Stuck in an airport queue? Why the official waiting times don’t add up

With more travellers to process, the Department of Home Affairs was quick to herald the faster average clearance times at Australia’s international airports than the year before.

But the fine print in the department’s 2023-24 annual report revealed a new and significant caveat: the travellers who are the slowest to process are no longer included in the calculation of average clearance times.

According to the department, the average clearance time – effectively, how quickly its officers can process travellers through immigration, measuring the time between one and the next – last year dropped from 73.14 seconds to 72.64 seconds inbound, and 42.66 seconds to 40.94 seconds outbound.

The Department of Home Affairs has changed its method of calculating average clearance times at Australia’s international airports.Credit: Getty Images

Canberra Airport had the fastest average inbound processing time (28.83 seconds), while Brisbane, often used by the department to trial new technology, was slowest (86.60 seconds).

The nation’s busiest airport, Sydney, had the fastest average outbound processing time (35.12 seconds), ahead of Avalon (35.14 seconds) and Melbourne (40.15 seconds), while the Gold Coast was slowest (65.22 seconds).

For the first time, however, the department admitted removing outliers before calculating the averages – albeit only the slowest clearance times, not the fastest.

Anyone who took more than three minutes to process, along with groups who took more than five minutes, as well as anyone subject to an alert or referral, was deemed an outlier and removed from the calculation.

This permanent change in policy allowed the department to ignore 28.2 per cent of people in the inbound queue, and 25.97 per cent in the outbound queue, to achieve its performance target of improving on the previous year’s times.

Outliers now include anyone delayed by outages with SmartGate kiosks, who will no longer stand in the way of the department achieving its performance targets.

Professor Rico Merkert, of the University of Sydney Business School, said government agencies had considerable bearing on the flow of passengers through airports.

“While technological advancement has the potential to improve matters, currently it often leads to hiccups and even more delays,” said Merkert, the deputy director of the Institute of Transport and Logistics Studies.

The department acknowledges its definition of outliers includes travellers who have trouble with SmartGate (up to 10.71 per cent in those lines were excluded from the calculation last year), but suggests many delays are beyond its control; for example, people caught up duty-free shopping, who made a mistake on their incoming passenger card, or who speak a language other than English.

Asked whether the method of calculating average clearance times was misleading, a department spokesman declined to comment, referring instead to its published annual report and current corporate plan.

The spokesman said that while security remained the department’s priority, work to improve the processing experience continued – for example, through the use of digital incoming passenger cards and biometrics.

In 2023-24, total air traveller numbers increased by 31.9 per cent inbound and 32.61 per cent outbound.

The department also claimed to have improved clearance times for air cargo and sea cargo, albeit noting it was “unable to provide assurances over the flow of data” reported by “complex systems”.