Whiddett, Adrien --- "Reflections on 20 years of the Australian Federal Police" [1999] AUFPPlatypus 20; (1999) 64 Platypus: Journal of the Australian Federal Police, Article 2

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Reflection on 20 years of the Australian Federal Police

By Deputy Commissioner Adrien Whiddett

When I was asked to pen some reflections on the AFP over its 20 year history I recalled that the theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking was told when, for the layman, he wrote ‘A Brief History of Time' that each equation he included in the book would halve the readership. In the end, he opted for only one: Einstein's widely familiar E=mc2. In my case, the equivalent was to worry over the effect on the readership of including or, worse, excluding identities.

Finally I, too, decided to name but one: Colin Stanley Winchester, whose tragic and untimely death contributed to defining the AFP's identity. (The fleeting reference to Petronious (? - c.66) is incidental; he was, of course, not one of us). Still, many if not most of you are indirectly acknowledged in the events and operations mentioned in this narrative. The blame, otherwise, for all flaws in this intentionally mostly light and eclectic article rests with me.

Deputy Commissioner Whiddett, APM, has held positions in state, territory and federal policing and has been seconded to, and worked with, police and criminal investigation services in the UK, USA, Canada, Western Europe and New Zealand. Mr Whiddett is responsible for the national criminal and intelligence operations of the AFP.

For most Australians the 19th of October 1979 was like any other day, but for the men and women of the former Australian Capital Territory Police and Commonwealth Police, and a short time later the people of the former Federal Bureau of Narcotics, it was either auspicious or inauspicious, depending on one's degree of faith or paranoia. The Australian Federal Police, which had come into legislative being on June 15, 1979, came to life in October that year with the infusion of people, and the former organisations had slipped (or were about to slip) into history.

To think back to 1979 is to be jolted into the realisation that some 80 per cent of the present membership were not with us then. For those of us who do indeed remember ‘The Beginning', our feelings will be mixed. Many will remember their past organisations with nostalgia. Quite a few will reflect on the first ill-fated attempt at a similar merger four years earlier. And most will recall the early soothing merger mantra ". . . no-one will be disadvantaged . . .". Of course, the author(s) of, and adherents to, that arrant fiction probably believed it, despite history demonstrating time and again that no human system yet devised is free of disadvantages. And ‘Enterprise AFP' proved to be no different.

The early years of the AFP were undeniably difficult. The merger was likened to "cobbling an ill-fitting 19th century boot", as the British architect of the AFP lamented. While the many ‘people problems' — some deadly serious, others deplorably laughable —were being sorted out, the old and new work of the AFP had to continue and unsurprisingly it fell, as always, to the professional few who had not had enough free time to feel ‘disadvantaged' and simply carried on and made the business-end tick.

Everyone wanted to make a contribution, to make a mark on the new organisation. Many useful as well as very silly ideas vied for attention. A few of the more memorable odd ideas were: a green and gold uniform, a police band and a mounted corps, and much energy more usefully expended elsewhere was lent to arguing that the Australian Coat of Arms on the AFP shoulder flash ought to be adorned richly with golden wattle. Now while these fancies were imaginative, they were hardly priorities for an organisation struggling to find its feet. The more useful contributions were on melding a single, cohesive national organisation in which all parts had an important but no greater or lesser place than the rest.

Back then, the AFP was segregated practically, and indeed sociologically, between the General Police Component and the Protective Service Component. Members of the former were held to be authentically minted police, the latter simply sentinels, a few of whom, nevertheless, had had police experience. While the early decisions as to who were fit for police work and who were fit to guard were felt by some to be as capricious as selections for ill-treatment in a concentration camp, there was, by and large, some attempt at fairness. Quite a few of the guarding element made the transition to the policing component, and, with typically dark police humour, were referred to collectively as ‘Retreads'. In 1984 we bade farewell to the Protective Service Component and it began a new life as the Australian Protective Service, the badge of which, incidentally, was amply filigreed with golden wattle — much to the chagrin of those who wanted it for the AFP. This separation was right and proper, as the writ of successive governments has been for the AFP to evolve as a law enforcement agency whose principal federal business is investigations.

Even though we gratefully gave up the ‘standing around' aspects of protection work, we continued to protect certain Australian and foreign VIPs and Internationally Protected Persons, the rationale being that this particular burden was onerous and demanded ready access to the wider range of conventional police powers and competencies and to our national and international colleagues.

An additional similar task, that of administering the specially legislated national witness protection program, fell to us following the revelations of the ‘eighties as to the very nasty habits of very pitiless criminals; that being a prosecution witness in proceedings against such predators was a dangerous and even lethal pastime, therefore the state ought to be obliged to keep endangered witnesses alive — both during their testimony and for as long as necessary thereafter.

In protecting witnesses or the elite, yardsticks such as critical success factors and other trendy methods to measure performance, all drastically reduce to whether each and every person exits his or her tailored protective cocoon, be it for one day or one year, as he or she entered — alive and well. Any other result is, by any clever measure, an abject failure. Thanks to our people, failure is something we work hard at avoiding.

One of the several early melodramas was shaped partly by the Sydney Hilton Hotel bombing in 1978 and by the AFP's birth coinciding with the rise internationally of aircraft hijacking. Aircraft hijacking enjoyed short-lived popularity due to most ending with the certain, violent demise of the hijackers, thus causing the more discerning terrorist to view this mode of terror as singularly unattractive if his or her death were not to be part of the game plan. In any event, a number of AFP identities with military backgrounds persuaded those who held the purse to pour sizeable sums into counter-terrorism measures, which naturally involved suitably awe-inspiring dress, the acquisition of exotic weaponry, frayful as well as farcical exercises, and many earnest talk-fests to share anxieties over ‘The Threat'. At one point, when blood had well and truly rushed to a few heads, even a military armoured car was both uselessly acquired and vainly deployed. All of that has now shrunk down to conform with both constitutional and operational reality, but it was an entertaining interlude.

For a few years after ‘The Beginning', we continued to suffer from an identity crisis. This was not helped by a number of prominent personages, who should have known better, persisting in referring to us as the ‘Commonwealth Police'. This made smug one-third of the new enterprise, but irritated the remainder. Our profile was (to borrow from the colourful but anatomically inaccurate observation of the wife of an Important Person about something else) lower than a snake's duodenum. The snake is a useful metaphor, as, back then, soaring like an eagle (or even striving like a platypus) seemed a profoundly distant prospect. Derogatory labels, applied mostly internally to misdescribe colourfully the members of the former organisations, were distilled by external critics and commentators to but one — ‘Plastics' — to convey the sense of AFP people not being ‘real' police. Later, as our standing seemingly improved in the eyes of the carpers, ‘Plastics' became ‘Perspex', presumably because the latter was a superior product to the former. A less flattering version was that perspex was thicker than plastic.

In those early years, notions such as empowerment and that rank did not necessarily equate with wisdom, or indeed commonsense, had not yet aroused the senses of the leaders or the led. Rank was still highly visible everywhere (even outside the ACT) and was routinely accepted as synonymous with enlightenment even if a leader was peddling hopelessly wrong-headed ideas or, worse, caused the hapless led to follow through on them. Here and there, unfortunately, not much has changed. One's ‘seniority number', if one were a sworn member (and back then unsworn members mostly rated less than krill in the food chain — that is before unified workforce magic transformed us all into equals), had a value akin to rank in the promotional stakes. The translation of the inaugural hierarchy, in keeping with dubious notions of what constituted advantage and disadvantage, brought about a few passable, but a few more unfortunate, appointments. This cautious retention of seniority for a period saw the elevation of a goodly proportion of the dull, nevertheless the idea that merit over seniority may well not constitute anarchy, soon began to take hold. Water, as they say, began to find its level.

Certainly in the first five or so years the AFP was anything but a cohesive organisation: there was Headquarters and there were the fiefdoms (now more commonly known as Regions), and to make things even more precarious HQ in particular had more feuding factions and the ever-present clutch of fawning courtiers working against each other than a constellation has stars. And even after half a decade or more it was not difficult to find people who still felt grievously disadvantaged — especially the talentless. Morale was said by the hand-wringers to be worse then than at any time in living memory.

Meanwhile, operationally, thanks to those who felt neither advantaged nor disadvantaged — simply bemused by those who did — we were gaining a tentative footing, nationally and internationally. So while a few were taking the pulse of morale, between 1981 and 1985, we opened shop in Los Angeles, Washington, Hong Kong, Manila, Islamabad and Singapore. And from our inception, we have continued to distinguish Australia and ourselves in United Nations' missions in Cyprus, Cambodia, Namibia, Somalia, Mozambique, and East Timor; as part of a multi-national force in Haiti; as advisers and trainers elsewhere on the globe; and, in recent years, as investigators of international war crimes. In peacekeeping, armed only with the force of will, men and women of the AFP brought the rule of law with courage, initiative, and quiet determination of the highest order to the task. Nowhere have these qualities been more evident than in East Timor where, in fraught circumstances and against impossible odds, the AFP stood between the murderous and unpredictable ‘militia' and ill-disciplined elements of the Indonesian police and military and those who were determined to cast their vote in the Popular Ballot.

In East Timor, as in other missions, we undertook impressively what we were sent to do.

We also began to make serious inroads into organised crime, and apart from one or two debacles best forgotten, a number of prominent and hitherto miraculously unscathed whole-of-life criminals bit the dust at the hands of the AFP.

The ‘eighties was also the era of several interesting commissions of inquiry in Australia, out of which organised crime came to be recognised as a genuine and present grave threat and new laws, such as proceeds of crime legislation, were introduced in an attempt to inconvenience the seriously wicked. During this period those who needed to be convinced finally were, that it would not constitute the end of civilisation as we know it if law enforcement were to be legislatively permitted to overhear the more anti-social conversations of these same crooks. We even tested a few early ‘partnership' arrangements with other agencies, with results that ranged from the successful through to the colourful and the plain awful. Operations with names like Scroll, Lavender, Neon, Rock, Postscript and Toggle achieved notable results. We were, however, troubled even then by the utter inadequacy of surveillance in the remote north of Australia, well before boat people were topical and perceived as worrisome.

Back then the drug debate, such as it was, centred on the steadily increasing availability of cannabis, and seizures of harder drugs were few and certainly far between and, in any event, were measured in the low grams not in kilos. The so-called ‘War on Drugs' has never ever been a true war, merely a number of small, random and inconclusive skirmishes from which the opposing side, encouraged by the steady increase in demand, has drawn strength and boldness and become more sophisticated, more pervasive, more menacing. We were unaware then, though it was not unimaginable, that significant deterioration on that front was set to occur. (And while it is not fashionable to say so, I fear much worse is in store). As a society, we also continued to ignore the numerous and growing social inequalities which have contributed to fanning the flames of the illicit drugs conflagration.

The march of time leads naturally to comment generally on the phenomenon of Change. We in the AFP have been entangled in Change for the whole of the past 20 years. But how surprising is that? You may preface Change with a suitable expletive, yet it is sobering to consider where we would be now if in 1979 the AFP had slipped magically into a parallel universe where time stood still, but all else around us rushed inexorably onwards as has been the case since humankind walked upright. If we had stood still we would be an organisation of little consequence, certainly not how we have evolved over 20 years. Change, occasionally ill-considered or imperfectly crafted and often badly explained and implemented, has nevertheless transformed the AFP into an agency recognised and respected in Australia and abroad.

Change made us forge a unique Identity. We began to question who and what we were and what we needed to become, and these are questions without ultimate answers if we are to adapt and remain relevant.

The advent of self-government in the ACT reopened a mild debate over whether the territory's community again ought to have its own police force, but commonsense prevailed then and the debate lapsed. However, just to prove that history can be viewed as cyclical as well as lineal, in recent times we have witnessed renewed stirrings over whether we should return to how it was in 1979. To unravel the huge gains in both Federal and ACT law enforcement over the past 20 years would, in my view, be stupendous folly, but I have long ceased to be surprised by folly. The ancients, at least back to Petronious, knew a thing or two about the exasperatingly cyclical nature of disruptive and purposeless change, but it seems to be the lot of the outgoing generation of every Age to endure the rehashing of old ideas, as if they were new, by the rising generation as the time carousel completes yet another revolution.

Before leaving Change, I was asked recently how many ‘reviews' leading to real change the AFP has had over the past two decades. My off-the-cuff estimate was at least one a year, every year. In fact, I was wrong: it is more like twice as many over the period. And for the information of those students of masochism, we inflicted most of them on ourselves!

In the mid-‘eighties, forensic technologies and techniques were on the move, with identikits becoming photofits, then computer-generated likenesses, and soon the AFP began pioneering and marketing its own unique forensic, technical and information technologies both in Australia and abroad.

We also began to take very seriously our ethical condition, putting in place measures, unique at the time, to bring to bear when necessary the arsenal and techniques we use on shrewd criminals against our own relatively few but equally crooked. Nothing could be more humiliating than to have some external scrutineer surprise us with something very unpleasant about the AFP that we have a clear duty to the public and ourselves to prevent or uncover. To lose sight of this utterly elementary truth is to undo years of internal vigilance and, of course, to undo our credibility and standing as individuals and as an organisation.

The more important reforms in those early years caused the AFP to re-order the organisation, shed inhibiting functions, overhaul terms and conditions (afoot yet again today) and, ultimately, in 1988, to ‘flatten' the rank structure and push authority and accountability downwards, where they belong. In fact, for those who are troubled by the extent of change today, 1988–1994 was the period of the most significant transition for the AFP. The reforms then included the first serious assault on the obstinate primacy of rank and saw the re-emergence of an old idea, now repackaged as ‘empowerment'. We also found ourselves becoming familiar with the concepts behind acronyms such as EEO and OH&S and high-minded terms such as Access and Equity, all of which were calculated to make all people equal and equally content with the world. Of course, as we all know, high-minded intentions do not easily become reality. And speaking of equality and intentions, about that time, ominously, ‘people,' ‘welfare' (as people issues were once known) or ‘personnel' were depersonalised further to become ‘human resources' and, later, ‘assets'. This shift in emphasis meshed neatly with the world-wide trend in economic and management babble which has a preference for dealing with people merely as inert entries in a column in a ledger.

We also became familiar with globalisation's slash and burn concepts such as ‘outsourcing', ‘re-engineering', ‘downsizing', ‘rightsizing', ‘delayering' and sudden wholesale disenchantment with so-called middle management, and here and there, in the rush to conform with fashion, the baby was ditched with the bathwater. The move from security of tenure to fixed term appointments for we ‘Assets' was cautiously accepted, chiefly because it came with a carrot, but a few damn doubters wondered whether the loss of tenure compromised the independence of the Office of Constable, reducing office holders to the status of employee. Thus far this concern has not been an issue, but nor has it been tested in any robust way. The introduction of FTAs, however, effectively turned the final screw in the casket of the vocation of policing being one of life-time duty and service.

Once again, these reforms were seen to advantage or disadvantage individuals depending on your bias (God forbid that anyone gave a second thought to what might also be happening to idealism!). It is to be noted, nevertheless, that one unforeseen and unlucky by-product of the benign translation of those in the newly compressed rank structure was that more than a few of The Disadvantaged found themselves elevated beyond their reasonable expectations and abilities, to the enduring despair of their subordinates.

And while those who were wise about such things continued to hold that morale was far worse than at any previous time in recorded history, between 1985 and 1990 we moved into London, Nicosia and Buenos Aires, and our skill in successfully undertaking controlled and other joint operations anywhere on the globe with participating international colleagues was increasing in sophistication.

We were nine months short of our first decade when the AFP and the country were stunned and saddened by the murder of Colin Winchester. We harbour the most personal of memories of this tragedy, yet while a decent and productive life was so prematurely and terribly cut short, the event strengthened the fibre and resolve of a maturing AFP. Our identity was even further defined. The nightmare of the event itself, however, was prolonged and continued unabated until the conviction — six long years on, after dogged and exemplary police work — of Colin's killer.

I mentioned earlier that ‘empowerment' is simply an old idea that has had a make over. What I mean is that Australian policing conforms to the British model conceived 170 years ago. It is fashioned along military lines, which was, in my view, a mistake. A perfectly understandable mistake given the era, but a mistake nonetheless. This is not to criticise the military, but in the military, authority — or superior orders — emanates from the top and passes downwards for obedient execution at the appropriate levels. Police officers, on the other hand, are independent office holders with original powers and authority, the exercise of which does not rely on superior orders. A military structure for civil police is also arguably inconsistent with the very principles expounded in 1829 by which the so-called New Police were to function.

Of course, a body of police demands some form of structure, organisation and management and inevitable rules and regulations, but police in Australia, as individuals, were well and truly ‘empowered' well before it became fashionable to wonder and worry over it. Unfortunately some people interpret empowerment as the right to do what they like, when they like, which means they are exhibiting an unfitness for the serious and exacting business of policing. We had such unfit people in 1979 and we have them still, and I daresay we'll have them in 2099. The difficult trick is for everyone in an organisation to identify with, and contribute diligently to, its ideals and mandate and to work together, not as rampant individualists.

Even though our identity crisis was fading, events such as the creation of the National Crime Authority (1984) and the real or imagined machinations of people in the wider bureaucracy said to have malevolent designs on us, caused a few alarmists to warn of take-overs and even our demise. This was the understandable legacy of having a workforce that had already lived through at least one aborted and one consummated merger at the expense (as some may see it) of the former organisations, therefore a few were twitchy. Of course, the recurring reports of our imminent demise were and are highly exaggerated, and while we maintain an alert interest in the state and direction of the organisation we will, short of being the victims of unwarranted chicanery, continue to flourish.

As we entered the second decade of existence, a new culture began to emerge: it was dawning on a growing body of people that their rank or position actually imposed obligations and responsibilities on them, not merely authority. The shrinking body of The Disadvantaged still paraded their gripes and relied upon their visible symbols of status, but found it increasingly difficult to be taken seriously by these means alone. Merit began to dominate in selections and the promotions' system became less clogged by wishful thinkers.

And as The Disadvantaged continued to grizzle that you would have to go back to the Big Bang or Creation (choose one) to find morale in a worse state, between 1990 and 1994 we opened up in Rome, Jakarta and Port Moresby, and operations with the names of Probe, Bigboy, Kaftan, Coat, Spiral, Tapir, Bastion, Newton, Rustic, Teacup, Flare, Windmill, Lilac, Civic, Isobar, Silkworm, Bud, Carousel, Leo, Bantu, Nepean, Camber, Bangle and Geronimo, raised our sense of achievement and our profile.

In the early ‘nineties we again critically re-examined our professed status as the ‘Commonwealth's primary law enforcement body', or variations of that sentiment, to see if we were perhaps deluded. Further industrial and structural reforms were undertaken and we participated in two defining external reviews, one of which, the Commonwealth Law Enforcement Review (1994), further stressed to government that it needed to take a closer interest in the organisational and operational evolution of the AFP in order to protect adequately the Commonwealth from present and emerging criminal threats.

In the mid-nineties, in reviewing where we had arrived over some 15 years and where possibly we may be in the future, it was felt that we needed to move further away from the 1829 policing model. We began to consider new titles and position descriptions. The decision to adopt Federal Agent for those below Deputy Commissioner in the federal sphere, was not taken without much vigorous, and sometimes heated, debate. There was an understandable view that we had unimaginatively imitated American titles; in fact, it was quite impossible to conjure up refreshingly new and novel alternatives which would not leave people guessing vainly as to who we were. For a time we bore the brunt of a new round of derisive jokes, yet there is no question this particular change has significantly improved our public image and standing nationally and occurred at a time when, fortuitously, our own in-house media people were marketing us better and turning out first-class publications (Platypus being one of them) for both internal and external consumption.

This decade has seen more organisational change, of course, and some exceptional results in operations. Having watched our progress in this area, it is clear we have become more confident, competent and innovative. Operations such as Papertiger, Caribou, Extra, Wand, Calgary, Norse/Oden and Wafer, proved the dexterity of the AFP to undertake successfully a very dissimilar range of work. And in the ACT, the zeroing in on the movements and preparations of career criminals, rather than on their repetitious crimes after the event, was yielding good results. We are also using techniques and technologies either unavailable or drastically scarce in the past, and much of this is due to the resourcefulness of our scientists, technicians and forensic specialists who ran their programs and research and development on shoestring budgets for years, yet have developed world-class technologies and solutions for application in increasingly complex and convoluted operations, and also in corporate support.

As we near the end of the second half of the decade, the future looks relatively promising. We are still fine-tuning the move from inflexible to more supple workplace structures, capable of adapting to both foreseen and unforeseen events and maximising the capabilities and energies of individuals in contributing together to achieve results. Our intelligence capability has improved markedly, and quite learned and informative papers on a wide variety of crime topics are being read and accepted beyond the mainstream law enforcement community; and tactical intelligence, through technical and operational performance means, has sharpened our edge in undertaking operations. The introduction of mobile strike teams, putting aside the promise of immediate real battle the words evoke, has opened up new possibilities for tackling work generally without the constraints of past fixed formulae for the ‘permanent' staffing of regions or other entities.

The major external resources review in 1998, the ensuing reform program of the government and other funding, are revitalising the AFP after a long enforced period on starvation rations. There is, however, still much that could and should be done if the AFP is to continue to rise from a deep trough and reach its potential. Our climb up is being made much more promising by new and improved information management systems, a quantum leap in the sophistication of our financial management, and the we-are-gradually-getting-there state of the engines under restoration that labour to manage and develop our people.

It is important that we do improve our capabilities markedly, as a significant contemporary development has been the rethink in influential external quarters as to what constitutes a threat to national security, with transnational crime and the drug traffic finally being understood to be leading, manifest external as well as internal threats to Australia's sovereignty, stability and the economic and personal wellbeing of its citizens. This change in attitude is attributable in large measure to the intelligent, patient perseverance of our people in convincingly pressing home the message in several national and international fora.

And in this last half of the decade operations such as Brawlins, Avoca, Brogue, Spanner, Pentium, Puritan, Sudan, Nitric, Molotov/Calculus, Anthem, Chowder, Redgum, Cyclops, Abilene, Ritz, Caspian, Pita, Tamarind, Platypus, Varnish, Cablet, Chandelier, Stockman, Linnet, Gentle, Novella, Magnetic, Toboggan, Aquatic, Bronte, and Bluebird/Avian have written a new chapter on the nefariousness and artfulness of criminals and proved the AFP was more than their match.

And while there will always be people who will judge morale as being at an all-time low at any time for all time, we continue to grow in ability and strength of purpose. Oh, and this year we put up our shingle in Hanoi and Beijing.

The third millennium is when any sequel to this necessarily brief and selective history will be written, perhaps in 2029 AD, our 50th anniversary, when there will be so much more to be revealed.

In reviewing our comparatively short life, I have been struck by two things in particular: the depth and breadth of our progress over 20 years and the remarkable dedication, resilience and patience, which are so often taken for granted, of you all in forging the AFP's achievements.

Operation Gentle seized 225kg of cocaine from

a runabout off the coast of Coffs Harbour in 1998.

It is perhaps the principal strength of policing that its practitioners, sworn and unsworn alike, have an overwhelming belief in the importance of what they do, a belief which transcends personal and organisational bickering. It is a quality which has been commented on, routinely and usually with surprise, by most in the extended column of consultants and other explorers who, over the years, have overturned and peered and poked knowingly under numerous of our corporate stones. The more forthright of their number have confided they are hard-pressed to find this commendable attribute in their own organisations, and why would this not be so when the bloodless qualities most admired and sought-after by the corporatists are to be found among the growing band of mercenaries for whom duty and service to the commonweal are altogether alien concepts and loyalty is exclusively to themselves or the highest bidder?

Your endeavours over the past two decades have made anything possible for us. We are now positioned to be regarded genuinely as the pre-eminent body to which the Commonwealth Government would naturally turn for professional expertise in law enforcement operations and law enforcement advice. It has been hard-won, not without pain, and it would not take much for us to be, once again, at the uncertain cross-roads of our future. I believe a favourable future is inextricably linked to the preservation of the original ideals of policing and these will be in jeopardy if the AFP ever becomes ‘just another job'. Whatever its origins, our vocation has come to be known as ‘The Job', a phrase which nevertheless understates idealism and the triumphs and frustrations that attach to something more lofty than the individual, the collective or organisational structures and symbols.

While change, too, can be important, even essential, perhaps irresistible, any change which erodes or weakens the fundamental liberal ideals on which policing is founded ought to be determinedly repulsed.

Let us trust, then, that in another 20, or even 100 years, the idealism that is ours, and of which we are the guardians, endures and is eternally distinguishable from the greater anonymous grey mass of paid toil from which duty and service purely in the public interest can never be expected or extracted.