QANTAS had been forced to seek security intelligence from overseas because Australian agencies could not provide up-to-date information, one of theairline’s most senior security officers claimed yesterday.

Speaking at the Security in Government conference held in Canberra, the airline’s crisis planning manager, Karl Sullivan, said the response from intelligence agencies was often slow and irrelevant.

He said that when the airline sought information about a situation in Japan a few weeks ago, “the answer from the Australian agency we deal with was `We don’t have any information about that’, which … is not good enough.

“One phone call to a US agency and a UK agency and we had all of the information that they had.”