Security scheme awaits its time

Both industry and the Australian Customs and Border Protection Service agreed that compliance was not worth the cost for many operators.
Deputy chief executive for passenger and trade facilitation Neil Mann presented the scheme and its pilot program with New Zealand to forwarders in December 2007, when it was quite well received.
Since then, it seems to have proved a good idea looking for a need.
According to Mr Mann, accreditation of security measures had been deemed feasible but faced no great demand from industry.
Trans-Tasman facilitation had been “pretty good” but implementation was likely to cost more than the gains.
Australian Customs Brokers and Forwarders Council chairman Steve Morris said he believed that only bigger players had anything to gain from it and then more by way of public relations because the benefit to business was not plain.
The cost to small to medium enterprises was too great and could not be passed on to customers.
“The AEO works in the European and US contexts because of the high intervention levels in some of these places by their Customs administrations,” Mr Morris said.
“The intervention in Australia of Customs on import declarations is probably less than 1%.
“The AEO followed on from the accredited client program that could not give any significant benefits either.”
He blamed Treasury intransigence on duty deferral for difficulties faced by the accredited client program, despite such deferral being available in other countries.
The AEO model might possibly get a boost from the US, as a consequence of cargo screening legislation that has mandated 100% screening of air cargo on passenger aircraft by August next year and of surface containers by 2012.
Putting aside the feasibility of the scheme as it related to containers, there are many other imponderables, such as what “screening” might actually mean in practice. 
Australia has joined 29 other trading nations and nine trading organisations in asking for clarification, especially as secure supply chain efforts had been pursued to avoid such a move.
Australia’s free-trade agreement with the US might also be a point of leverage.
The Australian Government through Customs has organised a response to bring before the Obama administration that will seek to explain Australia’s already thorough security approach and to try to identify an alternatives if needed, such as a “known shipper” program.
“We might need to look at radiation recording monitors at port or other places,” according to Mr Mann, but an X-ray requirement “may be beyond us”.
He said it was reassuring that the new US homeland security secretary Janet Napolitano had told congress that the sea cargo time-frame was unrealistic and extensions would be sought.
Australian Federation of International Forwarders chief executive Brian Lovell added that mutual recognition between the US and Australia suffered due to a belief in the US that management of the program was inadequate on this side of the Pacific.