Biosecurity Amendment (Improving Operational Efficiency) Bill 2026
Senator McGRATH (Queensland) (12:31): I rise to speak on the Biosecurity Amendment (Improving Operational Efficiency) Bill 2026. The coalition will be supporting this bill. Australia has one of the strongest biosecurity systems in the world, and we did not build it by accident.
It reflects decades of sustained investment, sound science and a shared understanding across the parliament that biosecurity is not a partisan issue; it is a national one. The coalition's approach to this bill reflects that same principle. We support a strong, well resourced biosecurity system, and we support the sensible use of new technology to help that system run more efficiently.
Our test in considering this legislation has been a simple one: that modernisation must never come at the expense of the strength of Australia's biosecurity protections. This bill passes that test. Let me set out what the bill actually does.
Every year, millions of travellers arriving in Australia complete a two-page paper Incoming Passenger Card providing information about the goods they are carrying, the places they visited and their occupation, all of which act as indicators of potential biosecurity risks. This bill creates the legal basis for that information to also be collected through a new digital Australia travel declaration that sits alongside the existing paper card rather than replacing it.
Travellers will be able to complete the declaration through an airline app or a web form before or during their travel, generating a QR code that a biosecurity officer can scan on arrival. It has already been piloted on selected Qantas flights into Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, and, by all accounts, that pilot is proceeding sensibly. This bill makes giving that information mandatory, and it does that by extending the existing civil penalty of 120 penalty units, which already applies to refusal on the paper card, to this new digital pathway.
I want to be very clear what that is and is not. It is not a new punishment; it is the same longstanding protection simply applied consistently across both channels. It is also worth noting that this penalty is entirely distinct from and far lower than the penalty that already applies to knowingly providing false information, which carries a civil penalty of up to 600 penalty units or a criminal penalty of up to 12 months imprisonment.
Those penalties are not new and are not touched by this bill. Importantly, the bill retains a paper and verbal fallback for travellers who do not have access to a suitable device. Nobody should be turned away at the border or penalised simply because their phone battery has gone flat somewhere over the Pacific.
That safeguard matters, and the coalition welcomes its inclusion. The bill also legislates a notice of intention requirement before the department can refuse or impose conditions on an improved biosecurity arrangement—for example, arrangements relating to treatment, fumigation or storage facilities. At present, this operates only as administrative practice with no guarantee in law.
This bill puts that process into legislation, giving affected businesses a genuine, enforceable right to respond before an adverse decision is made against them. That is a sensible improvement to procedural fairness and one industry has been seeking for some time. Finally, the bill makes a minor technical amendment to the Inspector-General of Biosecurity's information-gathering powers, removing an inadvertent reference to a defined term that does not belong there.
It is a housekeeping matter but a necessary one. On the substance of what actually is before us then, this is a sensible, practical modernisation of our traveller biosecurity arrangements. On the information available to the coalition, it does not weaken existing protections, and we will support it.
It is worth remembering just how much is riding on us getting biosecurity right. Australia's agriculture, fisheries and forestry sectors depend on their reputation as a clean, disease-free producer, a reputation that underpins tens of billions of dollars in exports each year. A single serious incursion—whether the foot-and-mouth disease, African swine fever or any number of other threats sitting on our doorstep—could cost our farmers and our regional communities enormously not just in the immediate response but in lost market access for years afterwards.
Every dollar spent on prevention is a dollar that protects an industry worth vastly more, and every efficiency we can find at the border, provided it does not compromise the system's integrity, is worth pursuing. That is precisely why the coalition takes the view that this bill deserves support. It is also precisely why we take such a dim view of the government neglect on the other side of the ledger, on-ground pest and disease management, which I will turn to now.
But I want to use the balance of my time this afternoon to speak to something broader, because a modern declaration form at the airport counts for very little if the threats that matter most to our farmers are already established well inside our borders and are being allowed to run rampant for want of proper ongoing funding. Let us look at where the government's priorities actually sit.
Some $56.1 million has been allocated to the broader border technology program that this bill forms part of. At the very same time, in this year's budget, the government cut the Commonwealth's feral animals, pests and weeds program entirely. There is no replacement and no clear plan for what comes next.
Feral pigs, wild dogs and deer are having an increasing impact right across regional Australia, damaging livestock, crops, pasture, waterways, native vegetation and biodiversity. Feral pigs in particular are a genuine biosecurity risk in their own right, capable of carrying and spreading serious livestock diseases and moving freely between public and private land, which makes them exactly the kind of threat our biosecurity system is meant to guard against not just at the border but everywhere.
I'm advised that the Walgett branch of the NSW Farmers Association has been personally paying more than $1,000 an hour for helicopter based feral pig control every six to eight weeks simply because pigs are moving onto their land from a neighbouring national park. This is not a burden any individual farmer should be left to shoulder alone, and yet, in the absence of a coordinated national action, that is exactly the position that many of our farmers find themselves in.
While dogs present an equally pressing example, and a particularly timely one, the National Farmers' Federation estimates that wild dogs cost Australian agriculture around $300 million every single year. And yet funding for the National Wild Dog Management Coordinator, a role that exists precisely to help co-ordinate the national response to this problem, runs out at the end of next month.
Funding for the National Wild Dog Action Plan itself lapses only a month after that. This government already funds equivalent national coordinator roles for feral pigs, deer, rabbits, cats and foxes. There is no principled reason to walk away from wild dog coordination now, particularly when we are only halfway through what was meant to be a 10-year plan.
The ask from industry here is not extravagant. It is $250,000 a year for five years to keep the coordinator role and the action plan running, and industry itself has already committed to co-funding it. This is about as modest and sensible a request to government gets, and so far it has gone unanswered.
Contrast that with what we are seeing at a state level. The New South Wales coalition has already put forward a $300 million biosecurity and feral animal package announced at its Albury conference in June this year. That package includes a feral pig bounty, aerial shooting, thermal imaging and drone support, and, critically, five-year funding cycles so that landholders can actually plan their pest management with some certainty rather than wondering each year whether the program they rely on will still exist.
That package has been welcomed by both the NSW Farmers Association and the Invasive Species Council, which tells you something important—that this is not a partisan issue; it is a practical one, and there is broad agreement on what needs to happen. The Commonwealth has a clear and important role to play here too in providing national coordination, research, surveillance and support so that farmers are not left facing a patchwork of inconsistent state-by-state responses to pests that, frankly, do not recognise state borders or property lines.
A genuine, national approach would give farmers far greater certainty and would ensure that the resources committed by individual states are not undermined by gaps at the Commonwealth level. Modernising Australia's travel declaration system is a worthwhile reform, and the coalition supports it without reservation. But effective biosecurity is about a great deal more than how efficiently we process the millions of people who step off a plane each year.
Digital declarations are a useful tool but they are not and never can be a substitute for practical, well-resourced, on-the-ground pest management. A modern border declaration system counts for little if the government cannot even guarantee ongoing funding for pest control programs that are already up and running and already delivering results. Stronger border protection and effective on-ground pest management are not competing priorities.
They are two halves of the very same biosecurity system, and both deserve the government's genuine, sustained attention. Digital reform must be matched with real continuous investment in the frontline programs our farmers rely on every day. None of this is abstract for the communities that live with these pests daily.
It is measured in fence lines that need constant repair, in lambing losses, in crops damaged overnight, and in the sheer exhaustion of farmers fighting a problem that does not respect property boundaries and cannot be solved property by property. Government has a role here that individual landholders simply cannot fill on their own, and that role becomes harder to fill each year when funding is allowed to lapse.
The coalition will support this bill because it is a sensible step forward, but we will keep advocating in this place and beyond for a properly coordinated national approach to feral animals, pests and weeds, working with farmers, industry and the states and territories to protect Australia's agricultural production, our environment and the strength of our biosecurity system as a whole.
We commend the bill to the Senate.