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A plan to allow wealthy airline passengers to avoid long airport queues will bring more visitors to Australia, Immigration Minister Peter Dutton says.
The government announced the potentially divisive measure in Tuesday's federal budget. Plane passengers would be offered a "premium" experience at airports which Fairfax Media understands may include a fast-tracked passage through border clearance, or even separate terminals.
It would initially operate at Sydney, Perth and Melbourne airports.
Official data shows that airport queue delays topped the list of complaints to customs authorities last financial year.
Wait times of 90 minutes or more have recently been reported at airports around Australia, including in February this year when a Virgin Airlines check-in glitch left passengers reporting queues flowing out the doors at airports.
Airport operators would pay the government a fee for the premium service, the cost of which may be passed on to airlines or passengers. The government did not say how much revenue would be raised from the measure, citing commercial confidentiality.
It would add to existing premium security lanes currently provided to business and first-class travellers at some Australian airports.
A spokeswoman for Immigration Minister Peter Dutton said "premium traveller facilitation services" could increase visitor numbers to Australia.
"The services would be on a user-pay basis and travellers using these services will be processed under established clearance procedure. They would not be exempt from customs, immigration, biosecurity or aviation security screening," she said.
Tourism and Transport Forum Australia chief executive Margy Osmond said a premium service could include "seamless" disembarkation and immigration clearing processes, fast-tracked passage through arrivals and departures and meet-and-greet services to help passengers with border clearance.
She said similar experiences were offered overseas and were increasingly expected by "high-yield travellers", who were prepared to pay for the service.
"Australia must cater to the needs for all traveller demographics … for a growing number of Asian travellers, which is Australia's key growth market, premium border facilitation is an integral component of the travel experience," Ms Osmond said, adding the measure was no different to airlines offering variously priced seats.
Sydney and Melbourne airports both welcomed the plan, and pointed to measures to improve the border processes for regular passengers such as automated bag drops, self-service check-in and the government's SmartGates.
The gates purportedly allow travellers to self-process through passport control. However there have been reports that the gates are often unusable because they have run out of paper tickets to print.
They also cannot cope with names containing more than 24 characters, forcing passengers with long names to join queues for manual processing. A spokesman for the Department of Immigration and Border Protection said it was "working on a technical solution" to this problem, and the gates had improved queuing time.
