Exclusive footage reveals boats at the centre of secretive Australian Border Force scheme

3 months ago 22

The Australian Border Force’s largest ship has been captured on film leaving Broome Port carrying four fishing boats, in stark visual evidence of its secretive and controversial program of purchasing old boats to give to illegal fishers and people smugglers that sail into Australian waters in unseaworthy craft.

The exclusive footage, captured by a 9News Perth drone, shows the Australian Border Force’s 110-metre Ocean Shield sailing out of the port on Wednesday evening, carrying the four fishing boats which had their identification numbers removed.

It is the first visual evidence of the ABF transporting privately purchased fishing boats to the north of the country, where illegal fishing rates have ballooned and people smugglers have managed to reach the Australian coast.

The boats are transported to Darwin, then towed behind ABF vessels, where they are then passed onto fishermen or people smugglers using unseaworthy boats before they are turned back from Australian waters.

The West Australian has previously reported that the ABF was purchasing fishing boats from Geraldton fishers for up to $400,000 and that people were approaching brokers to get top dollar for their boats.

A Geraldton fisherman who spoke on the condition of anonymity to this masthead said fishers had been selling their boats to the ABF via brokers for around market price, which could be between $350,000 to $400,000 – though he had not heard of any boats being sold in the past two months.

He said it was a good option for people with ageing boats who did not want to sell them back to their colleagues in the tight-knit WA industry.

He said fishers could later sell the boats after stripping them of all valuable equipment.

Shadow home affairs minister Jonno Duniam said the scheme was just “bolstering the people smugglers’ business model”.

“I think absolutely this would … pave the way for increased operations if we’re, in effect, running a trading scheme for people smugglers who send innocent people on boats that are not seaworthy and trade them in for a better craft with full navigational equipment and safety features,” he said.

“What’s to say these people, once they return to wherever they’ve come from, are not replaced by another set of people, by people smugglers and sent back to Australia?”

The four fishing boats on the ABF’s Ocean Shield.

When shown the footage, the ABF said it did not comment on operational matters, but it is understood the agency regularly buys boats from the private market for a variety of reasons.

In an investigation by this masthead, Indonesian authorities claimed that in June last year, the ABF gave a group of 44 asylum seekers from Bangladesh and Myanmar two converted fishing boats with pre-programmed GPS coordinates to send them back to Rote Island after they had made it into Australian waters.

Photos from the police on Rote Island showed one of those boats later ran aground on rocks.

The vessel used to transport the four boats in this week’s operation, the Ocean Shield, is the largest in the ABF fleet.

“It is a multirole ship that can respond to a wide range of civil maritime security threats. It is available for operations 300 days of the year. It can operate in northern waters and the Southern Ocean,” the ABF website states.

People smuggling has become a political headache for the Albanese government after several boats evaded patrols and reached Western Australia’s north coast.