It's getting close to a week since Australian horses started to cough, splutter and sniffle with the devastating symptoms of equine influenza, yet nobody will answer who or what brought the disease to Australia, how it got here and why it presumably spread out of a Sydney quarantine station.

If this was foot and mouth disease, we'd be in a bit of trouble by now, and there's a real feeling of deja vu when you start thinking back to events like citrus canker, or "that" Brazilian beef episode at the Wagga Wagga tip.

The Federal Government won't admit that Australia's quarantine system has failed, despite a nation's horse industry in lock down to contain a disease not seen in Australia before.

The disease's economic impact is already tipped to run into the billions and the calls for compensation and threats of litigation are starting to surface.

The whole case wreaks of human error, and the credibility Australia's quarantine protocols are looking weak with fever.

Minister for Agriculture, Peter McGauran, said authorities first became aware that horses in quarantine were displaying EI symptoms on August 17.

Yet the first publicity of the disease in Australia only surfaced last Thursday afternoon.

On Wednesday last week, Mr McGauran actually played down concerns about the impact of a potential disease outbreak by simply saying "it ain't coming in here".

Now that it's here, he's still to answer exactly what this disease is doing in Australia in the first place, with protocols requiring horses from Japan are kept in the same place for two months immediately prior to export in Japan on a property where there has been no trace of the disease for three months.

Not only has the system let us down at our borders, but also inside out borders.

Who is going to take the wrap so that the same "human errors" don't let something equally as devastating, like a bird flu or foot and mouth disease, into our country?

If it's anything like our past quarantine blunders, probably no one.

It's time the government expanded its review of 'human error' in relation to apple imports from New Zealand, and cast the net wider to encompass the risk of human mistakes to the entire quarantine system.