Overseas travel bubbles that will ‘definitely’ happen in 2021

Dust off your passports, because despite the forecast that overseas travel will be largely off until 2022, a new round of travel bubbles are on the cards.

Australian chief medical officer Professor Paul Kelly has high hopes that a travel bubble with New Zealand could soon be reciprocated, and that a similar arrangement may be in place for some of our other Pacific neighbours.

Prof Kelly said the vaccine rollout would be crucial to reopening international travel, despite earlier comments from Australia’s top health chief Professor Brendan Murphy that overseas travel will be largely off until 2022.

On Monday, Prof Murphy suggested Australia’s borders could stay closed for the entire year, even with a vaccine.

But National Cabinet – made up of Australia’s political leaders – asked the Australian Health Principal Protection Committee (AHPPC) to assess what countries could be green for travel, and they provided a pretty uplifting forecast.

“That was the assessment we did for New Zealand to start with. Every week I reassess that,” Prof Kelly said.

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Professor Paul Kelly says a travel bubble may be possible for some countries around Australia. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Christian Gilles

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“Weekly, I do a formal report to decide whether that should continue or not and we look at a range of details that come from the New Zealand Ministry of Health. That’s been very successful – we have had tens of thousands of people who have come across the ditch in the last few months and not a single case.”

The AHPPC has done similar risk assessments on Pacific island nations for the Pacific Labour Scheme but was still looking at establishing tourism bubbles.

“We haven’t found another green country at this stage; there are some that are very low risk and that is playing into discussions about how people from some of those countries should be quarantined to make sure it is safe,” he said.

Prof Kelly said they were “definitely open to other bubbles” and Australia would “welcome New Zealanders to look at our epidemiological situation and have something more reciprocal than what we have got”.

It will still by some time before international borders are completely open. Picture Jono Searle/Getty Images

Tourism and Transport Forum chief executive Margy Osmond said messaging around international travel being off the cards until 2022 was a blow to the industry, which would need a “pay-packet support exercise” similar to JobKeeper to survive extended international border closures and uncertainty around domestic borders.

“At the very least, we are going to need an extension of JobKeeper or a version of it. We’re keen to talk to government about that,” Ms Osmond told ABC News Breakfast on Tuesday.

“I do think there is a larger issue to do with the strategic survival of the industry. You step outside the ring around most capital cities, the sort of two-to-four-hour drive ring, and you will see real pain in the industry and in the centre of CBDs, which have largely died.

“So we are going to need a much more strategic approach. We have started that conversation with [the] Government. I must say the new Minister Tourism, Dan Tehan, has followed on from his predecessor, (Simon) Birmingham, with a serious commitment to the industry. But if we don’t do these things, we will be lucky go have a tourism industry in 12, 18 months’ time.

“We can’t recover without international borders opening and we can’t survive without certainty to do with domestic borders.”