The Australian import permit, BICON, and what a failed consignment costs

The conditions every consignment meets

The department's published conditions for commercial imports of fresh cut flowers require that a consignment contains only permitted species and plant parts, is free of biosecurity risk material, is devitalised where the conditions require it, and is packed in sealed, pest-proof packaging. Before it ships it must be inspected by the exporting country's plant protection organisation — for live insects, disease symptoms, weed seeds and other contaminants, with any live pest of biosecurity concern treated and the consignment re-inspected — and it must carry a phytosanitary certificate issued once that organisation is satisfied the flowers meet Australian conditions. The Kenyan side of that inspection is KEPHIS, and this is what it checks → The dip, the doses by genus and the certificate wording →

The permit condition, and where Kenya is named

Most destination guides describe import permits in general terms. The Australian condition is specific:

You will need an import permit if you are importing cut flowers from Colombia, Kenya or Ecuador and are managing pests through an NPPO-approved systems approach.

Two things follow, and they are separate. First, the requirement is conditional — it attaches to the pest management pathway used, not to Kenyan origin by itself. Second, whether a given exporter's pest management is an NPPO-approved systems approach is a question for that exporter and the Kenyan plant health authority, and not something this site will assert on anyone's behalf. Where a permit is required, a valid copy must accompany the consignment.

What that means before the first order. The question to put to a supplier is not "do we need a permit?" but "under which pathway is the crop's pest management run, and has KEPHIS approved it as a systems approach?" The answer decides whether the importer applies for a permit at all, and it is the importer who applies.

BICON decides, case by case

BICON is the department's Biosecurity Import Conditions system — the database in which the conditions for each commodity are published and kept current. The department is explicit that an importer must find the right BICON case for the goods and read its conditions, and that a species not listed cannot be imported until conditions have been developed and published for it. The devitalisation requirements are recorded as under review, and the department's standing instruction is that treatments are subject to change and should always be verified by searching BICON.

So the date matters twice. The conditions on the day the certificate is issued must match what BICON says on that day, and the reading on this page is dated at the foot of it. BICON on the day of shipment is the authority; this page is a map of what to look for in it.

On arrival: the papers first, then the goods

A biosecurity officer checks documents on arrival. Where documentation is invalid or incomplete, the consignment is held until correct paperwork is provided. Where goods are found to carry biosecurity risk material, the available outcomes are to re-export, or to fumigate or recondition so that the goods are safe to enter — applied to the whole shipment or to the affected part.

These actions are undertaken at the importer's expense. Goods remain segregated in a secure facility while the matter is investigated, which may include storage in a cold room at 10°C or below. And the department states its position on the commercial consequence directly: it does not offer compensation for goods that become unsellable while waiting for scientific assessment. For a product with a working life measured in days, a hold on paperwork is the most commercially significant line in the Australian regime. What actually stops Kenyan consignments, on the one border that publishes its reasons →

The rate that cannot be earned down

Australia publishes no origin-and-genus inspection frequency table of the kind Great Britain and the European Union publish. Nor can an importer of cut flowers reduce their rate through a clean record: the department's Compliance-Based Intervention Scheme, which lets importers of other commodities move to a reduced intervention rate after a set number of consecutive passes — the department calls it a census number — states that products not listed in its tables are not eligible, and cut flowers appear in none of them. The eligible categories are dried fruit, vegetables and herbs, fresh fruit and vegetables, nuts and certain other plant products.

The inspection rate for Kenyan cut flowers into Australia is therefore not established on this site, and we have not inferred one from another market.

What it costs to declare, and what is not reproduced

The charge met on every air consignment is the full import declaration charge: A$48 per import declaration, from 1 July 2026, up from A$46 under the department's standard 3.8% indexation. It is levied per declaration — not per box, not per stem — so it thins across a larger shipment and weighs heaviest on a small trial order. How that behaves beside the British per-consignment fee and the Gulf's ad valorem charges →

Inspection is charged separately and on a different basis — in 15-minute and 30-minute units for each officer carrying out the activity, with higher rates outside ordinary hours and higher again at weekends and on departmental holidays. We are not reproducing the individual inspection rates. They are set out against charge points in a table whose rows we could not match to charge points with complete confidence, and a fee quoted against the wrong charge point is worse than no fee at all. The department is also phasing in a new charging structure for its diagnostic work; a programme costed into 2027 should treat that line as a moving number.

What to ask

• Under which pest management pathway is the crop run, and is it an NPPO-approved systems approach? That decides whether a permit is needed at all.
• Which BICON case applies to each genus in the box, and on what date was it last read?
• Who is the importer of record, and therefore who bears a hold, a re-export or a fumigation?
• Is the certificate's treatment statement complete — concentration, duration and method — or does it just say "devitalised"?