The New South Wales Police Commissioner has insisted that drones deployed over Moree — a town in north-west New South Wales with a substantial Aboriginal population — are not being used for surveillance, but civil liberties groups and community advocates are not persuaded, according to the ABC.
The commissioner's denial raises an obvious question that has not been satisfactorily answered: if the drones are not for surveillance, what are they for? Moree, a town of roughly 8,000 people on the Gwydir River, has one of the highest proportions of Aboriginal residents of any town in New South Wales. The Aboriginal community there has long had elevated contact with law enforcement — a dynamic community leaders consistently describe as a product of over-policing rather than elevated criminality.
Deploying drones over a residential community is not a politically neutral act. The technology is capable of sustained aerial surveillance of individuals, vehicles, and gatherings at resolution and persistence that ground-based policing cannot match. The commissioner's assurance depends entirely on trusting the police to describe their own operational purposes accurately — an assurance that communities with Moree's history with New South Wales Police are not obliged to accept at face value.
Australia has no comprehensive statutory framework governing police use of drone technology. The regulatory landscape is fragmented across state and Commonwealth aviation authorities, without the kind of oversight mechanism — independent review, mandatory data retention limits, court-ordered deployment authorisation — that would be considered baseline in comparable jurisdictions. Police can essentially deploy drones where they choose and describe the purpose in terms of their preference, facing no systematic external check.
Civil liberties advocates and the Australian Human Rights Commission have both called for a national framework governing police surveillance technology, including facial recognition and drones. Those calls have not produced legislation.
The pattern extends well beyond Moree. Indigenous communities across Australia — in Alice Springs, in remote Western Australia, across the Northern Territory — have been subject to disproportionate and poorly scrutinised police operations for decades. Drones represent a technological upgrade to that same unequal pattern of enforcement.
The commissioner's denial deserves to be tested, not accepted. What data are the drones collecting? How long is it retained? Who has access to it? Under what authority was the program initiated? These are not difficult questions. The fact that they have not been answered publicly is itself informative.
