Australian Border Force: Inside WA’s coastline operations and strategies for protecting the State

Like fashion, trends in the criminal world also repeat. Crime syndicates trying to smuggle highly lucrative illicit substances into the country — particularly through WA’s busy ports — are returning to concealment strategies not seen since the 1990s. That’s the view of Superintendant Shaun Senior, the man in charge of the Australian Border Force Maritime operations in WA. “In my long career, after 30 years, things go in cycles,” he said. “So I’m seeing stuff in the ‘90s that used to be used, being used now. “It’s like fashion, things go cyclically. It’s all coming back.” The West Australian was given exclusive behind-the-scenes insights into the complex operations that keep a close eye and ear on the more than 20,000km of the State’s vast coastlines (including islands). And overseeing that task is Supt. Senior. He leads a team of 130 border force officers, who monitor the nearly 20 million tonnes of cargo discharged at the State’s ports annually. To give some perspective to that gargantuan job, more than six million sea cargo containers and bulk cargo consignments came to Australian ports in the 2022-23 financial year. And more than 90 per cent of sea containers destined for Australia can be processed at our Fremantle Port, according to the 2023 Fremantle Port annual report. “WA gets 50 per cent of all the commercial vessels that come into Australia and one-third of all the vessels into Australia go to Port Hedland and Dampier,” he said. “Most containerised cargo goes to Fremantle, but bulk cargo — such as minerals and iron ore — heads up north to Port Hedland, which is one of the busiest ports in the world.” He and his teams have managed to stop 2.2 tonnes of drugs — most of which was cocaine — from hitting the WA community in the last 12 months. But finding those drugs and contraband is a complex operation, and once inside a ship, it is like finding a needle in a haystack, Supt. Senior said. “You can spend weeks on a vessel looking through it from top to bottom — they are massive, so we need information to narrow that search down,” he said. “It is never an at-random search, the only time we will search one is once we’ve gotten intelligence and it is a targeted operation. “We can’t physically search every single container . . . and it’s not an ‘eenie meenie miney moe’ thing.” The ABF, along with the Australian Federal Police and other off-shore partners, gather intelligence. “We look at things like: onboard vessel tracking systems; has it deviated from the course that it had set; are people communicating with that vessel. We use a lot of methodologies to narrow down which vessel to look at,” he said. Cargo that has travelled between certain ports — such as from South America to Sydney, where the price per gram of cocaine is the highest in the world — could also be deemed as high risk. And ways of hiding drug shipments back in the ‘90s — such as within surfboards, the walls of boxes or other items — are becoming popular again. Supt. Senior said he was sometimes left “impressed” by the lengths criminals go to in their attempts to smuggle drugs and other contraband into the country. He cited drugs being stored in floor tiles — meaning they painstakingly cut the tiles in half, placed a thin layer of drug in and glued them back together again. “They can conceal it in tiles, in fridge doors, in cars, in motorbike engines and sometimes they might use a scatter approach — so they might put a run of drugs in tiles that are going all across the country,” he said. However, most commonly, reputable carriers are unaware that contraband has been transported in their containers or ships. “I think these smugglers are impressive, it’s big business,” he said. “Even if we found nine out of the 10 consignments, it would still be profitable for them. “The sheer amounts these outlaws bring in shows the confidence of the smugglers and the high-stakes financial dividend they get. “They will go to no ends, so it keeps us busy.” Another drug-smuggling tactic is dropping the packaged substance off cargo ships into open water, and sharing the coordinates with a criminal on shore who will travel out and collect it. This tactic is referred to as the “mother-daughter”. Due to our vast coastline, deploying officers to an unfolding mother-daughter scenario can be difficult, however, often the task is made easier by an innocent call from a member of the public who has spotted something unusual. In February last year, 365 kilograms of cocaine was found stashed in an overturned boat following the dramatic rescue of three men found clinging to an esky in Albany. Their boat was seen floating in the vicinity of Boat Harbour, between Denmark and Walpole. A commercial abalone diver spotted the boat, with only the hull poking out of the water. As well as drugs, Supt. Senior’s team also work to locate weapons and contraband, such as vapes. Nationally, since the introduction of the vaping regulations in January, the ABF has seized more than 750,000 vape devices with an estimated street value in excess of $23 million. All the tools at hand to find drug consignments and contraband all work in “concert”. But the sniffer dogs bring a special advantage. “All the technologies we deploy collectively work together, but the dogs can mass screen and can do it a lot quicker, and they’re very mobile,” he said. “I can’t put an x-ray machine onto a vessel, but I can stick the dog onto a helicopter and take it out to a ship that’s anchored off-shore.” After a long and complex operation, the feeling of finding that needle in the haystack is “amazing”. “My wife will probably kill me, it’s not like having our children or getting married, but it’s pretty close. It’s pretty amazing,” he said. “To be able to think you’ve stopped a tonne of drugs to hit the streets and the damage that does to families and the pressure that puts on hospitals and the like — around a whole range of mental health and domestic violence issues — to know you’ve helped stop that is pretty rewarding.”