Shrinking The Ditch

In fact, insiders say that Australia and New Zealand are now quietly testing pre-clearance on trans-Tasman cruise ships and that aviation is a natural progression from this. The report, produced for TTF by international consultancy Airbiz Aviation Strategies, outlined three options for speeding up the process of travelling by air between the two countries:

• Introducing a common border would effectively treat trans-Tasman flights as being domestic without border controls.
• The current border could be maintained but all passengers on qualifying flights would be fully pre-cleared before departure.
• The final option of pre-clearance by passenger would enable most travellers to be pre-cleared at their departure airport.

Osmond says airlines will benefit from changes through the faster turnaround times, and the ability to switch aircrew between domestic and trans-Tasman routes. With the rate of growth in visitor arrivals rapidly overtaking the capacity of airports to deal with the higher volumes, she says the answer does not lie in continually building or expanding terminals to absorb the growth but in speeding up passenger movement through existing terminals. It would potentially enable many trans-Tasman air services to operate from integrated domestic/international terminals, freeing up gates in pure international terminals, reducing arrival and departure queues, and potentially streamlining flight connections for passengers transferring between trans-Tasman and domestic flights in both Australia and New Zealand.

“The fastest and smartest way is to remove people from queues who don’t need to be there – and the obvious place to start this reform is between Australia and New Zealand, two markets which deliver more visitors to each other than any other market,” says Osmond. The scenarios proposed would reduce travelling times by embracing the use of advanced biometric screening technology to enable immigration and quarantine ‘pre-clearance’ of passengers prior to departure, eliminating further formalities for most trans-Tasman passengers when they reach their destinations. “Our vision is to maximise pre-clearance of international passengers so that their arrival at the destination airport is similar to that of a domestic traveler – a whole lot easier and much more pleasant. Border formalities could be slashed by linking each passenger’s travel documentation to facial recognition technology. Known as ‘Face on the Fly’, this system would identify trans-Tasman passengers as they pass various points between baggage check-in and boarding their aircraft, without them needing to stop or produce passports, travel documents or even boarding passes.” Osmond believes that what is particularly exciting is that if the concept is successful on the Tasman, such reforms could form the basis of similar changes to revolutionise travel from other trusted, high-volume markets such as China (about to overtake New Zealand as Australia’s largest source of visitors).

So, if it makes sense and everyone wants it, why isn’t it happening? Asked by Australian Aviation what progress was being made a spokesperson for the Australian Department of Home Affairs said in a brief statement only that “Australia continues work with New Zealand and relevant Industry stakeholders to look for opportunities to conduct trials on trans-Tasman pre-clearance in both airports and cruise ship environments”. It did not comment on what the specific issues were that needed to be resolved before reform could occur.

While progress is not entirely visible, advances are being made. The TTF report became the basis for the tourism working group of the Australia-New Zealand Leadership Forum. Led by Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and his New Zealand counterpart Jacinda Ardern, this year’s meeting was held last month at the International Convention Centre in Sydney’s Darling Harbour, under the theme “Trans-Tasman Opportunities”. Osmond co-chairs the working group with Auckland Airport’s General Manager Aeronautical Commercial, Scott Tasker. The group brought together all the airports and airlines in both countries likely to be affected, which would also be contributors to finding solutions, as well as border forces from both New Zealand and Australia.

The TTF chief stresses the whole process is going to be evolutionary, not revolutionary. “The combined private/government working group was brought together specifically to look at what the best ways of progressing the next round of that report, understanding that with the best will in the world it’s probably going to be incremental as opposed to a revolution,” explained Osmond. “The group we brought together felt there was a list of recommendations we needed to put into the Australia-New Zealand mix to provide the best platform for taking this thing forward. I don’t think any of us were interested in just having a talkfest. What we really wanted to do was to get some runs on the board and start making the changes we needed to do to get us to a point where pre-clearance was sort of a natural outcome.”

Where do things stand now? “Regarding the things that were on our list, some people might see them as not being urgent or critical but they are both urgent and critical. One of those is the fact we don’t have common biometric standards between Australia and New Zealand. IATA (International Air Transport Association) are doing some work on this at the moment and it is anticipated that IATA will be out with something in the next couple of months that they would see as a good generic global standard from a biometric point of view. So, we will be building off that to try and get a baseline agreed uniform standard for biometrics between the two countries.

The other one is privacy laws which once again you might not think would have an impact on this space but they will, not the least because the EU has just introduced new privacy provisions and there are new provisions coming in here in Australia. Once again, we don’t necessarily have uniformity. And what we may need to do is simply adopt the highest standards from an aviation point of view regardless of what the local domestic privacy requirements are going to be. But we are looking to have that one sorted by the end of this year as well. There was some very concrete pieces that came out of the meeting of the government and the private sector and it was agreed that these would be useful steps forward to get us to a more formal expansion of the pre-clearance model.”

Another issue is security… and not only in terms of terrorism. As Air New Zealand chief executive Christopher Luxon told Australian Aviation: “Certainly, from a customer perspective it makes sense to make it as seamless and as easy as possible from a connectivity point of view. What happens is you get into the Nation/State arguments where there might be different security positions between Australia and New Zealand or perceived security threats. In the New Zealand experience biosecurity is really important for us. So, when we have Queensland fruit fly, that’s devastating for our horticultural industry and things like that. On one level it seems very simple when it is very desirable and we’re all very supportive of it. On the other level, we just have to work through some national security risk issues for both countries and they really need to be highly aligned. And some of these things are biosecurity risks. They are very real and very damaging.”

Osmond agrees the biosecurity part of the exercise is critical. “We are anticipating that the working group that we have already got in play, which is both private sector and government and does include Air New Zealand, Qantas plus Virgin, that the next move for us is to bring in representatives from the Agriculture industry. We are focused on the fact that the biosecurity piece is the next big one we need to roll into the mix. When you talk biosecurity most of the government players will say to you the biggest problem is not always someone bringing in a huge shipment of something that’s infected, it’s nine times out of ten going to be someone who’s got an apple in the bottom of their bag that they’ve forgotten about.”

Luxon says the reality is that the two countries are incredibly close. “We have 1.4 million Kiwis coming to Australia every year and 1.3 million Australians coming to New Zealand every year just for travel. A large part of it is leisure, seeing friends and relatives. The two countries and the two economies aren’t like any other two countries on earth. Anything we can do to strip out barriers and get flows of capital, data, information, people moving between the two countries is a really good thing. It’s just working through some of these issues. It might be visas for tourists, which could be done in a joint fashion so you have access to both Australia and New Zealand. But that requires alignment on security threats and risks and also biosecurity.”

It is certainly understandable that the two governments don’t want to rush into drastic reform without considering all the angles, including unintended consequences. After all, there is a history in this area. Under the Trans-Tasman Agreement, the two countries enjoyed a passport-free environment between 1973 and 1981, when Kiwis and Australians could travel, live and work in either country with relatively few restrictions. That came to an end when, on April 24, 1981, the then Australian Minister for Immigration Ian Macphee announced that all people entering Australia, including New Zealanders, would be required to carry a passport from July 1 that year, a move partly prompted by concern that international terrorists and drug traffickers could pose as New Zealanders and enter Australia. It caused chaos. With only nine weeks till the deadline, passport offices were swamped with applications. New Zealand alone saw some 54,000 applications lodged and a backlog of 28,000 requests backed up. More than half were from people who intended to travel in July. Between April and November, New Zealand’s five passport offices issued almost 155,000 passports, compared with 54,000 in the same period of 1980. It wasn’t just New Zealanders stampeding for documentation. The Australian High Commission in Wellington was swamped by Australians who suddenly found they needed a passport to return home. Wellington wasn’t happy, though it didn’t react immediately. It wasn’t until 1986 that the idea of returning the favour was officially mooted in New Zealand and in 1987 it became official, with Australians needing a passport to visit the Land of the Long White Cloud.

There have, nevertheless, been moves since then to make travelling across “The Ditch” easier. For example, in 2009 then New Zealand Prime Minister John Key and his Australian counterpart Kevin Rudd announced citizens of the two countries would be able to use electronic passport control, which allow people with passports containing a biometric chip to scan their own passports and use facial biometrics technology to identify themselves and proceed to departure gates without going through immigration control. The now common Smart Gates were in operation at all the two countries main airports by 2011.

In another example, New Zealand has recently been trialling a trusted traveler scheme to allow low-risk passengers to complete border processes faster, while maintaining border requirements. Called the Streamlined Travel Trial, it involved about 200 frequent fliers and participation by New Zealand’s Ministry for Primary Industries, New Zealand Customs Service, Immigration New Zealand and the Aviation Security Service. Trial participants were all New Zealand citizens living in New Zealand, who are frequent trans-Tasman business travellers. Following approval into the trial, if they had nothing to declare on arrival, after passing through Customs, they had access to an electronic lane and could proceed directly to the green lane rather than go to MPI (Ministry of Primary Industry) officers. Arrival cards were still required and sniffer dogs were present in the green lane. Trial participants had to have travelled into New Zealand directly from Australia, without having been to any other country on their trip, with nothing to declare on arrival. Authorities said reaction to the trial was “overwhelmingly positive”.

Extending that program is something that was put to the two Prime Ministers at last month’s leaders forum. “At the moment it’s only New Zealanders so we want is to see it applied to both sides of ‘The Ditch’ and increased to 10,000 people. We wanted to remove New Zealand departure cards (a move taken by Australia last year) which thank goodness the New Zealand Prime Minister announced (at the forum) would be the case. That’s good,” said Osmond.

The working group is also looking for the digitization of boarding passes and arrival cards on both sides of the Tasman by 2020. “I would actually expect we are going to get that before then but we are just keen to put some timeframes around these things. We wanted a pre-clearance pilot to be up and running by the end of this year and I think we are progressing very nicely towards that one as well, she added, pointing out “there is an enormous amount of goodwill on both sides of the Tasman at the moment for this to happen”.

As to whether there could eventually be a return to the passport-less days of the 1970s, it may not be totally out of the question. As Osmond explained: “It’s an interesting thing. I wouldn’t want to pre-empt anything but amongst the workshops discussions that were held at the Australia- New Zealand Leadership Forum there was discussion about how can we really simplify this? We asked people: what should be the aspirations? And yes, there was a bit of discussion about why can’t we go back to that situation? But I think the world’s probably a different place to what it was then.”