Australian Quarantine Review Secretariat Australian Quarantine a shared responsibility

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2.2 SCOPE OF QUARANTINE

For quarantine activities to be meaningful, it is important that they reflect the realistic requirements of the Australian community and accord with Australia's international obligations. The Quarantine Act 1908 describes quarantine as 'measures for the inspection, exclusion, detention, observation, segregation, isolation, protection, treatment, sanitary regulation and disinfection of vessels, installations, persons, goods, things, animals, or plants, and having as their object the prevention of the introduction or spread of diseases or pests affecting human beings, animals, or plants'.

Although one meaning of the word 'quarantine' is to isolate, the Review Committee has not considered quarantine as an 'isolationist' concept. Rather, the Review Committee has taken a positive and proactive approach by seeking to embrace the needs of the Australian and international communities. It is therefore important that the scope of quarantine reflects a shared community vision of quarantine — a vision that encapsulates both the benefits and responsibilities of effective and efficient quarantine.
Recommendation 1: The Review Committee recommends that the vision for quarantine be 'that Australia will maintain its relative freedom from unwanted pests and diseases while fulfilling national and international obligations in a responsible manner'.

2.2.1 The Public Good Element of Quarantine

The term community service obligation (CSO) is frequently used to describe a range of government activities aimed at improving or protecting the welfare of the Australian community. These activities are usually undertaken by governments because:

· other organisations would not elect to perform these duties on a commercial basis;
· they would be provided commercially only at higher prices; or
· they involve responsibilities that governments do not require other organisations in the public or private sectors to undertake generally.
Activities funded by CSO for the public good most commonly occur where the beneficiaries are diverse and not readily identifiable. In those cases where the beneficiaries are a discrete unit with an ability to pay, it is normal to fund the activity being undertaken on a commercial basis attracting a 'user-pays' fee.
In some circumstances, quarantine has the properties of a public good, in that if left to the private sector, quarantine activity in certain areas would tend to be under-supplied relative to the level desired by the Australian community. The failure of voluntary market arrangements to cope with pest and disease risks is a fundamental reason for government involvement in quarantine. Although the principal beneficiaries of certain aspects of quarantine might sometimes be readily identifiable, in a number of cases benefits are spread throughout the community and it is difficult to identify individual beneficiaries. The regulatory approach generally adopted to quarantine could therefore be viewed as a government attempt to correct this apparent market failure.
The community benefits of quarantine stem from the prevention of various pests and diseases (including undesirable animal and plant species) becoming established in Australia. With respect to the introduction of any new quarantine provision aimed at achieving this objective, the benefits would be the avoidance of costs and losses associated with the spread of pests or diseases. Such benefits might include:
· reductions in the cost of pest and disease control (e.g. spraying or special transport arrangements within Australia, or damage to the natural environment ¾ including effects of chemical residues);
· continuation of Australia's pest and disease-free status, thus reducing the cost of entry to overseas markets by reducing the cost of meeting other countries' quarantine requirements;
· savings in costs of administering any natural disaster relief programs that might otherwise have been necessary;
· avoidance of output losses that would persist after an outbreak even if pest and disease control measures were adopted; and
· flow-on savings to the Australian community and industries such as tourism that could be adversely affected should an introduced pest or disease damage native flora or fauna.
In the absence of quarantine initiatives there could be a range of losses depending on whether and how rapidly a pest or disease entered and spread within the country, and the extent to which it affected the natural environment, local production and market opportunities. It is difficult to achieve community agreement on the economic costs of an exotic pest or disease incursion, given the diverse interests of particular segments of the community. However, by way of illustration of the costs associated with an exotic incursion, the Review Committee notes that governments alone have committed $55 million for the attempted eradication of papaya fruit fly from northern Queensland. In this regard, it has been suggested that quarantine has some of the elements of insurance in so far as it involves the imposition of regular costs, like an insurance premium, to provide protection through managed risk. The issue of the appropriate level of government budgary funding for quarantine and quarantine-related activities is discussed in detail in Chapter 11 on Resources and Legislation.

2.2.2 Imbalance between Plant and Animal Quarantine

Although the scope of quarantine is broad, the development of measures since 1908 to reflect this scope has not always been consistent across the three areas of human, animal and plant health. For instance, the strong quarantine focus on human health in the early part of the twentieth century is now overshadowed by the focus on animals and plants of agricultural importance. However, quarantine has tended to have a stronger focus on animals than plants. This inconsistency is due to a number of reasons, including the facts that:

· the industry infrastructure to support animal health is more highly developed and integrated than for plants;
· the number of economically important species of plants is significantly greater than that of animals, and the level of information on many plant pests and diseases tends to be less than that available for most animals;
· plant diseases are often present for a longer period of time before detection and their spread is usually more insidious and less dramatic than animal diseases;
· the number of pests and diseases that can affect plants is far greater than those affecting animals (so plant pests and diseases are more difficult to address); and
· the effects of an outbreak of an exotic disease of animals tend to have a greater visual and emotive impact on the community than disease outbreaks affecting plants.
The imbalance between resources provided for both health and quarantine for animals and for plants also applies internationally. The larger number of exotic pest and disease introductions affecting plants, as compared to animals, over the past 25 years may also reflect this imbalance. Independent reports commissioned by the Review Committee indicate that, conservatively, the number of exotic plant pests and diseases that have established in Australia during the past 25 years is at least 10 times more than for pests and diseases of animals (see Appendix B). The Review Committee is strongly of the view that increased resources need to be devoted to plant health and quarantine, although not at the expense of resources allocated to animal health and quarantine. Chapter 9 on Monitoring and Surveillance contains more detailed discussion and recommendations relating to this issue.

2.2.3 Public Health

The importance of effective quarantine measures to public health can best be gauged by Australia's freedom from a number of serious pests and diseases of humans that occur in other parts of the world ¾ such as Ebola fever, yellow fever and plague. Australia's early quarantine arrangements focussed primarily on the exclusion of exotic human diseases. Although of less concern than a few years ago due to improved treatments and international eradication or control of a number of serious diseases, human quarantine still requires vigilance at seaports and airports. Malaria is a disease of growing concern in the South-East Asian region and viral haemorrhagic fevers still occur in many countries. Similarly, rabies is widespread and remains a disease of concern in many parts of the world.

The occurrence in 1995 of equine morbillivirus in Queensland and subsequently of Japanese encephalitis in the Torres Strait region created renewed interest in zoonoses (pests or diseases transmissible between humans and animals). Incidents of food poisoning with Escherichia coli in Australia, Japan and the United States have also raised the profile of infections transmitted to humans by animal products, as has the concern regarding the possibility of human infection with the agent of bovine spongiform encephalopathy in Europe. The Review Committee notes that there are well-established links between animal and human health authorities in Australia, including veterinary representation on the group responsible for coordinating national control of infectious diseases of humans, the Communicable Diseases Network of Australia and New Zealand, which meets routinely by telephone conference about every two weeks.
However, the importance of effective quarantine measures in maintaining Australia's favourable human health status was addressed by only a small number of written submissions to the Review Committee. Community awareness and appreciation of the benefits of effective quarantine to human health may therefore need to be heightened.

2.2.4 The Importance of the Environment

Written and public submissions clearly indicated to the Review Committee that maintaining a safe and clean natural environment is fundamentally important to both the general public and industry. The Australian community has come to recognise that quarantine has an important role in protecting Australia's indigenous flora and fauna from exotic pests and diseases. Most Australians regard Australia's unique biodiversity as an asset of high value.

It is therefore important that quarantine decisions take account of environmental considerations. Although the Quarantine Act 1908 does not make a distinction between native flora and fauna and other plants and animals, decision making under the Act must conform with the relevant provisions of Australia's environmental legislation and related arrangements dealing with environmental impact assessment, protection of endangered species, and protection of World Heritage areas and the National Estate. Relevant legislation includes the Wildlife Protection (Regulation of Exports and Imports) Act 1982, the Environment Protection (Impact of Proposals) Act 1974, the Endangered Species Protection Act 1992, the World Heritage Properties Conservation Act 1983 and the Australian Heritage Commission Act 1975.
In addition, the Inter-governmental Agreement on the Environment provides that environmental considerations be integrated into government decision-making processes. Quarantine authorities therefore have a major responsibility to consider possible adverse environmental impacts of quarantine decisions. Notwithstanding this, the Review Committee is of the view that the Quarantine Act 1908 should be amended to reflect specifically the importance of quarantine to the natural environment. This issue is discussed further in Chapter 7 on Risk Analysis.

Recommendation 2: The Review Committee recommends that the goal of national quarantine should be to prevent the establishment and spread within Australia of exotic pests and diseases that are deemed to have a significant deleterious effect on humans, animals, plants or the natural environment.

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