A handful of private Australian 'risk' companies operated by former SAS soldiers is at the front line of Australia's border security in the country's far north, writes Peter Michael
SLAVE boats. Fish poachers. Drug traffickers. Gun smugglers. Transnational crime syndicates.
Billion-dollar booty. Poverty. Disease.
And a spy scandal.
Former SAS soldier "Mick" lives and works in the Torres Strait on the front line of Australia's secret, private war. 
"It's only a short boat ride," he tells his political cargo at Saibai Island, only 3km from the Papua New Guinea mainland. "But expect to get wet." He is one of the highly trained ex-SAS warriors-turned-trainers who populate these isolated mosquito-ridden coastal villages covered by the Torres Strait Treaty. Black wraparound sunglasses. Khaki shirt. Gunslinger stance. Mick and his quiet, lean offsider have the look of hard, capable men who like a challenge and can thrive in the toughest and most remote of conditions.
"It's the Land of the Unexpected," says Mick. "So expect that too." These battle-hardened warriors, their life experience forged in the heat of Australia's covert operations in Africa, Afghanistan and Iraq, have become private contractors and taken up a new mission.
They prefer to call it "smart security".
In the Torres Strait, in the populated islands of first-world Australia, and the primitive tribal settlements along the southern coastline of PNG up to the Indonesia border, this is a different sort of campaign.
Here it is a battle for "hearts and minds".
INLOC is one of a handful of quietly influential private Australian "risk" companies operated by former SAS soldiers and working in Australia, New Guinea, the South Pacific and South-East Asia.
INLOC has teamed with the world-renowned Cairns-based scientific organisation, Reef and Rainforest Research Centre, in a $21 million, five-year project to train 150 local villagers to be sea rangers in South Fly treaty villages of Western Province in PNG.
They've done the same in with remote indigenous communities in Queensland's Wild River Rangers program, in Bougainville and Vanuatu.
In doing so, hopefully, those locals will become Australia's eyes and ears in the fight against crime, corruption, terrorism, drugs, guns and human trafficking.
Mick, like the dentist in the toothbrush commercial, does not want to show his face. Or talk publicly. But, according to the INLOC website, they are expert in training indigenous peoples in coastwatch activities, community policing, health programs, surveillance and anti-poaching methods.
"In Africa some major business enterprises are dedicating two thirds of their previous 'hard' security budget on community engagement - what INLOC has developed into 'smart security'," it says.
"INLOC has already established enduring personal relationships across our operational footprint, affording us an extensive network of influence. (We have) ability to deliver robust services in location 'at the coal face' for sustained periods, even under difficult, harsh or hazardous conditions. Linguists include Tok Pisin, Bahasa Indonesia, Torres Strait Creole.
"We deliver a critical core of on-ground skills, infrastructure, and governance capacity, usually centred on ranger, gamekeeper or eco-guide training. By creating a marine ranger program, we provide food security, safe and reliable water transport, secure work areas in decentralised locations, and reliable electronic communications. The bottom line: local communities gain immense benefit." Two weeks ago they graduated their first class of 52 rangers at Mabaduan, a village visible across the water from Australia's northernmost outpost of Saibai Island, so close the rusa deer swim across the channel at low tide.
Fish poachers, pirates, traffickers and transnational crime syndicates, too, are known to ply these waters. They seek to exploit a "backdoor" smuggling pipeline through the vast network of islands and reefs of our porous northern border.
Top-end federal MPs Warren Entsch and Nigel Scullion, two men who love their guns, hunting and fishing, invited Insight on the trip north on a charter flight out of Thursday Island for the official graduation ceremony.
It was a celebration of culture and colour, a spectacle of song and dance, with live demonstrations from the INLOC-trained rangers on how they can use a chainsaw, administer first aid, and build basic infrastructure.
It was also good timing.
Days earlier, authorities on both sides of the border had launched one of the biggest-ever anti-human-trafficking operations in the Torres Strait to hunt down a fleet of 33 slave boats believed to be illegally fishing in the region.
It was a tip-off from unnamed local sources to Australia's new Border Force who advised PNG authorities of the fleet and it led to the impounding of the mother ship of the Thai crime syndicate-run operation.
Eight refugees from Myanmar and Cambodia who had been used as slave labour by the fish pirates - chained to the boats, kept in cages, tortured and starved - were rescued from the 1200sq m refrigerated tanker, Blissful Reefer.
PNG officials impounded the ship at Daru as the rest of the flotilla of 33 wooden fishing trawlers, each carrying up to eight indentured slave-labour workers, fled back over the border into international waters amid a huge air and sea search.
Border Force helicopters and light aircraft flew sorties in and out of Saibai Island as the Australian political delegation and RRRC executives were ferried to PNG by speedboat driven by the ex-SAS team.
"We prefer not to talk too much about the SAS guys," says Entsch, whose vast electorate of Leichhardt stretches from Cairns to the Torres Strait and PNG border.
"INLOC do a great job. But they like to be low-profile. They quietly prefer to get on with the terrific work they've been doing in building local capacity and infrastructure in these 13 treaty villages.
"But it is outrageous to find that slave boats even still exist in this day and age, let alone a whole fleet sneaking under the radar and turning up on our doorstep.
"It shows how vulnerable we are in these parts.
"As for the rangers themselves, it was very emotional to see the pride in their eyes and smiles on their faces as they received their ranger caps, badges and certificates in front of their family and communities." Entsch says the project had built a platform for the delivery of health services in these communities.
"It's come about because of my focus on TB, the lack of effective treatment in the Western Province and the threats this presented to Torres Strait communities and as far south as Cairns."
Scullion, who once operated his own fishing trawlers in the Torres Strait, is equally familiar with the threats on our border in PNG and at nearby Merauke in Indonesia's West Papua.
"In many ways, these rangers - the future leaders - are a lighthouse, not only to the region but also to the Australian region," he says.
Entsch, a former RAAF technician, has been lobbying federal Cabinet for a new forward patrol multi-purpose facility to be built on Saibai Island ahead of a border-protection announcement by Prime Minister Tony Abbott.
Abbott flies into the Torres Strait for a week-long stay in the region from tomorrow.
"This is the open backdoor in our nation's border security," Entsch says. "It's the soft spot on our doorstep, the weak point in the invisible line of Fortress Australia.
"It is absolutely critical we build a bigger presence on our northernmost border to support the fight against drugs, crime, and disease." Federal MPs support in principle the push by the Australian Federal Police to deploy drones, or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), across the Top End.
The AFP cited how drones would have been useful during the five-month Operation Alate when eight people were arrested last   October over links to a drugs-for-guns trafficking crime syndicate - including smuggling chemicals to make almost $2.5 million of ice - through the Torres Strait out of Daru.
The drones, which can carry heat sensors, cameras and weapons, would have been able to capture criminal acts but also covertly direct the highly-visible Navy, Border Force and Australian Federal Police boats, the nation's top cops say.
Saibai Island councillor Ron Enosa tells Insight the open border region is a notorious "lawless hotspot".
"We need more eyes, ears, and boots on the frontline up here," the treaty island chieftain says.
"Call it a spy base, a drone home, a border fort, a multi-purpose facility, whatever, we need law enforcement officers on the ground." Border Force officer David Rankine, based on Saibai Island, works on rotation out of a rusted demountable hut. His job is to man the thin red line where the border checkpoint is a stone seawall on a mud beach.
He and a fellow officer mostly process villagers - allowed cross-border visits under the Torres Strait Treaty - who come by banana boat for food and medicine supplies and urgent medical help.
The PM's visit comes at a fractious time in Australian-Papua New Guinean relations.
PNG politicians are still stinging over revelations the Australian embassy had been involved in a spy scandal, bugging officials and electronic eavesdropping in our former colony.
As PNG prepares to celebrate the 40th anniversary of independence next month, leaked US diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks described PNG as being trapped in "Ponzi politics".
It quoted Australian diplomats as referring to the PNG Government as a "dysfunctional blob".
Australia's former ambassador to PNG has been recalled in outrage over a decision by Australia to set up a mission in the strife-torn former autonomous region of Bougainville.
Bougainville was the setting of the infamous Sandline affair, with abortive plans to use a mercenary outfit to overthrow rebel leaders on the gold and copper-rich island in the late 1990s.
There is also unrest over the deployment of 74 AFP officers training and advising the Royal Papua New Guinean Constabulary.
PNG only has 6500 police across a population of seven million people and, in places like capital Port Moresby, corrupt police themselves are blamed by locals for up to 70 per cent of crime.
Abbott is due to take part in the Pacific Island Forum Leaders Summit on   September 9 and 10 when border security, corruption, policing and Australia's $477 million in foreign aid will be on the table.
"We still have colonial hang-ups, we don't have a normal relationship with PNG," says former diplomat and Melanesia Program director Jenny Hayward-Jones, of the Lowy Institute.
"We define it too much through the prism of our aid program, we look at it as an aid client, security issue and a development problem.
"We look at it through fearful eyes." PNG Prime Minister Peter O'Neill has put Australia on notice, in a call to ban the nation's foreign advisers acting as "middle men" on aid projects, as he develops closer links with China, India and Israel.
He has also ordered a review of the border treaty with Australia in the Torres Strait.
"O'Neill is trying to portray PNG as a regional power. He wants to position himself as a player in Asia," Hayward-Jones says.
"And he does have Australia bent over a barrel with our deal on the Manus Island detention centre facility." Times like these, we need all the friends we can get.
peter.michael@news.com.au