Underwhelming border patrol: Jonno Duniam slams lagging post-pandemic surveillance flight numbers

Border patrols across Australia’s northern reaches increased over the past year but haven’t returned to the levels seen under the Coalition government.

Australian Border Force planes and helicopters flew 14,755 hours of patrols in the 2024-25 financial year, The Nightly can reveal.

This was a jump of more than 17 per cent on the previous year, when there were 12,579 flight hours completed.

The department believes it’s on track to reach 15,000 flying hours for the current financial year.

If achieved, that would bring the level just above where it was in 2021-22, but still below 2020-21 when patrols flew for more than 16,000 hours.

The aerial patrols are critical to ABF efforts for the rapid detection and response to maritime threats, such as people smugglers, drug traffickers and illegal fishers, and to help cover remote and inaccessible areas.

Shadow Home Affairs minister Jonno Duniam said the levels of surveillance were still not good enough.

“This Labor Government oversaw a 22 per cent decrease in surveillance flights in just two years – a catastrophic decline in aerial surveillance,” he told The Nightly.

“The slight subsequent uptick is still not enough to bring the numbers back to the level of surveillance monitoring that the Coalition reached in Government, and that we know kept our borders protected.

“The Albanese Government still doesn’t take the management of our borders seriously.”

Border Force officials have previously told Senate estimates that aerial surveillance efforts have been hampered by ongoing maintenance issues with third-party-provided aircraft and difficulties with the availability of pilots for how many days the planes and helicopters were supposed to be available.

They’ve now cracked down on the contractors and in late 2024 ended the arrangement for leasing helicopters.

Over the past year, four penalties were imposed on contractors for not meeting their obligations, which the Home Affairs department said had proven an effective way of driving them to meet expected outcomes.

This meant that “aircraft availability improved markedly . . . driven by expanding pilot ranks, robust contract management, and more proactive support by the contractor”, the department’s annual report states.

“Early mission planning and proactive management of the service provider contributed to the improved contract performance.”

The number of maritime patrols also ticked upwards, to 2156 patrol days, although it still fell short of the annual target.

This was about a 3 per cent increase on the previous year — but again the improvement comes after several years of declines.

The total number of marine unit patrols in 2023-24 was the lowest in at least eight years, The West previously revealed, which was almost 22 per cent below peak levels under the Coalition.

Home Affairs has changed the way it publicly reports aerial patrols, now publishing the number of patrols instead of flying hours in its annual report.

The change means this year’s publicly available figures can’t be easily compared to previous years without obtaining extra information, but the department considers it to be an appropriate benchmark.

There were 2399 missions made by fixed-wing aircraft (95 per cent of the number planned) and 156 missions flown by helicopters (78 per cent of the benchmark).

Throughout the year, ABF and its partners under Operation Sovereign Borders dealt with 13 people-smuggling boats.

After being disrupted, 135 people were returned to either their home country or the place they left from. Another 33 people were transferred to Nauru for processing.