Abstract
International mail articles present an important potential vector for biosecurity and other regulatory risk. Border intervention is a key element in Australia’s biosecurity strategy. Arriving international mail articles are inspected and those that are intercepted with biosecurity risk material are documented, including the address to which the article was to be delivered. Knowledge about patterns in the intended destinations of mail article permits more detailed biosecurity intervention. We used geo-location software to identify the delivery address of mail articles intercepted with biosecurity risk material from 2008–2011. We matched these addresses with demographic data that were recorded at a regional level from the Australian Bureau of Statistics 2011 Census and used random forest statistical analyses to correlate various demographic fields at the regional level with the counts of seized mail articles. The analysis of the seizure counts against demographic characteristics suggests a high correlation between having higher numbers of university students that speak a particular language in a region and higher quantities of intercepted mail articles destined for that region. We also explore metropolitan and regional patterns in the destinations of seized materials. These results can be used to provide information on policy and operational actions to try to reduce the rate at which mail articles that contain biosecurity risk material are sent to Australia.
Highlights
Biosecurity is the management of risks to the economy, the environment and the community, of pests and diseases entering, emerging, establishing or spreading
Region in this case is defined using the ABS remoteness structures, which are based on a measure of relative access to services (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2016b)
There were greater amounts of Human Therapeutics destined for Victoria (21.9), Vegetable/Vegetable Products destined for New South Wales (NSW) (8.5) and Contaminated Goods/Footwear/Packaging destined for Western Australia (16.1)
Summary
Biosecurity is the management of risks to the economy, the environment and the community, of pests and diseases entering, emerging, establishing or spreading (see, e.g. Craik W and Palmer D and Sheldrake R 2017). Australia’s unique flora and fauna and strong reliance on agriculture make it sensitive to invasive pressures, many food, plant and animal products are considered to present a substantial biosecurity risk as they may be vectors for invasive pests. The department is the regulatory authority and inspectorate that is responsible for maintaining border biosecurity, amongst other things, focusing on biosecurity to protect agriculture, social amenity and the environment. It carries out this important responsibility via a suite of activities, including screening, monitoring, inspection and, when necessary, litigation. The department sets out the conditions under which food, plant and animal products may be imported in the online Biosecurity Import CONditions database, BICON (Department of Agriculture 2018)
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