When police announce an “Australian-first” surveillance trial in a rural town with a large Aboriginal population, we should not be asking whether the technology is impressive. We should be asking why it is always these communities that become the testing ground.
Moree, where nearly one in five residents are Aboriginal, is now the site of a six-month trial of police surveillance drones, remotely operated from Bankstown, capable of hovering over the town for up to 500 hours a year, streaming live footage to police on the ground. Two machines, housed on the roof of the local police station, marketed as “eyes in the sky” to reduce crime and fear.
What has not been explained is who, if anyone, consented to this experiment, and who had the power to say no. Being briefed on surveillance is not the same thing as consenting to it, especially when refusal was never on the table.
Yesterday’s violent attacks by New South Wales police on peaceful demonstrators attending the protest against the visit of Israeli president Isaac Herzog demonstrates very clearly that police cannot be trusted. Shocking images of police brutality against peaceful protestors have flooded social media accounts. Greens member Abigail Boyd even reported being punched in the head and punched in the shoulder in an unjustified attack by police. Police were even seen attacking Muslims praying in the street.
Let’s call this drone experiment what it is: a dramatic escalation of state surveillance in a community already over-policed, over-criminalised, and structurally impoverished. Yet we are told this is about safety. We are told it will make “offenders think twice”, and that if it stops even one break-and-enter, then it’s a win.
“If it stops even one crime” is an argument with no limit. By that logic, there is no level of surveillance that could ever be excessive, no camera too intrusive, no monitoring too constant, so long as it can be justified by a hypothetical harm. That logic is familiar, and deeply dishonest.
Surveillance Does Not Equal Safety
There is no credible evidence that increasing surveillance reduces crime in the long term. What it does reduce is privacy, autonomy, and freedom, particularly for Aboriginal people, whose lives have been policed, monitored, controlled and punished since invasion. Surveillance does not exist in a vacuum. It lands on bodies already marked as suspect.
In Moree, police already conduct aerial surveillance using fixed-wing aircraft for dozens of hours each year. The problem, we are told, is that this is expensive. The solution? Replace planes with drones and multiply the coverage tenfold. More hours, more monitoring, more data, but much less accountability.
Hundreds of hours of aerial footage does not disappear when the trial ends. Who owns that data? How long is it stored? Who can access it, share it, or repurpose it later? History tells us that surveillance data collected for one purpose rarely stays there. What begins as a “trial” for serious incidents has a habit of quietly expanding: reused, reinterpreted, and redeployed, long after public attention has moved on.
This is not innovation. It is efficiency in repression.
Moree residents are also told not to worry about privacy, that operators will follow aviation rules “very, very strictly”. ‘We are not in the business of spying in people’s backyards or looking at people over their fences,’ said Superintendent Chris Nicholson from NSW Police Aviation Command. But privacy concerns are not about whether pilots comply with air-safety regulations, they are about what happens when police are given the power to watch a town continuously, proactively and pre-emptively. When surveillance shifts from responding to incidents to scanning for potential ones.
“Proactive aerial patrols” is just another way of saying suspicion without cause.
History tells us exactly how this plays out. Constant surveillance does not make communities safer; it makes them quieter on the street, in a park, outside their own homes. It teaches people, especially Aboriginal people and young people, to shrink themselves, to move differently, to expect scrutiny simply for existing in public spaces. And more police presence leads to more police contact, more contact leads to more charges, more charges lead to more incarceration, and Aboriginal people, racialised people and people living in poverty, as always, bear the brunt.
This trial is not about addressing the causes of harm; it is about managing the visibility of poverty while refusing to address it.
Moree has high rates of break-and-enter because it has high rates of poverty, housing insecurity, intergenerational trauma, and systemic neglect. None of those conditions are addressed by drones, cameras in the sky. Nor are they improved by streaming footage back to Bankstown.
But addressing poverty would require something this system has no interest in: redistribution, accountability, and a genuine transfer of power, away from policing institutions and toward the communities they claim to protect.
Instead, Moree gets surveillance.
This is the same logic we are seeing perfected globally, where entire populations are subjected to constant monitoring in the name of security, where technologies tested on racialised communities are later rolled out more broadly. What is being normalised in Moree today will not stay in Moree.
The colonial playbook has always been the same: test the tools of control on those deemed expendable, then scale up.
We should be deeply alarmed that a town with a significant Aboriginal population has been chosen as the proving ground for what police openly describe as “the next step in policing”, because we know where these steps lead. They lead to more criminalisation, not less. More punishment, not prevention; and more fear, not safety.
Notably absent from this announcement is any suggestion that Aboriginal community-controlled organisations led the decision, designed the safeguards, or retained veto power. Surveillance imposed on Aboriginal communities, rather than governed by them, is not protection, it is control.
Policing Is Not Community Safety
Community safety does not come from drones circling overhead. It comes from secure housing, decent incomes, culturally led services, and self-determination, and it comes from investing in people, not watching them.
More surveillance is not the answer. Crueller, more dystopian policing has never been the answer.
The question is not how this technology will be regulated, but whether it should exist here at all. The answer should come from the community, with the power to refuse it.
This trial should be opposed, not because it might be misused, but because its very premise is wrong. It treats communities as problems to be monitored rather than people to be supported, and it expands the reach of policing while shrinking the horizon of justice.
And because if we don’t say ‘no’ here, we already know where the cameras will turn next.
As a matter of fact quite a few night clubs and inner city areas have installed cameras, whose populations would have rather different socio-economic status from Moree. They are also very well lit, in part to give people a sense of safety from crime. Would the writers be opposed to them? In principle I can’t see them as that much different to the use of drones though I’ll admit the drones does make me uncomfortable.