Australian border control authorities hit a New Zealand grandmother with a $3,300 fine after she brought a chicken sandwich through border control without a permit. The 77-year-old woman, June Armstrong, from Canterbury, was in tears after being handed the hefty fine on May 2, having bought the sandwich in Christchurch and popping it in her bag without thinking of it again, The New Zealand Herald reports.
Australia’s Department of Agriculture, Fisheries, and Forestry isn’t backing down.
In fact, they say that Armstrong is lucky she wasn’t hit with an even higher penalty for trying to bring the chicken sandwich into Australia without the proper paperwork.
However, border control officers who fined her in the first place told her that she could appeal the fine and “strongly advised” she did. Armstrong did so within the 28-day payment period, but she only ever got automatically generated replies before time ran out.
Paying the fine put June Armstrong and her husband in dire straights.
She said she had to pay the $3,300 fine from the pension she and her husband receive, which isn’t that much to begin with.
“My husband kept saying, ‘Just pay it.’ I said, ‘It’s our pension, we can’t afford this,’” she recalled to The Herald.
She did query why she was fined to begin with, especially considering that the sandwich was sealed and she’d never had any previous infringements. However, she never received a response.
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No import permit, you pay a big fine.
A spokesperson for Australia’s Department of Agriculture, Fisheries, and Forestry told The Herald that if Armstrong wanted to bring the sandwich into the country, she should have filed for an import permit.
“Meat has strict import conditions which can change quickly based on disease outbreaks,” the spokeswoman explained. “Uncanned meats, including vacuum-sealed items, are not allowed into Australia unless accompanied by an import permit.”
