Biosecurity Amendment (Improving Operational Efficiency) Bill 2026
Mr MATT SMITH (Leichhardt) (16:00): There is a strange trick of legislation sometimes. This is the Biosecurity Amendment (Improving Operational Efficiency) Bill 2026. Its purpose is to get rid of those stupid cards that nobody likes filling out when they arrive back in Australia.
The first time I travelled overseas I was 16 years old. I was coming back from a basketball tour and I was tired and injured. Because of where Australia is in the world, all flights seem to go overnight, and I hadn't slept when we arrived in Melbourne.
It was the late nineties. Someone handed me a card and on it they needed a whole bunch of details, some of which I couldn't remember. I wasn't entirely sure where my passport was.
I was 16, so I certainly didn't have a pen. I couldn't remember if I'd been on a farm. It was a complete shemozzle.
We got through it and I was allowed back into the country, which I'm very thankful for. That is something that we Australians face—those of us lucky enough to travel overseas—but it's something that our international visitors face as well, particularly in a region like Leichhardt. We have two international airports.
We are a tourist destination. People come from all over the world. It's a bucket list investment, just for a few hours on the beautiful Great Barrier Reef or to smell the clean air in the Daintree or to take a look at the vastness of Cape York.
The last thing people want to do when they get off that plane is fill out that card. You've got the card, you trudge through customs and get through security, then you get your bag and you get to go out into the beautiful sunshine. But we're changing that.
We have been working with Qantas over the last few years, developing the prototype and making sure we've got a system that works. Over 425,000 people have already used it. Over the next four years we're phasing those cards out—gone, done, finished.
If I'm lucky enough to travel overseas again, I'm looking forward to being able to do it all electronically on my phone, nice and quick, and get back to doing the things I want to do—which, when I'm coming home, usually involve collecting my dogs. But, for our tourists, it'll be getting out amongst everything that Australia has to offer. This is going to create cost savings.
It's going to make sure that people get where they want to go faster. It's going to improve the opportunity for our customs and Border Force officers to do the thing that they are best at doing: keeping our borders secure, keeping our country safe and keeping contraband—tobacco, alcohol, drugs and weapons—out of Australia. They won't have to collect the cards.
You won't have to remember where you're staying, which can be a bit tricky, particularly if English is not your first language. We want to make the experience better. We want to make sure the people—the men and women—who are working some really strange hours at times, with flights arriving at two or three in the morning, are doing the job that they put their hand up for.
Every customs officer and Border Force officer I've ever met in this job has put their hand up for one reason: they want to keep Australians safe. They understand the responsibility and the commitment that that takes. They understand the precious nature of what we have been given naturally and the precious nature of what we've built as a society.
And they are hell-bent on making sure that it continues in the right direction. They don't want things that are dangerous coming into our country, and they don't want to be collecting cards and entering data when it could be done electronically. This has been in the works for quite a while.
It seems like such a small change, but small changes have big impacts, and it also brings us into the 21st century. It is not a great look to hand people a card on their way into Australia, particularly when they're sitting there on their smartphones—probably playing the block game. This will make it better and easier.
Pressure will be taken off the system, and our Border Force and customs officers will be able to continue to do what they need to do. For example, in 2025, over 359,000 incoming travellers and more than 280,000 air and sea consignments were inspected. The modernisation will allow those numbers to increase.
We know that organised crime is testing the borders always. We've seen it up my way, in the Torres Strait, and we responded hard with BROADSTAFF. But it's like the velociraptors in Jurassic Park.
They're going to keep testing and they're going to keep coming. Each time that happens, we need to be ready for them. We need to make sure that our security systems are there.
We need to make sure that our Border Force is well resourced. There was an extra $74 million for Operation BROADSTAFF in the last budget, keeping the most northern border safe. It's a bit of a porous border with the treaty villages there, but it's an important part of Australia.
Being smart and practical is the Australian way. It's always been the Australian way. Now our customs is going to catch up to what we know we're capable of.
I'm really excited to know that the guys who are on the front line will be making a difference and that they're not going to have to do the paperwork. No-one likes paperwork. Since this commenced in 2024, as I said, over 450,000 passengers have already utilised this system, mostly on inbound Qantas flights to Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne, and they've trialled it as a travel declaration.
The anecdotal evidence coming out of this is that it has been met as a resounding success. We're going to expand it out to Perth and Adelaide before the end of 2026. That will take care of most of our capital cities, and then it will be rolled out more broadly across Australia to our regional international airports, of which Cairns is one and Horn Island is another.
This is an essential part of what co-design looks like. This isn't a department saying to business or an entire industry, 'This is what we think you need.' This is sitting down, listening and understanding what the requirements are and building a system that meets the needs of that industry. That's what good governance looks like—understanding the needs of who it is that you're working with.
In this particular case, the airline industry has been very excited to get this up and running because they know what that means. They know that faster movements through customs is a selling point. Everyone always starts their story about their trip overseas by saying how bad customs was—'How was your trip to Peru?' 'Oh, it was great, but I was three hours in customs.' It's the negative that always sticks.
I don't want people talking negatively about the Far North or about Australia when they come here. I don't want them to say, 'But customs was a bit rough; we were there for a couple of hours.' I want them to say: 'I got off the plane and I went outside and felt that beautiful Australian sunshine hit my skin for the first time. It's got that tingle that is not available in most of the rest of the world.' I want them to say that they smelt that air and that they looked at our blue sky.
Our sky, compared to a lot of the other countries I've ever been to, is electric—and, in my part of the world, set against the rainforest or, down south, the gum trees. That's what I want people to talk about when they get off the plane. That's what I want them to talk about when they go back to their countries of origin.
That's what I want them to remember—that initial beauty and the fact that someone said, 'G'day, welcome to Australia; we hope you enjoy your stay here.' We understand what that means for tourism, what that means for our international reputation and what that's going to mean to the hundreds of thousands of people who will descend on Queensland over the next few years, especially when the 2032 Olympics are up and running.
We're going to make it nice and smooth. We're going to make it nice and easy. The sun will hit their skin.
They'll be in Brisbane, they'll be in Cairns, they'll watch the Olympics and we will say, 'G'day, welcome to Australia.' I commend this bill to the House.