Recommendation

The Primary Production Committee has examined the Biosecurity Amendment Bill and recommends that it be passed with the amendments shown.

Introduction

As introduced, this bill would amend the Biosecurity Act 1993 to increase the maximum penalty for an erroneous declaration at the border, and for the corresponding infringement offence.

This bill would also establish a single infringement scheme, which would move infringement offences, notices, and fees out of the Act and into regulations. The maximum infringement fee for all infringement offences would be $1,000.

Commencement

As introduced, clause 2 would bring the Act into force on a date appointed by the Governor-General by Order in Council. The Regulations Review Committee wrote to us expressing concern about the potential for the will of Parliament to be frustrated by an Executive that might no longer support the policies in the Act.

To allay these concerns we recommend amending clause 2 to specify commencement of the Act one year after Royal assent, with provision for the legislation to be brought into force earlier by Order in Council.

The deferred commencement date would allow time for supporting regulations to be brought into force at the same time as the Act. It would also allow time for operational details such as printing new forms and publicising the changes.

Raising maximum penalty

We recommend amending clause 5 (which amends section 157(7) of the Act) to raise the maximum penalty on summary conviction for an offence of an erroneous declaration at the border from $400 to $1,000.

Section 159A of the Act currently specifies an infringement fee of $200 for the offence of an erroneous declaration at the border. Clause 7 amends section 159A of the Act so that it applies generically to all infringement offences under the Act that are committed at the border, and not solely to erroneous declaration offences. Clause 7(3) of the bill amends section 159A(4) of the Act, to remove the $200 fee, specifying instead that the penalty for all offences committed at the border will now be “the amount of the infringement fee for the offence”. Clause 8 clarifies that the infringement fee payable for the offence of erroneous declaration (and all infringement offences under the Act) would be prescribed by regulations and could not exceed $1,000. We recommend no changes in this regard.

Infringement clarification

We also recommend amending clause 8 by replacing “prescribing offences as infringement offences” with “prescribing any offences against or under this Act as infringement offences”. This would make it clear that only offences that were already included in the Act could be considered infringement offences.

Further issues

Whilst it was beyond the scope of this bill, we extensively discussed the issues of biosecurity risk profiling at airports. At this point, we remain unconvinced that sufficient work has been done in this regard. We note the Government has indicated a move for complementary measures at Australian airports to provide for screening of passengers and baggage which can be relayed to New Zealand. The committee was advised that there are still outstanding issues before such information sharing can take place between the two countries.