"Government budgets are declining or static and we have a growing industry," she told the Australian Airports Association national conference on the Gold Coast on Tuesday. Fresh focus: Screening procedures could change under proposed new rules. Credit:AP "We really need to focus our activities on areas of highest security risk. Our challenge is ensuring security outcomes are maintained and dealing with the perception they might not be which happens every time we change security settings." She said moving to risk-based screening of passengers was a departmental priority and OTS had begun to work on it with border agencies, with a proof of concept trial expected in early 2015. She did not say how the government would determine which passengers presented a low risk.

Michael Pezzullo, the secretary of the Department of Immigration and Border Protection, confirmed the agency would work to improve the processing experience. "We recognise – because we are Australian citizens as well – for a weary traveller with a family in tow re-entering the country, say coming back from a trip, we all increasingly want a seamless self-processing process and for visitors getting off a cruise ship or flight for the first time, a fast, low touch and increasingly a paperless border environment," Mr Pezzullo said. "The fewer interactions we have with low-risk and no-risk passengers, the more we are able to do our real job, which is to intervene on those high-risk passengers who pose a threat to Australia's revenue, its security and, ultimately, its sovereignty." Between June and August, the government consulted the industry about prohibited items. Ms Wimmer said it was considering whether to allow the public to carry small scissors, with blades of six centimetres or less measured from the fulcrum, on board, as well as similar-sized tools and rounded end cutlery knives.

Stephen Goodwin, the chairman of the Australian Airports Association, said changes to the prohibited items list made sense. "Some people would see that as a scary thing but when a screener needs to look for so many items on a daily basis hundreds and hundreds of times, that is a challenge," he said. For airports, Ms Wimmer said the government could consider placing them in different categories based on the security risk they presented, such as iconic status and the number of international passengers, rather than based on the current long-standing category system. "When it comes to regulation, one size does not fit all," she said. "We need to tailor our regulation to be proportionate to security risk." Cairns Airport, which has 4 million passengers annually, is considered a Category 1 airport alongside Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth and, therefore, subject to the same regulations as its much larger peers.

"We fully support . . . the proportionate risk-based categorisation of airports," Cairns Airport operations head Kate McCreery-Carr said. "I don't believe we will remain in band 1 with the big four." OTS, which is part of the Department of Infrastructure and Regional Development, is also working with the airport industry to come up with more sensible security measures. For example, it will allow testing for explosives to occur in front of the security screening point rather than after it and for up to three passengers to be screened for explosives at once. "We have changed the requirements to allow for a more flexible approach to [explosives detection]," Ms Wimmer said. "Not only have we achieved security outcomes, but we have also improved passenger experience." She said X-ray and explosives detection technology would continue to improve so that screening technologies would have less contact with passengers, while biometric use would also increase. The reporter travelled to the Gold Coast as a guest of the Australian Airports Association.