I’m Wing Commander Noel Hinschen. I’m the current Commanding Officer of RAAF Base Darwin. Previously we were called the Base Commander but now I’m the Commanding Officer, I’m also the Commanding Officer of 321 Expeditionary Combat Sports Squad, which is the squadron which actually does most of the running of the base here. Now, RAAF Base Darwin as such, predominately here to support any sort of operation to the North or North West of here, or a mounting base from here. In other words, if there is any type of humanitarian activity towards the north of us, as the tsunami was a couple of years ago a lot of that gets mounted out of here. We… the base is here ready to tick into gear and provide whatever support is needed at the time.
Well, we are, Australia, the current government and the previous government, and a number of previous governments have taken it upon, the responsibility as being a good neighbour in this region, and being able to provide support to the whole region where there any sort of a need arises, in most cases obviously it is a humanitarian type role but in some cases it’s different. Such as East Timor for example it’s more of a security assisting type of role there at this stage. Now as a good neighbour the government has said that’s the sort of tasking they would like us to do and as Air Force we are only part of the complete ADF network, the Australian Defence Force network. We’re not stand alone, it’s not the Air Force doing it. It’s the Air Force, Navy and Army doing it combined. But the RAAF base here, as such, is the mounting base to provide that airhead. As you are probably well aware we have got a number of heavy airlift aircraft in the Air Force, C17’s and Hercules aircraft, and those aircraft have to have an airstrip to fly out of. That’s just the nature of the way they operate. So, Darwin provides that service.
The operations from here is to do that surveillance role along the northern coastline and of course across to the north of us, into our region and down along the western coastline into the western region. Now that role is a surveillance role of fishing boats that shouldn’t be there, shipping that shouldn’t be there, at the same time they pick up any type of search and rescue type operations, the - last week the Orion behind us was involved in a search and rescue operation out to the North of us for a fishing boat that had lost its power and had gone under and they got a call, they were there and they were off looking for them. They eventually located them and called in the rescuers to pull them… to take them away, and collect them out of the water so to speak. Now, the other type of surveillance role is of course they’re looking for anything that might be a danger to our shores, not just personnel but environmental danger. Anything at all like that, they’re keeping their eye out and they feed that back to the appropriate Commonwealth Government institution or territory or state government institution who then follow that particular sighting up and take action accordingly.
The fact that Australia hasn’t been attacked in, you know, I don’t know how many, how many years doesn’t mean to say we don’t need a defensive capability, obviously we need that to be able to defend our own country. Second World War was a prime example of where we were; we were actually attacked on our shores. Here in Darwin there were bombing runs, a number of bombing runs that many people don’t even know about. But, there was constant bombing. So, we do need to be able to protect our shores but we also need to have a strong defence force to be able to go off shore and assist our neighbours in that regard defensively. So that the neighbours that we have agreements with, we’re there as a good neighbour to help them at the time. We’re not just sitting back, on our shoreline waiting for problems occur to us because that’s not the way a good neighbour acts in a region.