Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2026-2027

Mr LITTLEPROUD (Maranoa) (18:49): I have one simple question, which I hope this government can answer. After four years of an Anthony Albanese government, why are we still filling out a paper based declaration card, when returning to, or coming to, Australia, to declare what is in your bags and where you have been? I can give a little bit of feedback and a little bit of experience on this because I was once the agriculture minister.

Back in 2021-22, we sat on a pathway of digitising the declaration card so that we could simplify it like the rest of the world has done to make it easier for our airports to process passengers through those airports so they can enjoy their holiday here in Australia but also to protect our biosecurity and for Border Force to have the information about those coming in here.

Wouldn't it make sense that, in 2026, after we set this in train back in 2021-22 at the cost of a bit over $20-odd million to digitise this, we have a government that has been here for four years and still hasn't prioritised this? Just so we understand—this goes beyond Border Force into biosecurity, because we were also putting in place and prioritising 3D X-ray scanners with AI intelligence.

We were doing that in New Zealand. If you put your bag through New Zealand and came to Australia, that scan would marry with your electronic declaration so that our Border Force and an AQIS staff would know what was in your bag before you even came here and whether it married up with the declaration card. That was going to save hundreds of millions of dollars in what was required of the resources at our airports to process passengers through every one of our ports.

The fact is that, four years on, this government has fallen asleep at the wheel and hasn't digitised the declaration card when the rest of the world has. When we face the Olympics in Brisbane in 2032, you'll have line-ups waiting to come through airports, whether they be in Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne or wherever they want to come into this country to go and experience the Olympics.

We will still be waiting because the Albanese government has been sitting there doing three-fifths of bugger all. The reality is that the technology's there, the opportunity is there and the streamlining of this process helps Border Force and AQIS to process passengers. That feeds in to what happens in terms of what we actually charge for the processing of passengers coming through.

This government added to the processing of passengers an extra $10 in this budget. Well, if you invested in technology, you wouldn't have to increase that and put a tax on tourism by actually saying there's another $10 on the passenger movement charge in this country. If you had invested in a simple digitisation of the declaration of those coming into this country for a measly $25 million, you would have sorted this out.

What is the minister doing? Literally—where are the Minister for Home Affairs and the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry? We had it sorted.

We were ready to actually implement this. We'd actually invested in further technology down the supply chain to ensure that we could process passengers but also protect our borders even better with AI intelligence and 3D scanning. That would go further to make sure that we protected Australians.

We would streamline this. This is just common sense. But, for some reason, this minister has been asleep at the wheel and has let this fall away.

This is an opportunity for the minister to explain why. To finish in the time allotted to me, I saw in the Australian today a story about illicit tobacco and a new report that tells us that now we are to the point where only about 20 per cent of the market is through a regulated model. The rest is through the black market because we have gone down this model of prohibition.

Prohibition has never worked anywhere, and the fact that this government has said that they think that it will work has meant that we have lost billions of dollars of excise that will now not go into our health system, where we will still have the health problems to abide. This is the reality of a government that has lost touch with the reality of where we sit as a nation and where the pressures are as a nation.

I say to the minister: there are a couple of quick fixes here, and you could do them very quickly. (Time expired)