water matters. 

This was infamously broken on the eve of the last election when then-prime minister Scott Morrison instructed the Australian Border Force to publicise the interception of a boat of asylum seekers from Sri Lanka before the operation had been completed. A subsequent review found that there was “pressure placed on [Border Force] officials … to draft and publish a statement within 15 minutes”. 

But while the Labor Party came to power in 2022 promising greater transparency and accountability, not much has changed in terms of disclosures around maritime arrivals. 

“The policy settings have not changed,” said Madeline Gleeson, senior research fellow at the Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law. 

“It remains impossible to reach Australia by boat and then seek asylum here. That has not changed, nor has the lack of transparency on boat arrivals.

“In terms of on-water matters, and Operation Sovereign Borders, there has been no substantive change in policy or transparency. Those matters are still outside the public domain. It is difficult to scrutinise them even through parliamentary proceedings.” 

The Department of Home Affairs has published a public monthly update since at least January 2015, outlining the number of interceptions, turnbacks and the status of detainees in offshore detention, but Crikey understands these numbers do not always correlate with figures published months, and sometimes years later in Senate estimates under questioning.

In Senate estimates of March 2020, Greens Senator Nick McKim asked the department for these figures, as well as whether they correlated with the figures given by the department in its monthly releases.

The department said that “current sensitive operational activity has occasionally not been released” in the monthly updates, but that “information on all ventures is captured in public statistics when it is no longer operationally sensitive to do so.”

Guardian Australia reports there was an increase in arrivals over 1999-2001 (peaking in 2001 at 5,516), followed by an even larger increase in 2012-13 (20,587 people, on 300 boats arrived in 2013). There were zero arrivals in 2021, 199 people on seven boats in 2022 and 74 people on four boats in 2023. The number of people arriving in Australia by plane who then seek asylum, (known as an “onshore claim”, an avenue not open to boat arrivals) vastly outnumbers arrivals by boat. Last year, according to Home Affairs statistics, 22,916 people made an onshore asylum claim.

Crikey put questions to the Minister for Home Affairs, Clare O’Neil, about the government’s position on transparency relative to the previous administration. 

O’Neil’s office did not answer questions relating to transparency arrangements, but said the government’s commitment to Operation Sovereign Borders is “absolute”. 

“Every person who has attempted to reach Australia by boat since I have been minister is back in their home country, or in Nauru, having wasted thousands of dollars and having risked their lives,” O’Neil said.

O’Neil labelled Dutton’s remarks as “directly counter to Australia’s national security, [giving] people smugglers the disinformation they need to get people on boats.”