Biosecurity Amendment (Improving Operational Efficiency) Bill 2026

Ms AMBIHAIPAHAR (Barton) (13:13): As a kid, I would sit with my uncle, late at night, on his car bonnet, watching the planes taking off or landing at Sydney airport. Fast forward to today: if you stand on the northern edge of my electorate on any given morning, you'll see the planes lining up over Botany Bay and, one after another, descending into Sydney airport.

It is a visual Barton locals know very well because behind each landing and take-off is a small force of my own constituents. They're baggage handlers, check-in staff, cleaners, caterers, ground crew and biosecurity officers checking bags at the carousel before anyone gets to go home. Sydney Airport sits right on Barton's doorstep.

For thousands of families in Hurstville, Rockdale, Kogarah and Bexley, it isn't just a piece of infrastructure; it's the family income. And that's the lens I bring to this piece of legislation, the Biosecurity Amendment (Improving Operational Efficiency) Bill 2026, seeing it not as a theoretical piece of border machinery but as legislation that touches on an industry my community works in, lives near and very much depends on.

I want to start with something almost everyone in this chamber has experienced personally: standing in the arrivals hall after a long haul flight, exhausted, filling out a paper form by hand, trying to remember exactly what farm you visited a couple of countries ago, then shuffling forward in a queue that never seems to actually move. That paper form is the Incoming Passenger Card, and it has been part of the arrival experience for many decades.

It works in the sense that it gets the job done, but it's slow. It's manual, and in an age when almost everything else about air travel has gone digital, it increasingly feels like a bit of a relic. Two previous attempts to digitise it, between 2016 and 2022, didn't get across the line, but this bill is the third attempt and, unlike the first two, it's already proving itself in the real world.

Since October 2024, a pilot program called the Australia Travel Declaration has been running on select Qantas international flights, starting in Brisbane and expanding to Sydney in 2025 and to Melbourne this year. Instead of a paper card, travellers fill in their declaration on their phone up to 72 hours before they even board. It generates a QR code sent straight to their email, which a Border Force officer simply scans on arrival.

As of May this year, more than 380,000 travellers came through this system this particular way. In July, the government announced that it would extend the digital declaration to every capital city before the end of the year and has backed it with $56.1 million over four years to build a web form version so that no traveller, regardless of which app they have or don't have, is left behind.

For an airport that sits in my community's backyard, that's not a minor technical upgrade. It's the difference between a smooth Tuesday arvo at the terminal and a bottleneck that ripples through every gate, every ground crew's shift and every connecting flight. Let me put some scale around what our biosecurity system is actually managing.

Last year alone, biosecurity officers intercepted more than 359,000 incoming travellers carrying something of concern and inspected over 280,000 air and sea consignments. Detector dogs, including the extra 20 this government has added to the front line, caught more than 42,000 items at our borders and mail centres in 2024. Over 10,000 of those were through the new dogs alone.

Those aren't just statistics for a briefing note. Every one of those interceptions happened because a person was standing at a desk or a dog was working on a bag at an airport where my constituents go to work every single day. When traveller numbers keep climbing—and they are climbing, with Australia welcoming millions of visitors a year and with Brisbane, in particular, preparing to host the Olympics—the volume passing through the system only grows.

If we don't modernise how we collect basic biosecurity information, the strain doesn't fall on some faceless bureaucracy; it falls on the workforce at Sydney Airport, on the queues that snake back from immigration and ultimately on whether Barton locals actually get home on time after their shift. This legislation makes three changes to the Biosecurity Act 2015.

First, it creates a clear, standing obligation for travellers arriving in Australia—passengers, crew or anyone in charge of an aircraft or vessel—to provide the biosecurity information regulators need, in whatever form regulations prescribe. That's the legal foundation that lets the Australia travel declaration keep expanding as the paperless replacement for the Incoming Passenger Card, covering the same essential questions—what goods you're carrying, where you've travelled and your occupation—but just collected earlier, digitally and with far fewer touchpoints between a traveller and an official.

Second, it introduces a notice-of-intention process for businesses operating under approved arrangements, the agreements that let companies manage their own biosecurity risk under departmental oversight. Under this bill, if the department is proposing to refuse an application or attach conditions to it, the business gets advance notice and a genuine opportunity to respond before that decision is finalised.

This is not a new concept, invented from scratch; it puts into law a practice the department already follows informally. But writing it into legislation matters, because it gives industry participants certainty and a proper avenue to be heard, rather than simply being told after the fact. Third, the bill fixes a drafting error concerning the powers of the Inspector-General of Biosecurity to request relevant information during a review.

This is a small but important piece of legislative housekeeping that ensures independent oversight of our biosecurity system actually functions the way parliament always intended it to. I note for the House that none of the regulation-making powers in this bill are exempt from parliamentary disallowance. Every regulation made under the new traveller information obligation remains subject to the parliament's scrutiny, which is exactly where that scrutiny belongs.

Listening to people who actually use it, what struck me the most in reviewing the evidence before the Senate committee inquiry into this bill is how broad the support is and how thoughtfully conditional some of it is, too. Industry has been asking for this for years. The Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry has recommended digitising border processes in successive pre-budget submissions.

The Tourism & Transport Forum called it 'practical, achievable and long overdue'. The Australian Airports Association surveyed travellers and found 71 per cent wanted a digital option. Sydney Airport itself told the committee this bill 'provides an important legislative foundation for a more efficient, secure and technology enabled border environment'.

But I think the most important voices in this debate are the ones asking us not to rush the substance of biosecurity protection in the name of speed. The National Farmers' Federation put it plainly at last year's Economic Reform Roundtable: 'Our biosecurity is a non-negotiable, and any change to the paperwork has to prove it strengthens border protection, not just streamlines it.' The Queensland Farmers Federation made a very similar point, stressing that cybersecurity has to be a genuine pillar of any digital system, not an afterthought.

Canberra Airport, even as it has welcomed the change, reminded us that the declaration process has to stay accessible for travellers who face barriers using digital technology—older travellers, people without smartphones and people who simply aren't confident online. That is a very true reflection when I think about my grandparents, when they travel. I think those are the right instincts, and they're instincts that this bill actually tries to build in.

The regulations remain disallowable. A web form option is funded specifically so no-one is forced to rely solely on an airline's app. And the underlying information being collected doesn't change.

We are not lowering the bar on what biosecurity risks were already screening for; we're changing how efficiently we screen for them. At the end of the day, I think the bill is about two things at once. It's about protecting Australia's farms, food security and environment at the border.

And it's about making sure that people who work that border—many of them who live in my electorate, who are also members of the mighty United Workers Union, I must say—aren't carrying the weight of a system that's very much stuck in 2005 vibes. Every time I drive past the airport, I see the queues at the drop off. I think about the shift workers heading in and the exhausted families heading out, all of them relying on a system that must be quite rigorous but also fair.

I believe this bill doesn't compromise on that rigour. What it does is finally bring a much fairer and a much clearer system to the industry. As the Chair of the Sydney Airport Community Forum, this is something that would be of interest for the participants in this forum, who look at a lot of things outside of the scope, particularly on LTOPs and the sounds of aircrafts, but it is also quite relevant to the functions and the operations of Sydney Airport, which are really pertinent.

I think for them this is an important step. It will also make it clearer for Sydney Airport and also for the workers and travellers. I commend the bill to the House.

Sitting suspended from 13:25 to 16:00