‘Perpetual crisis’: Border Force chief’s warning

The outgoing Australian Border Force (ABF) chief has warned the country’s borders are in “perpetual crisis”, and that challenges will persist for decades to come.

ABF Commissioner Michael Outram has had a career spanning decades and continents.

The decorated law enforcement veteran will retire next month, handing the reins over to Gavan Reynolds, the inaugural defence intelligence head.

In a National Press Club address on Wednesday, Commissioner Outram said the challenges to Australia’s borders had changed over his career, and was having a more profound effect on economic security.

“In parallel with the obvious economic benefits of globalisation, over the last four or five years the international environment seems to have become increasingly less predictable for businesses and for governments,” he said.

“And this affects supply chains and borders and how we manage them, where predictability, resilience and security all frame our approach to risk.”

He said the cost of living crises being felt in many countries, including Australia, showed just how sensitive the world was to supply chain disruptions.

He said bad actors were taking advantage of such disruptions, adding that many borders around the world were “perceived to be in a perpetual state of crisis.”

“The truth is that many of the contemporary challenges to our sovereignty, which can drive those perceptions, are unlikely to diminish over the coming decades – including the displacement of people through conflict or climate change, grey zone tactics being used by states and the sophistication and reach of transnational criminal networks,” he said.

“But a state of perpetual crisis is really exhausting for our officers to sustain and their margins for error also become unrealistically narrow.”

The Commissioner steered away from saying it was a problem to be solved, and more so an environment to adapt.

“I think maybe we just have to accept them as being a consequence of globalisation and have to be able to normalise our preparedness for them,” he said.

“For our border, the new normal of globalisation seems to be an enduring and evolving battle against challenges to our sovereignty; this is simply our world and our border needs to be geared up for it.”