Exit blocked: Half of all requests to leave the country knocked back

Australians have a fifty-fifty chance of making it out of the country with the world’s toughest borders, with half of the travel exemptions applied for being refused.

Border Force officials knocked back nearly half of all applications to leave the country in May, with almost 10,000 citizens or permanent residents seeing their exemption requests knocked back thanks to what are believed to be some of the strictest outgoing border controls in the world.

A deserted international departures hall at Sydney Airport.

Bureaucrats with the agency approved just 11,876 applications over the course of the month, and denied a further 9,871. Some 3,486 were otherwise finalised, which according to the agency meant that they were withdrawn, submitted by someone who ordinarily lives in another country and therefore already permitted to travel, or did not contain enough information.

According to the Border Force website, there are only a few valid reasons to leave the country including employment, study, and for “compassionate and compelling reasons” such as to attend funerals or visit sick or dying relatives, though these exemptions are considered on a case-by-case basis.

A Qantas Boeing 747-400 aircraft taking off at Sydney's Kingsford Smith Airport in Sydney.

“While the rest of the world is opening up and letting families getting back together, we are maintaining these strict measures that have terrible impacts on families,” said Andrew Cooper, president of LibertyWorks, who recently brought litigation seeking to overturn the travel ban.

“The worst thing is that government officials are granting themselves exemptions and holding back the same thing for tens oi thousands of Aussies,” he said.

The figures come after Prime Minister Scott Morrison took criticism for an undeclared side trip to research his family’s history while at the G7 in Cornwall, and Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk relented and got the Pfizer jab “in the event I need to travel to Tokyo for the Olympics.”