Originally Posted by
drewguy
Mildly amusing story about passenger who forgot to declare her half-eaten foot-long Subway sandwich upon arrival in Australia . . .and was fined US$1,844.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/natio...tralia-tiktok/
Gotta say seems a bit harsh unless she was somehow evasive about her failure to declare - I would have expected an opportunity to discard it without penalty.
At least she didn’t get escorted back to an international departing flight after having failed to preemptively toss restricted foodstuff?
Australia and New Zealand take ag/biology controls very seriously, more seriously on average than the US. And it shows in how much they fine for even things that would more ordinarily get way less of a fine (if any) in the US for disallowed imports of the food sort.
Negligence and absence of ag/biology controls has caused problems in many places before. While I don’t like it when law enforcement does things primarily to make a public example of a law violator in order to send a public message that garners more attention, there are environmental consequences that would otherwise be more widely ignored if not for such headline grabbing amounts for a half-eaten sub sandwich.