You weren't behind me were you?

FWIW, I think the Australian government encourages people to not declare food as they tell you that you will be ineligible for express customs processing if you declare anything.

Which is rubbish. When travelling to SYD, I normally carry all the food and my wife carries none. I declare it, and most times after questioning from the Bio-security guy in the queue, I get to avoid the screening. Several times I have beaten my wife through!

If you demonstrate that you are aware of the rules and declare, you can often zip straight through.

I agree - this is not a big deal. I always have chocolate coming back from Switzerland, and have never had a problem with declaring it. Once they asked me to open my checked bag after x-ray because (I guess) they thought the tray of dense hand-made chocolate cubes looked suspicious. When I pulled out the gift-wrapped box, they just looked at it and said "okay". On one or two other occasions, when I've said that the food was chocolate, they've asked to see it, but one glance at the bag and I've been sent on. Many many times I've said "chocolate" and they've just waved me through. In September, there was an officer talking to passengers waiting for baggage claim; he looked at my form, asked where I'd been and what food I had, and when I said "USA" and "chocolate", he wrote something at the bottom of my card and said I could leave by the green gate.

Even more interesting, AQIS seem to have latitude to apply common sense. Years ago a well-meaning friend gave me a jar of flavoured, whipped honey which was a local specialty. I weighed up whether I could (and should) eat a whole jar of honey on the flight back home or whether a sealed, shrink-wrapped jar might have a better chance, but figured it was a loss since honey is one of the prohibited items due to some issue with bee diseases that I don't have time to look up. I approached the AQIS desk with the jar in my hand and made it clear that I was ready to surrender it. The AQIS lady looked at the jar, and then at me, and then at the jar, and then at me, and finally said "okay." Maybe the flavouring and whipping implied a heat-treatment, or maybe the professional shrinkwrapping meant it wasn't from someone's backyard, or maybe I looked like the sort of person who was going to eat it rather than toss it in the trash. (It was quite good, too. Thanks, AQIS.)

I also had an inexperienced colleague who didn't declare the tea bag assortment he brought back from our time in the UK; AQIS found the tin in the x-ray, gave him a lecture for not declaring it, but let him keep it.

I have to admit that I've never listed TicTacs, Lifesavers, coughdrops, etc but otherwise, if you can eat or drink it, it's safest to declare it and usually there's no hassle.

Rule number 1: don't trust everything you read on wikipedia. A lot of the information is incorrect and taken out of context in that article. I'm not going to elaborate.

Allied governments all spy on each other to some extent or another. If you think the French, Germans, South Koreans, and other allies aren't spying on us, you're sorely mistaken.

At any rate, Aussies do some things right, but at the same time, you're right about them trying to be a nanny state with the great firewall. It's a play taken out of China's book.

Nope, different FTer.