Australia`s defence minister Richard Marles introduced an amendment to parliament that seeks to introduce a 20-year prison term for providing military training to a foreign military.
Pat Hoelscher/AFP
• Australia plans to send any resident who trains a foreign military to jail for up to 20 years.
• Draft legislation seems to have the Test Flying Academy of South Africa firmly in its crosshairs.
• The company says the change will not affect its operations in any way just as US sanctions didn`t.
Australia plans to introduce tough new penalties for any resident involved in training a foreign military not closely allied to that country.
But the South African company the law seems to target says it will not be affected.
Australia`s defence minister Richard Marles on Thursday introduced an amendment to Australia`s parliament that seeks to introduce a penalty of 20 years in prison for providing military training or tactics to a foreign military or government body, including hybrid civilian and military organisations, or state-owned companies, without authorisation.
Australia`s close partners Britain, the United States, New Zealand, and Canada will be exempt, officials said, as will training for the United Nations or for humanitarian relief.
Marles said the law will strengthen criminal laws in Australia that already ban the provision of military training to a foreign government by former Australian defence staff. It will extend that ban to any citizen or permanent resident who provides such training.
The change seems to have the Test Flying Academy of South Africa (TFASA) firmly in its crosshairs. But, if so, Marles may be disappointed. TFASA told News24 it had no Australians on its staff, and that the change would not affect its operations
In

November 2022 Australian police raided the home of TFASA chief operating officer Keith Hartley, a former British military pilot. Authorities said they suspected him of organising the training of Chinese military pilots, but he was never charged.
The raid came a month after the United Kingdom issued an official `threat alert` about TFASA`s activities.
TFASA has been openly training Chinese pilots out of an Oudtshoorn base since 2002, and was formed with the blessing of the South African government with just such training in mind.
The company recruits pilots trained by NATO countries, but says it has protocols in place to ensure sensitive military information is never shared.
Britain too trained Chinese pilots, at a time when relations between the two countries were growing closer. But with the United Kingdom and United States increasingly considering China a threat, such cooperation has fallen away.
Unlike Australia, Britain has not yet sought to update its legislation accordingly.
In June, the United States added TFASA, and other aviation companies in countries such as Thailand and the United Arab Emirates, to an `entity list` of individuals and companies thought to be a possible threat to American security or its foreign policy.
The US does not consider a listing to amount to sanctions, but American companies that do business with listed entities anywhere in the world could face criminal charges.
At the time, TFASA said it did no business in the United States, and that its operations would not be affected by the move.
It also pointed out that the majority of foreign training of Chinese pilots happened in the United States. V.4984

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Airports Company South Africa (ACSA) this week revealed that Cape Town International Airport (CTIA) has achieved a ground-breaking milestone by processing more than 10 million passengers over a single financial year. This is the highest number of regional and international passengers processed since COVID-19 V.5316
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Due to system downtime and load-shedding, the Department of Home Affairs (DHA) lost nearly 141,000 hours of Smart ID application and production time between the 2019/20 and 2022/23 financial years. Minister Aaron Motsoaledi revealed this figure in a recent response to questions raised in Parliament by Democratic Alliance MP Adrian Roos. Motsoaledi provided a breakdown of smart ID production and application hours lost to technical difficulties and load-shedding per province for each financial year from 2019/2020. These disruptions hit home Affairs offices in the Eastern Cape the hardest, with over 34,000 hours to rotational power cuts and system downtime. Mpumalanga offices lost the next-highest number of hours at 17 V.5313
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Home Affairs Minister Dr Aaron Motsoaledi has said the public has shown great support for the final White Paper on citizenship, immigration and refugee protection which appeared in the Government Gazette on Wednesday. Briefing the media, he addressed what he saw as a long-overdue need to replace an outdated Citizenship Act, as well as enact proposed changes to existing legislation. V.5306
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Minister Aaron Motsoaledi’s indifference to the plight of those affected by his decisions is appalling In the tumultuous seas of immigration law, where uncertainty looms and families are left adrift in bureaucratic limbo, the department of home affairs has emerged as a sinking ship. As a director of a firm of immigration attorneys I’ve witnessed first-hand the dire consequences of the department’s negligence and incompetence. Today, I raise my voice not just as an attorney but as a concerned citizen, urging for a radical overhaul to salvage what remains of our immigration system. We have tirelessly fought battles in the courtroom against home affairs’ disregard for agreed-upon time frames. Countless cases have landed on our desks, each one a testament to the systemic failures plaguing the department. We’ve seen cases where contempt applications were the only recourse, as the department brazenly ignored court orders. V.5307
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Document proposes overhauling the Citizenship Act, the Refugees Act and the Immigration Act and a review of the international treaty on refugee protection Home affairs minister Aaron Motsoaledi says the cabinet has approved a white paper overhauling the country’s immigration laws after “robust engagements” that resulted in “wide support” of the document’s policy positions. V.5308
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The DA has been inundated with complaints that the Department of Home Affairs (DHA) systems are offline, resulting in long queues and delayed processing of documents. Through questions posed to the Minister, the DA can now reveal that the DHA has lost over 77 years’ worth of working hours due to system downtime and load-shedding from 2019 to date. Concerningly, this data only relates to hours lost for the application of smart IDs, meaning decades more of working hours could have been additionally lost in other spheres such as passport or visa applications. The lost hours are largely due to system downtime, surpassing load-shedding. In the 2022/2023 financial year, where we experienced extensive load-shedding, system downtime was the cause of 41 691 hours lost (17 years), whereas load-shedding caused around 9 322 hours lost (4 years) at DHA civic offices on the production of smart IDs. V.5309
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JOHANNESBURG - Minister of Home Affairs Aaron Motsoaledi said that while the White Paper on Citizenship, Immigration and Refugee Protection had been gazetted, there were amendments that needed to be made to the legislation before it could be passed into law. The White Paper is proposing an overhaul of the country`s migration laws, with the aim of tightening rules around allowing migrants into the country. V.5310
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