Since March 2020, Australia has had some of the world’s strictest border rules even banning its own people from leaving the country.
The policy has been praised for helping to suppress Covid, but it has also controversially separated families.”It’s time to give Australians their lives back,” PM Scott Morrison said.Australia has recorded more than 1,300 deaths from Covid-19 and more than 107,000 cases of infection.
Travel would not immediately be open to foreigners, but the government said it was working “towards welcoming tourists back to our shores”.At present, people can leave Australia only for exceptional reasons such as essential work or visiting a dying relative.
Unvaccinated travellers must still quarantine for 14 days in hotels.Australian carrier Qantas responded by announcing it would restart its international flying a month earlier. It had already put flights to major overseas destinations on sale from 18 December.
Mr Morrison said Australia’s mandatory 14 day hotel quarantine which costs each traveller A$3,000 would be replaced by seven days of home quarantine for vaccinated Australians or permanent residents.
Western Australia and Queensland are still going for an elimination policy, meaning they have been quickest to close their borders to other parts of Australia.
It’s a very different picture in NSW, the most populous state, where the policy has changed from elimination to vaccination.All of that is going to make the practicalities of reopening international borders quite tricky.
Airlines have already said they’re not ready for the ramping up of services this reopening will require. And with so many details still vague in terms of restrictions and proof of vaccination, this could be a potential headache for border authorities too.
NSW or Victoria may allow their fully vaccinated residents to travel abroad and come back to home quarantine but Western Australia, for example, will most likely be reticent to do that and take on increased risk.
Tim Soutphommasane, an academic and former Australian race discrimination commissioner, told AFP news agency that Australia had become a “fortress nation with the drawbridge pulled up to the rest of the world”.
“There has been a sense of parochialism and insularity that has shaped the nation’s response to Covid-19,” he said. “The rest of the world may well be looking at this thinking that Australia has changed fundamentally as a country.”
