Scott Morrison increases passenger cap, forces states to take more Aussies

The Prime Minister has put pressure on states to take in more overseas arrivals so more Australians can fly home from abroad.

About 25,000 Australians stranded overseas have been given hope for returning home soon after the Federal Government pressured states into taking more international arrivals in hotel quarantine.

Australia will raise its weekly cap on international arrivals from 4000 to 6000 from Friday next week, with state leaders agreeing to increase — and in some cases, double — their weekly intake.

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The move is expected to help alleviate a backlog of overseas Australians still struggling to secure seats on flights home, especially after the cap was lowered in August to ease pressure on state quarantine facilities.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison denied this morning the cap could be raised without the approval of state leaders.

The Federal Government will raise Australia’s weekly cap on international arrivals from 4000 to 6000. Picture: David Gray/Getty Images

“We went through a process with our officials to work out what was the best way to get people home and it’s on commercial flights, going through the hotel quarantine system — which the states have been running, in most cases, extremely well — and we’ve just reviewed all that though an agreed process,” Mr Morrison said on Sunrise.

“Back in July the premiers asked that we take the heat off the quarantine system by putting these caps in place. That’s when Victorian numbers were surging and NSW had their challenges and that was reasonable at the time.

“But we’ve done the review of quarantine and we’ve got (Australian Defence Force) people in Western Australia and Queensland, NSW and other places, so now’s the time we’ve got to start taking the caps off again.”

The Federal Government wants Sydney, Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide to take in a further 500 overseas arrivals each from Friday next week.

The Federal Government wants each of the states to raise their weekly intake by 500.

This means Sydney will continue to take the brunt of the national intake, with its weekly cap raised to 2950.

Currently, Perth’s cap is 525 and Brisbane and Adelaide are each limited to 500. There are no international flights into Victoria.

Mr Morrison praised NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian’s government for taking the lion’s share of arriving passengers.

“They’re carrying half the load here and they’re not just Sydneysiders and NSW people coming home, they’re Tasmanians, they’re Queenslanders, they’re Western Australians so (NSW is) making sure they can get home to their state eventually too,” he said.

The Prime Minister also ruled out Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese’s suggestion yesterday the Federal Government should dispatch unused Royal Australian Air Force VIP aircraft for international rescue flights.

Airlines say they have struggled to remain profitable with tight limits on passenger numbers on expensive flights to Australia.

“There’s no need for that,” he said. “There are plenty of commercial planes, they just need to lift the caps so they can run the services to Australia. It’s the caps that were stopping the planes.”

The development comes a week after the boss of Qatar Airways, which has already brought home more than 180,000 Australians from overseas, urged Australia to relax arrival caps or it may be forced to pull flights.

“We have between 38 and 42 seats in our business class. And because we have such a limited number of passengers that we can carry, we have no other alternative but to maximise the yield that we get because you know very well Australia is at the end of the world,” chief executive Akbar Al Baker told the ABC last week.

“It is a very long flight and when we carry limited numbers of passengers you can see that it puts a huge strain on our costs.”

Australians overseas have complained about getting bumped from flights multiple times, sometimes within hours of departure, as airlines such as Qatar prioritise higher-paying passengers so they can stay profitable sending mostly empty planes on the long and costly routes.