Is a Christmas holiday to Australia over-optimistic?
Q Australia at Christmas: any thoughts? I’m optimistic.
Fraser
A Optimism is always a valuable quality in travel, but I fear in this case it may be misplaced. I believe that by summer the UK will have got rid of the most draconian rules for outbound and returning travellers, such as making holidays illegal. So British travel restrictions should not play a significant part in preventing any such journey. But I fear that Australia’s rules will remain extremely strict, as the country seeks to maintain its excellent record in keeping coronavirus under control.
At present overseas tourists are banned from Australia, and there have been repeated border closures between states in response to Covid outbreaks.
Trans-Tasman journeys between Australia and New Zealand – another extremely good performer in the Covid stakes – will resume at scale in the coming months, and links with some other relatively safe
locations, such as Singapore and the Pacific Islands, may be re-established. But there appears little political appetite to welcome other tourists.
Last week, the prime minister, Scott Morrison, told reporters: “I think it is a reasonable expectation that as time goes on, as the vaccination rolls out across the world and here in Australia, you should rightly expect that things will change and how we manage the virus.”
Yet even the managing director of Tourism Australia, Phillipa Harrison, was cautious, and did not mention the possibility of returning this year – saying: “There’s still going to be a lot of friction to travel, so it’s not like on 1 January 2022 the borders are going to fling open and we’re going to go back to where we are.”
Having said all that, let me be equally optimistic. The UK’s adult population should all have been offered vaccines long before Christmas. If that leads to a sharp and sustained fall in coronavirus cases here, it may be that visits are allowed – at what is normally a very lucrative time for Australia’s airlines and tourism providers. If that were to play out, then expect a heavy testing regime – and perhaps a “no jab, no go” policy to prevail.
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