Correct; the trial was to bypass risk assessment (the MPI officer who asks you about your declaration and stamps your arrival card). Under the trial you still had to walk through Green (Exit, not Queue) Lane with the sniffer dogs.

TBH I don’t really see any difference in allowing most frequent NZ/AU travellers to use some sort of e-mechanism to bypass risk assessment. If you forget you have an apple stashed in your bag then you are probably not going to twig to that at risk assessment either. A combination of beefed up detector dog screening along the Green Exit Lane or an e-gate which randomly diverts users to x-ray instead of Green Exit Lane (like what they do in Mexico for Customs inspection, for example) would I have thought capture most “forgotten item” cases, with perhaps the added disincentive of requiring anyone who is caught with any undeclared items to have to use manned risk assessment in future.