By Eryk Bagshaw
Australian travellers are being forced to wait in long queues at the nation’s airports because of failures with a digital passport processing system that has been riddled with technical faults despite cost surges of more than $120 million.
The SmartGates system has been labelled embarrassing by the Australian Airports Association, which wants the government to urgently address the problems that have caused queues at Sydney and Melbourne to snake through terminals, leaving tired passengers stranded in delays after flights of up to 14 hours.
The SmartGates system has been beset by delays and technical faults.Credit: Michael Howard
The system was intended to increase efficiency and security. Australian Border Force Commissioner Michael Outram in 2017 said he expected 90 per cent of travellers to use automated border clearance processing by 2020.
However, internal Home Affairs data shows only 57 per cent of inbound travellers use SmartGates.
“Bali is a more seamless travel experience than going in and out of Australia,” said Australian Airports Association chief executive Simon Westaway.
“We have to work with the data in front of us. We need to do a hell of a lot better.”
Successive Coalition and Labor governments have overseen the network since the first gate was installed in June 2015.
But the system has been crippled by technical failures since then, even as the contract with one provider, Idemia, surged from $22 million to $113 million within five years. Another taxpayer-funded contract for biometric scanning with Vision-Box has doubled from $25 million to $55 million despite Home Affairs finding its technology “was not fit for purpose”.
The roll-out of the SmartGates system has been coupled with a reduction in manned processing desks, exacerbating delays during peak arrival times and technical outages.
The SmartGates were designed to eliminate manual processing by pushing the majority of travellers through automatic gates that scan each passport. But Australia’s unique two-step system requiring travellers to first obtain a ticket from a kiosk by answering customs questions before proceeding to a SmartGate has made delays worse.
Traveller Ross MacPherson, who returned to Australia after a holiday overseas with his wife last year, said the arrivals hall at Sydney airport was chaos.
“It was pandemonium,” he said. “You had all the Border Force people shouting at people, and people were getting frustrated. In the middle of it all, one of the kiosks broke down, and they had to run around to find the one person who could fix the kiosk.”
Similar queues were reported at Melbourne Airport in September when passengers took up to two hours to get out of the terminal during the morning rush.
MacPherson said the design of the Sydney Airport arrivals hall, which funnels thousands of travellers through tight corridors via duty-free to poorly signed kiosks hidden around corners, had compounded the technical failures of the system.
The system has caused airport queues in Sydney and Melbourne. Credit:
“When you arrive at Los Angeles or Heathrow, you walk into this huge room with all these terminals available. What happens at Sydney Airport? Every man, woman and child has to walk through the duty-free section,” he said. “It’s like putting sheep in a pen.”
The average clearance time for travellers arriving in Australia last year was 72 seconds. However, according to the footnotes in the Home Affairs annual report, more than 2 million travellers who used SmartGates and 2.6 million using manual passport processing were removed from the figure after being classified as “outliers” because their clearance took more than three minutes. The clearance time does not measure the queuing time waiting for a kiosk or a SmartGate to become available. It measures only the time the kiosk or SmartGate takes to perform the process and for the next traveller to start theirs.
Travellers who use the kiosk to get a ticket but do not clear the passport gate are also not included in the figures, meaning the actual clearance times for all travellers are likely to be much higher. The department has not released the average clearance times for outliers.
Singapore’s Changi Airport, one of the world’s busiest, introduced passport-free immigration clearance for residents and long-term pass holders across its four terminals last year, reducing its clearance times to 10 seconds.
Home Affairs assistant secretary Alice Stanley said Border Force was committed to “streamlining and modernising the border clearance process to position Australia as a global leader in embracing technological advancement and innovation”.
“To meet the strong growth in passenger numbers post the pandemic and travellers’ expectations for digital services, we are partnering with industry to modernise the border,” she said. “We are looking to meet these challenges head-on with a number of innovative trials under way.”
Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry tourism executive chairman John Hart said the inconsistency of the SmartGates system was “very frustrating” and was compounded by resourcing and scheduling challenges at Australia’s major airports.
“When you get a number of flights arriving at once, you get these enormous queues behind the SmartGates that are created because people don’t know what they’re doing,” he said.
“In a lot of cases, you’ve got people that don’t speak English as their first language trying to interpret them, and there’s nobody there to help them. There’s no resourcing, there’s no advice, there’s no support available on the SmartGate queues inbound to be able to help people through.”
The congestion and government funding shortfalls became so bad last year that Sydney Airport was forced to purchase an additional 40 kiosks for Border Force to operate in 2025.
A Home Affairs spokesman said the department was undertaking signage trials at Sydney and Melbourne airports, as well as developing an in-flight video to assist passengers in understanding the SmartGates process.
However, even departure clearances, where travellers do not need to complete a two-step process to clear immigration, are falling behind targets. Only 76 per cent of outbound travellers used the SmartGates system, still below the intended 90 per cent mark. Home Affairs has reduced its target to 70 per cent of passengers using SmartGates.
Hart said the government had to be “hypersensitive”, or Australia would lose travellers to other countries.
“We are a long-haul destination from a lot of our major source countries. It’s a long flight, and the last thing you need at the end of that journey is to be standing in a queue for hours,” he said. “We’re also a very expensive destination, not only to be in, but to get to. So all that means we’ve got to do so much better in this process.”
The SmartGate system has been criticised by the industry and travellers.
Indonesia, New Zealand and South Africa are among dozens of countries that have implemented online declaration forms to accelerate the customs process. Australia began a trial of the digital Australian Travel Declaration last year, limited to Qantas flights from New Zealand.
Margy Osmond, chief executive of the Tourism and Transport Forum and a member of the government’s Seamless Travel Group, said Australia’s two-step system was “less than optimal”.
“We’d be very keen to see that technology changed as quickly as possible,” she said. “The first experience people have of Australia and for Australians coming back into the country; it’s probably the experience that will sit in their mind.”
A Home Affairs spokesman said that when the digital travel declaration was implemented, it would support fully contactless travel. “By sharing their credentials pre-arrival, passengers will be able to skip the kiosk step and proceed directly to the SmartGates for contactless processing with no need for the use of their physical passport,” he said. Border Force aims to have the technology in place at most airports by 2030.
Despite the poor performance, contracts related to the SmartGates system have surged significantly over the past decade.
French giant Idemia’s contract was originally worth $22 million in 2019. It has since grown to $113 million.
Vision-Box’s contract was originally worth $25 million in 2015. It is now worth $55 million. The company had global annual earnings of $33 million in 2023. Home Affairs did not respond to questions about why it had awarded the large contract to the relatively small Portuguese company. International competitors’ contracts, such as Singapore, have been awarded to Thales, which had global revenues of $30 billion in 2023.
The Australian government last year extended the Vision-Box contract to 2026 despite warning signs in 2017 that its biometric scanning system was not fit for purpose.
The failures meant Border Force returned to its original provider, Idemia, to provide ongoing support for its SmartGates in arrival halls.
“There was a real misstep in that period where NextGen smart gates failed, and they had to pull them out and put back in the old ones again,” said Hart.
Idemia and Vision-Box were contacted for comment.
A Home Affairs spokesman said taxpayers’ value for money was continually assessed throughout the contract lifecycle. “The increase in value over the life of these contracts can be attributed to contract extensions for ongoing maintenance and support and ongoing SmartGate capacity and expansion activities,” he said.
Australian Airports Association chief executive Simon Westaway.Credit: James Brickwood
Westaway, the Australian Airports Association chief executive representing 340 airports nationwide, said the problems had to be rectified before traveller numbers returned to record highs.
Australia is forecast to welcome 27 million international passengers by 2030, up from 15 million in 2023 following the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Our airport members are getting very frustrated,” said Westaway. “This latest data is compelling, and it’s certainly a long way off the [key performance indicators] that the department set for this technology some years ago.”
The failures have mounted despite Australia having one of the world’s highest passenger movement charges. The $70 levy is charged by the Australian government to each passenger on outbound international flights, but only half of the $1.1 billion per year is spent on border management. The rest is redirected to consolidated revenue.
Singapore will spend $3.6 billion over the next six years upgrading its terminals, including immigration systems, check-in and arrival halls. New Zealand will spend $110 million on border infrastructure. It receives just a quarter of Australia’s international arrival numbers.
Sources with knowledge of the negotiations who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations said the lack of funding and resources from the federal government had left Australia with a second-rate SmartGates system and outdated IT systems behind the operations. The transformation has been mapped out by the department, but not enough funding has been provided to speed up the transition.
The Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, the Tourism and Transport Forum and the Australian Airports Association said it was time to redirect the revenue to improving an inefficient system.
“Australia should be right up there globally leading this space,” said Westaway.
“I think this is a really important moment we’re at. I hope that when this data comes out, it really does focus people’s minds. It should be much better than what it is.”
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