Peter Jennings highlights the problems of protecting Australia’s Parliament House in the light of pro-Palestine protestors gaining access to the roof.
Total security can be achieved but only at a cost to the operation and image of the site. The key is finding an appropriate balance between the two. The building was designed to be the “people’s house”. This included the ability for people to walk over their politicians in a comfortable and open space. The site was fenced off to primarily prevent access to the glass pyramids over the chambers, thereby destroying the image and a major design element of the site. The pyramids could have been protected through other less intrusive means. Jennings refers in his piece to the “Pajero Drive ” incident some years ago when a retired schoolteacher crashed through parliament’s front doors and parked his four-wheel drive in the middle of the great hall. Vehicle barriers were an initial design consideration but were removed from the plan for aesthetic reasons only to be installed after the incident.
The physical security measures have now, however, been shown to be ineffective from a reasonably low-level attack. The presence of highly armed police didn’t deter the protestors. (After the shooting in the Canadian Parliament some years ago, the AFP increased their numbers and weapons at Australia’s Parliament House.)
But it’s the procedural response that appears to have been highly ineffective. Even allowing for the donning of safety equipment and identification of safe access routes, an hour to respond seems excessive. Imagine if those demonstrators were terrorists, merely posing at first as peaceful protestors.
We protect assets to protect the functions of the site. Key “assets” to be protected are reputation and image. Security is a combination of physical and procedural measures that need to be implemented to protect identified assets from specific threat vectors. They need to be designed to fit within and support the operating environment of the site and validated as to their effectiveness.
What’s needed now is an independent security assessment of Parliament House, with recommendations on what additional procedural treatments such as a combination of active CCTV surveillance, physical measures and a greater human presence are required.
Security at the Parliament will always be a compromise between practical, considered protective and response measures and the political imperatives of the Speaker of the House and the President of the Senate, who are ultimately responsible for the building.
One approach would be to fence everything around State Circle, a bit like the White House situation. But fencing State Circle would present the wrong image and would be very difficult to monitor. We don’t want to make our Parliament House a fortress that further isolates our political leaders from the people.
An effective security assessment would lead to efficient practical management of security resources protecting assets. And on the response side maybe the place to start is with current ideas about policing: When the old Parliament House front door was burnt a few years ago there were lots of police around. But the ethic appears to be non-interference.
Anthony Bergin is a senior fellow at SAA and an expert associate at the National Security College.