Cruel India travel ban driven by fear, ignorance and incompetence

Even I must now say I am ashamed of Australia with the federal government’s cruel India travel ban.

I hate people playing the race card. But even I must now say I am ashamed of Australia, which is making it a crime for Indian Australians to come back home.

To me, it stinks of racism to tell the 8000 Indian Australians trying to come home that they must stay in India, in what Western Australia’s Premier admitted was the “epicentre of death and destruction”.

How cruel we are to enforce this virus travel ban when the risk of these Australians dying of the coronavirus is much higher in India, where hospitals are running out of supplies, than they’d be here, where their treatment would be guaranteed.

The death of any Australian in India because of this ban will shame the Prime Minister and everyone cheering this despicable and irrational policy. Any death will be because we turned our back on our own.

The surging number of coronavirus cases has created a crisis in India. Picture: Money Sharma/AFP.

What’s more, I fear that more than 600,000 Australians of Indian ancestry will now conclude that they can never been real citizens of this country. That they are outsiders. Not “real” Australians.

And so our tribalism deepens.

Yes, I know it is mainly fear, ignorance and incompetence – not racism – that drove the Morrison Government to announce $66,600 fines and even jail for anyone who flies back from India, even through another country.

Fear, because Australians are almost insanely paranoid about a virus that is now infecting 400,000 people a day in India but which has killed just one Australian here this year – an 80-year-old who got infected in the Philippines.

Ignorance, because our contact tracers have actually contained every recent outbreak from our quarantine hotels, making our city-shutdowns pointless.

How cruel we are to enforce this virus travel ban when the risk of these Australians dying of the coronavirus is much higher in India. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Gary Ramage

Incompetence, because we still do not have the failsafe and purpose-built quarantine centres for returning travellers that we’ll need for possibly years to come, relying instead on hotels – some not fit for purpose – bizarrely placed in the middle of our biggest cities.

True, the Prime Minister did say in suspending flights from India that our quarantine facilities needed a breather, having seen the number of infected travellers jump from 90 in a week to 143, thanks mainly to travellers from India.

Yet we last year had as many as 600 Australians a day – not a week, but a day – get infected and our hospitals still coped.

And what is our government suggesting: that Australians who get sick in India must take their chances with Indian hospitals that are short of even oxygen, when the taxes of these citizens helped to pay for Australian hospitals at home that could save them?

This policy is so mean and irrational that I must also blame racism.

I can’t believe we would impose such a travel ban on white Australians fleeing from, say, England.

Indeed, I keep hearing people criticise Indian Australians for having gone back to India in the first place, as if they were recklessly choosing some foreign hell-hole over Australia. As if they were phoney Australians.

The truth is that many went back to do the kind of things we’d expect from people with good hearts – to help a sick or bereaved parent, or introduce a baby to their grandparents, or go to a funeral or get married.

And every one who went back since last year did so with the approval of the Australian Government, which reckoned their trip was fair enough, the risk minimal.

But then they go stuck. Airlines cancelled flights, state governments in Australia cut their intakes of returned travellers, and the virus took off in India. The door slammed shut. Some Australians have been trapped in India for months.

How could anyone assume they’d in some way betrayed Australia? That they made their bed in India and must now lie in it?

In fact, these are Australian citizens. They had to renounce their Indian citizenship to become Australians. Australia is their only country, and has a duty of care towards them.

I get that we want to stop the virus sneaking into Australia. So, yes, ban foreigners coming here from virus hot spots, unless they’ve been vaccinated. And restrict Australians from leaving to visit where the virus is worse.

But it should mean something to be Australian. It should mean that when disaster strikes, wherever you are in the world, Australia will try to save you.

That’s not happening here. Australians caught in the virus disaster in India have been told we’re leaving them there. And if they die there, too bad. It’s every man for himself.

Is that really Australia today?