Protecting integrity of our borders
Biosecurity is a crucial consideration for our ports.
It has become a common — but unwelcome — sight in Australian and New Zealand ports: unloaded imported cars being put back on to the ships that brought them, denied entry because of the presence of brown marmorated stink bugs (BMSBs).
The stink bug, which is native to areas of East Asia but can also be found in Europe and the Americas, is a problem for fruit farmers around the world. Both Australia and New Zealand face massive damage to their horticultural industries if the pest gets into either country. The problem is, they like cars.
“This thing hibernates in winter, and likes to find itself somewhere nice, warm and cosy to sleep for winter,” says Mike Gallacher, chief executive at Ports Australia. “The problem is, that warm and cosy place could be in a container, it could be in a ship, or more importantly, it could be in a motor vehicle.”
During the past five years, an increasing number of shipments of new cars have been delayed after stink bugs were detected.
Detections of BMSBs tripled in the 2018/2019 season compared to the same period the year before, according to figures from the Department of Agriculture and Water Resources (DAWR). If the stink bugs are found in a shipment, the entire cargo needs to be treated offshore — or sent back to where it came from, if DAWR is not satisfied.
The BMSB is just one of a very long list of threats — insect, plant and animal — that the Department considers capable of wreaking huge damage on Australia’s agriculture and horticulture industries, as well as its environment, flora and fauna. The Department maintains a Top 40 of “exotic and unwanted” plant pests, but there are plenty more — and stowing-away on a ship is a common method of attempted entry.
While the National Border Surveillance program conducted by DAWR is the centrepiece of the nation’s biosecurity surveillance activities — at ports, airports and international mail centres — the nation’s ports are a “critical frontline presence,” Gallacher says.
“Biosecurity is a crucial consideration that our ports must make day in and day out, to protect the integrity of Australia’s border. At the end of the day, more than 98 per cent of goods passing through Australia will hit the port gate, which places a lot of responsibility on our port staff to maintain high biosecurity standards.”
‘Cargo movements far exceed the resources of biosecurity agencies, leaving it to waterfront workers to identify hazards’
To the Maritime Union of Australia (MUA), biosecurity is a major plank of campaigns to limit automation, with the union stressing in negotiations with stevedoring companies that its members play a frontline role in biosecurity, which is threatened by moves to automate more tasks.
“By removing wharfies from the frontline, where they are able to protect the Australian community by identifying risky cargoes, automation risks weakening biosecurity measures,” says MUA national secretary Paddy Crumlin.
“Cargo movements far exceed the resources of biosecurity agencies, leaving it to waterfront workers to identify hazards such invasive species that could decimate Australian agriculture, or dangerous compounds that pose a risk to the community.”
Of course, 2020 saw a new unwelcome potential arrival, in the form of the COVID virus — to which the ports industry had to respond quickly.
“So much of the initial response to COVID was focused on air passengers and aircrew,” Gallacher says. “We really had to alert the government to the fact that there was another big risk, and that was the interaction between Australian maritime workers — such as pilots and stevedores — and international crews.”
Ports Australia, working with DAWR and the commonwealth Departments of Health and Infrastructure, rapidly mobilised a maritime task force, to identify and implement what governments around the country “needed to do to ensure that we minimised risk,” Gallacher says.
“As an industry, we brought together the MUA, the Australian Maritime Officers Union (AMOU), and the International Transport Workers Federation (ITWF), to be the voice of the international seafarers in the debate,” he explains. “It was remarkable the speed at which the industry hit the switch and put in place measures that, to this day, have seen very little infection coming from seafarers across to Australian workers, or in the other direction.”
Central to the COVID measures was simply “cutting interactions to the minimum”, he continues. “Take pilots as an example: from the moment a pilot gets up a ladder and onto a vessel, he is welcomed aboard by crew members, who help him off the ladder, and escort him through the ship to the bridge, which is quite often filled with people, bringing the vessel in. That was peeled right back.
“We sat down with the maritime task force, we had the AMOU (the union responsible for the pilots) and we worked out how to minimise this interaction. We had pilots basically kitted up looking like Neil Armstrong, which posed its own risks, because climbing up a ladder up the side of a vessel, at night in a 3-m swell, dressed like an astronaut, is not ideal. But they were the measures that the pilots put in place for their own safety.”
With more than 98 per cent of Australia’s physical trade moving through the nation’s ports — and vital supply chains at risk — the COVID measures “had to be strong”, Gallacher says.
“We knew we needed to remain open to keep supply chains open and to allow maritime trade to continue during the pandemic, but we also knew it was absolutely essential that we keep our port staff and our shipping workforce — Australian and international — safe.”
Self-isolation, distancing, sanitation and protective equipment have had to become second-nature, Gallacher adds.
“This has always been a very safety-conscious industry, with that constant biosecurity vigilance, so that is not as big a change as it is for some industries. It’s all about minimising interactions.
“It has required some new thinking and quick pivots: for example, in the Pilbara they have been utilising unused mining camps as isolation accommodation for seafarers, while in Queensland, Maritime Security Queensland (MSQ) has done an amazing job setting up dedicated bus transport, with secure overnight accommodation, as it moves crew members between the international ports in Queensland.”
Overall, Gallacher says, the industry was able to make extensive changes, and quickly.
“Again, it comes back to long experience on the frontline of biosecurity, in recognising the vulnerability of the interactions that we have, and lessening that vulnerability as much as we can,” he says.