KEY POINTS:
New biosecurity measures to help cope with a big increase in cruise ship visits to New Zealand have netted a 25 per cent increase in declared goods per passenger.
MAF Biosecurity has trialled the introduction of new, larger and illustrated declaration cards to help speed up passenger processing.
Stuart Rawnsley, MAF's northern ports manager, said because of limited staffing resources and large extra volumes of passengers the processing system had to become more efficient.
The numbers of cruise ship arrivals and passengers entering New Zealand had more than doubled in the 2007/08 season.
Mr Rawnsley said the new cards meant passengers could more easily identify what goods they might have in their luggage that could be in breach of biosecurity rules and allowed them to list in detail what the suspect items were.
They could then be sorted into risk and non-risk passengers, the latter who could proceed through Customs with no further intervention from MAF officials.
Mr Rawnsley said the cards were used in addition to the standard cards issued to visitors arriving in New Zealand though airports.
The new system was particularly suited to cruise ship passengers who could retrieve goods from luggage they had in their cabins for checking.
It had resulted in an average 25 per cent increase in the number of items each passenger declared.
Mr Rawnsley said MAF quarantine officers and Customs officers were aboard cruise ships before they arrived in New Zealand, the officials flying to join the vessel at its last overseas port to enable pre-processing.
Items seized on cruise ships had included stuffed frogs, jars of honey, nuts, frangipani cuttings, coral and flower leis.
"Anything people buy and carry they will try and bring in."
Mr Rawnsley said the process for cruise ship daytrippers was to check their hand luggage and use sniffer dogs to pick up any potential risks.
Customs told the Herald that ships also sent advance details of passengers to screen for risk.
A Customs spokeswoman said anecdotal information suggested that internet social networking sites like Bebo and Facebook were being used by some people to share information to outwit border protection systems.
Customs had identified only one tangible example on a New Zealand site where two users discussed evading Customs controls by not describing products properly. Foreign customs administrations had advised that similar communications were taking place between their nationals on social networking sites, she said.
