Has the government of Australia given any rational for banning Australians from leaving? What is the public discourse like over this?
I also heard that Australia was making it very difficult for Australians who were abroad prior to COVID from coming back, is that true? Has that changed much? Again, does the government give a rational for this decision? And the discourse?
I think that Australia and NZ were right to lock down hard and stamp out COVID but I'm a bit baffled by the fact that it has managed to get in a few times and more specifically how it has managed to get in.
It seems to be that once if you're an island the size of Australia and you've eliminated domestic transmission the simple solution is to route all international flights to an airport in remote location (not one in a large city) where absolutely everyone involved in the process be they passangers, crew or quarantine staff must stay for two weeks with zero exceptions.
If you did that then you could easily repatriate Australians living abroad.
> I also heard that Australia was making it very difficult for Australians who were abroad prior to COVID from coming back, is that true? Has that changed much?
As an Australian living abroad - nope, nothing has changed. It's near impossible for us to get back although at this point, why would I want to..
> And the discourse?
Australians overseas are distraught with many being forced to watch friends and family go through tragedy from afar. The ones living at home don't seem to give a crap at all - "you left, serves you right" isn't an uncommon sentiment.
It's been discussed in other posts recently on HN about Australia - life there is pretty good and Australians are generally laid back to a fault. If a problem doesn't affect an individual on a personal level, it doesn't exist.
The rationale for preventing citizens leaving is that they may catch COVID abroad then rely on govt. intervention to get back home as a "stranded" Aussie. This is of course nonsense, as govt. intervention to get home has been worth exactly fuck all over the last 18 months. An acquaintance of mine went overseas for his mother's funeral, was told he wasn't allowed to return, managed to get back on the constraint that he flew business (we want rich people back here, after all), then had to fly to South Australia (we are in NSW), quarantine for two weeks, hire a car, and drive back to NSW where he was required to quarantine for two weeks at the border before returning home.
Whether all that was indeed necessary to prevent the spread of COVID (despite several negative tests and all but total isolation in that time) is up for debate, but yes the government certainly makes it as hard as possible to enter the country, virtually impossible unless you can purchase upper-class tickets (bribe the border force).
It got in because quarantine is a complex system (unless you completely seal your borders, and don't accept things like medicine), and complex systems do not operate perfectly forever.
Australia foolishly believed that they could choose if and when Covid entered their country, which explains the sheer complancy at all levels of government in dealing with it. This was never true.
The result was that Australia purchased, at enormous cost, some covid-free time, and then proceeded to piss it up against the wall.
(As an aside: I'm Australian, and live outside Australia. I do not want to be "repatriated", I want to simply be able to visit the country I'm a citizen of, without being banned from leaving again, and without spending thousands of dollars on quarantine.)
> Australia foolishly believed that they could choose if and when Covid entered their country
No. They believed they could limit covid cases and they were right. Australia's still got some of the best covid results in the world, even with the currently rising case numbers:
If your pursuit of "best covid results" (and all the goal post shifting justifications that come with it) requires that your ostensibly democratic, free country turns even more towards something resembling East Germany, i'd say you've failed in some more fundamental way. Many other countries also managed to decently deal with a highly difficult and fluid situation like this without imposing absurd Stasi-like equivalents of exit visas. What a shameful thing for a western democratic state to shift to and what a shame that so many idiots defend the normalization of these things in their terror of this relatively moderate virus.
No. You're confusing public health measures with political ideology.
This confusion is one of the reasons that the US covid response was, and continues to be, such a failure. The US is at 649,754 deaths from covid and counting.
The U.S. response has been extremely variable and has operated under circumstances entirely different, geographically and politically from those of a much smaller, island country like Australia. Comparing the two as countries is absurd. With that said, there are many legitimate criticisms of the Australian government reaction, and yes, on authoritarian grounds as well. The U.S response is in many ways worth criticizing as well. Furthermore, what has Australia really gained? Endless rolling lockdowns and a fragility against covid upticks that's laughably tenuous while also being highly authoritarian. It's wonderful to see the exceptionally low death count among COVID cases in the country (taking into account its unique geographic situation) but had vaccination not become available, this would have been a very fragile, unsustainable thing bought at enormous social cost.
A lot, economically. Australia & NZ returned to growth faster than just about anywhere else on the planet, and the states that locked down hardest returned to growth fastest.
So it was a big win heath wise, and a big win economically. Whether the new rules were a big loss of freedom is a matter of taste I guess, but we already have lots of rules like don't drive too fast, don't yell Fire! in a theatre, your kids must be schooled, don't has sex with minors. More rules than you can poke a pointed stick at in fact. In comparison the new ones were a drop in the ocean, and they disappeared as soon as they weren't needed (ie, when the lock downs worked). I sincerely wish the other rules were reviewed as quickly.
Yes, the US has failed as a nation in its covid response.
You claim Australia's health measures are now "normalized" which is absurd. They are abnormal measures to deal with an abnormal situation.
Let's make a bet: I bet Australia will remove its lockdown restrictions when either the covid case numbers are under control or it decides to just give up and let covid infections rise (like the UK did).
You bet the lockdowns are "normalized" and Australia remains an "authoritarian regime".
In WA we've been pretty much living a normal life sans about ~4 lockdowns, most of which went for 4-7 days. It feels like ancient history. Last one we had was around April 24
At what cost? Hasn’t NSW been under a severe lockdown for months now? And it’s being further tightened because cases are at an all time high and still going up? I mean they had to designate approval of friends for single people so they at least have human contact.
So sure, great job on keeping Covid numbers down until now, but it’s not like it wasn’t costly in other ways.
And I say this as someone with family in Vietnam who took a similar approach. They felt like it would be a great time to create a domestic vaccine industry since they had zero cases for most of last year - plenty of time to develop their own Covid vaccine.
Well in the past 4 months cases have increased by almost 200x (2,000 to near 400,000), same with deaths and it still hasn’t peaked. Total number full vaccinated is a little under 2% (though 1 dose is almost 20%).
Now they are scrambling like mad to get any vaccine they can. And they have the military distributing food in their biggest city because nobody can leave their homes - unless for medical care.
To the grandfather’s point, the control of Covid was admirable, don’t get me wrong, but it was squandered out of complacency that they could always get it under control.
> At what cost? Hasn’t NSW been under a severe lockdown for months now?
It's a meaningless question without any numbers. Show me the economic impact for, for example, the UK versus Australia. Who comes out better in growth and GDP?
Well, they have lower numbers of confirmed cases, but they have a higher death rate than some countries. As an example, Norway has registered 3 times as many cases, but fewer deaths. And while Norway, especially Oslo, has had strong lockdowns, they were nowhere near as onerous as what Melbourne and Sidney have gone through.
Australia bought themselves time, but squandered it rather than ensuring that as many people as possible were vaccinated.
> Well, they have lower numbers of confirmed cases, but they have a higher death rate than some countries. As an example, Norway has registered 3 times as many cases, but fewer deaths.
Norway's population is 5,469,887. Australia's population is 25,839,176.
Norway's covid deaths per million is 149. Australia's covid deaths per million is 38.
Our, Norway's, economy has already recovered to pre-COVID levels. We have never needed a lock down. We expect to have 95% of the eligible over 18s fully vaccinated before the end of October.
We have never been forbidden from travelling abroad, just advised against, always been able to return. Now that I am fully vaccinated I can return without having to quarantine, without tests, I don't even have to fill in a passenger locator form.
We have never had any violent protests, or violent reactions to protests, about COVID restrictions.
> Australia's doing much better than Norway.
It seems to me that reducing performance to a single dimension is counter productive both literally in GDP terms and qualitatively on a personal level.
And yet, Canada did do lockdowns and is around 4.7x worse than Norway. Plus the gov’t spent $240 billion by Dec 2020; a significant part of which ($80B) was the unemployment program introduced so that people didn’t go broke when they couldn’t work.
The retrospective studies on all of this across different countries is going to be really interesting.
Squandered is not really an appropriate take. Australia's cases are just about to leave triple digits daily and we've already got 30% of the country vaccinated, and most people have been given at least a first dose. This is an enviable position, the edge is going to be taken right off when the case numbers are get high. And the elderly have nearly finished with the vaccination campaign.
And we were struggling to lay hands on the vaccine a few months ago. Supplies were going to countries that honestly needed it more than Australia (cough India cough).
> route all international flights to an airport in remote location (not one in a large city) where absolutely everyone involved in the process be they passangers, crew or quarantine staff must stay for two weeks with zero exceptions.
That's not practical.
You need capacity to house at least 10,000 people in quarantine, then another 1,000 staff to look after them. Ideally you'd also be close to a major hospital and the airlines certainly wouldn't sign up to having their staff made to quarantine after every inbound flight.
A large federally-funded quarantine facility on the outskirts of each state capital would fulfill the need for quarantine that can operate at capacity, whilst limiting transmission. It's not rocket science, but unfortunately it is politics.
The past couple of years have caused me to really become ashamed of being Australian. Being part of an increasingly globalised society, I found the government's blanket dictat of "Australians come home now" to belong to another era. With 4% of its population living in other countries, one would assume they would try harder to not alienate their diaspora.
It's not rocket science but does require some foresight. Realistically it would take 6 months - 1 year to fully build out quarantine sites that could fully replace hotel quarantine.
If the governments had started on this in March 2020 it would have been worthwhile but these facilities are only just starting to be built now, are too small to entirely replace hotel quarantine, and will be largely redundant by the time they open if NSW and VIC continue on their current paths.
Maybe we could use some of the 600 million earmarked for politically convenient carparks? [1]
Compared with the eyewatering sums thrown about to keep the economy alive while closed off to the world, a series of quarantine facilities that allow us to open up is surely doable.
It's not really a cost issue it a logistics (better to locate them on the edge of large cities rather than remote areas) and timing (these facilities weren't seriously considered until it was already too late) issue.
> It seems to be that once if you're an island the size of Australia and you've eliminated domestic transmission the simple solution is to route all international flights to an airport in remote location (not one in a large city) where absolutely everyone involved in the process be they passangers, crew or quarantine staff must stay for two weeks with zero exceptions.
> Has the government of Australia given any rational for banning Australians from leaving?
Somewhere after "flatten the curve", Australia aimed for "covid zero" - so they don't want any cases in the country, at all. They did well at that for most of the pandemic, but now delta is running rampant.
They don't want anyone leaving, because they know you'll just come back again and you might bring covid in.
> What is the public discourse like over this?
There was a court case about it being unconstitutional, but it got over ruled because "dangerous times". [1]
> I also heard that Australia was making it very difficult for Australians who were abroad prior to COVID from coming back, is that true?
(for what it's worth, I returned to Australia from Canada in late June 2021 - so I went through all of this).
Again, they're trying to keep covid out, so they have a strict limit on the number of people that can fly into the country from the outside world. Right now it's 3,035 people per week for the entire country [2]. With numbers so restricted, and a mandatory 2 weeks of being locked in a hotel for the cost of $3000, it's difficult to get a flight. From Canada it wasn't nearly as bad as the media makes it out to be, but supposedly there are well over 10,000 people "trying" to get back... though in my experience, and talking to everyone in my quarantine hotel and on my flight, I don't actually believe that's true.
> Has that changed much? Again, does the government give a rational for this decision? And the discourse?
The incoming people cap was halved in July because of the current Delta outbreak (which escaped hotel quarantine). The government's justification is "dangerous times". The discourse is "this is being done for your safety, and you should be thankful".
> I'm a bit baffled by the fact that it has managed to get in a few times and more specifically how it has managed to get in.
After going through it myself, I'm shocked covid didn't escape quarantine more. Just in Sydney airport more than 10 people spoke face to face with all of us arrivals, touched my passport with bare hands, etc. etc. Multiple people picked up and moved my bags, were physically close to me in elevators, etc. etc.
If I were running the show, anyone coming into the country would be treated like they had the zombie plague and nobody would get within 10 feet of them. Certainly nobody would be touching their bags and physically touching documents.
> the simple solution is to route all international flights to an airport in remote location (not one in a large city) where absolutely everyone involved in the process be they passengers, crew or quarantine staff must stay for two weeks with zero exceptions.
Surely good in theory, but where will you find a remote location with a big enough airport and enough accommodation you can just take over? also remember staff want to have days off, food must be delivered, people in quarantine want packages delivered, etc. etc.
> If I were running the show, anyone coming into the country would be treated like they had the zombie plague and nobody would get within 10 feet of them.
> Surely good in theory, but where will you find a remote location with a big enough airport and enough accommodation you can just take over? also remember staff want to have days off, food must be delivered, people in quarantine want packages delivered, etc. etc.
The planes full of zombies can land in an air force base with a suitable air strip and then they are lead to quarantined trailer camps like you would find in many remote mining and oil and gas operations around the world.
At the end of it all the camp that you've built can be dismantled and either sold to the mining industry in Australia or redistributed to the armed forces.
>supposedly there are well over 10,000 people "trying" to get back... though in my experience, and talking to everyone in my quarantine hotel and on my flight, I don't actually believe that's true.
Speaking for myself, I am not wanting to return permanently, so I do not want to take the quota place of someone who does want to. There is also uncertainty for me if I would be able to leave the country.
I do want to see my family however, and I have no idea when that will be possible. Video calls only do so much.
I'm in a similar boat, and I chose to come back. I'll be here for 18 months.
I will now have to apply for an "exemption" to leave, though with my proof of residency and personal business in another country, I should be fine (all fingers are crossed)
Why would a mere 2 week quarantine be sufficient to prevent someone coming in from spreading it domestically? AFAIK 2 weeks is only good enough to catch around 99.99% of cases. That's plenty of cases getting through.
I think a generous interpretation of my comment regarding 2 week quarantine would be "the period that is sufficient to catch 100% of active infections of COVID-19."
Perhaps that is 2.5 or 3 weeks?
Either way, the fact remains that Australia's decision to leave thousands of their citizens stranded abroad and to lock their citizens in their country is both peculiar and unreasonable.
I was actually taking that generous interpretation - that you might mean 21 days since that's what HK demanded for example. But my point is that nature doesn't work that way as far as I know. There is no 100% point, just increased 9s on the end of 99.9. Scientists have identified 34 days as what seems like the upper end now, but that doesn't mean we'll never see a case of an infection showing up only after a longer period.
Meanwhile if 10,000 people enter the country, 1 makes in to the community and incubates on the 34th day, and things aren't detected immediately with amazing contact tracing it can turn into 1000 cases in no time.
All at the incredible cost of already having put 9,999 unnecessarily through a ridiculously long 34 days quarantine.
So there is a certain impracticality in this type of thinking, since a human lives for only so long. A human has only so many years of his life with which to develop his career and save for his old age. A lot of 0 covid policy countries are seriously going to spiral into territory where the sacrifice of individual human lives by "portion" is no longer insubstantial if we don't see some 180 degree reversals (perhaps by violent revolt). Like if NZ and AZ carry on for 5 years like I expect them to.
I don't believe Australia or NZ has had anyone leave quarantine after 2 weeks and then test positive. The only exception might be where there was transmission inside a facility.
Actually the famous case that escaped in Adelaide quarantine was exactly that.
Guy tested negative before the flight, and on days 2, 7 and 14 of quarantine. Then drives around and spreads it. They assume he caught it on his last or second last day in quarantine.
Which is why I had to have tests 72 hours before my flight, then on days 2, 7 & 14 of quarantine, then yet another test on day 16
I also heard that Australia was making it very difficult for Australians who were abroad prior to COVID from coming back, is that true? Has that changed much? Again, does the government give a rational for this decision? And the discourse?
I think that Australia and NZ were right to lock down hard and stamp out COVID but I'm a bit baffled by the fact that it has managed to get in a few times and more specifically how it has managed to get in.
It seems to be that once if you're an island the size of Australia and you've eliminated domestic transmission the simple solution is to route all international flights to an airport in remote location (not one in a large city) where absolutely everyone involved in the process be they passangers, crew or quarantine staff must stay for two weeks with zero exceptions.
If you did that then you could easily repatriate Australians living abroad.