A catastrophic failure in biosecurity has led the federal agriculture department to rethink its entire approach to securing Australia's borders from contaminated imports.
The department is investigating how an outbreak of the highly contagious white spot disease at seven prawn farms on Queensland's Logan River late last year is linked to raw prawn imports.
Up to half the raw prawns bought into the country could have been contaminated with the disease, department officials told a Senate committee on Wednesday.
Uncooked prawn imports were suspended on January 6 this year.
"There was deliberate circumvention of our biosecurity controls by a number of importers," department deputy secretary Lyn O'Connell told senators in Canberra.
Committee chair Barry O'Sullivan was unimpressed.
"This represents a catastrophic collapse of our biosecurity arrangements," he told officials.
Department head Daryl Quinlivan said the matter had uncovered a "fundamental issue" for how it approached biosecurity.
"Our biosecurity system, by and large, has been based on the assumption that we're dealing with people who are making mistakes or acting benignly," he told the committee.
"But the experience here - and we have had a couple of other incidents in other areas over the last 12 months - have led us to think we're going to need to rethink our posture and the assumptions we make about the motives and behaviour of ... industrial scale imports."
That would be a huge challenge for the department, Mr Quinlivan said.
The department has uncovered 86 "behaviours" by importers that were apparently designed to thwart inspections.
These included 24 undeclared batches of raw prawns, 22 instances of carton marking - such as using a different coloured strapping or texta to easily identify a box - disregarding instructions for "seals intact" inspections, missing or wrong documentation, and incorrect country of origin labelling.
Officials took action against the first importer of concern last November, before the outbreak in prawn farms.
The department has now cancelled the permits for six importers and is pursuing possible criminal charges against four of them.
It has also strengthened its testing regime for raw prawns, including compulsory "seal intact" tests where an official must be able to take samples from unopened imports.
Ms O'Connell said Australia's conservative approach to biosecurity aimed to reduce risk to very low levels.
"However, our borders are not impenetrable," she said.
"Zero risk would require the cessation of all trade and of international movement of goods and people."
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