Flight cap doesn’t fit our civil rights, Mr Morrison

It isn’t right, to have the well-heeled flying into this country on business-class tickets, while ordinary Australians sit abandoned abroad, for months on end. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Gaye Gerard

You have perhaps heard about international flight caps, which basically put a limit on the number of planes allowed into Australia.

Here is what that looks like in practice: 30 people per plane, most of them in business class, where tickets cost $10,000 or more.

Seventy people a day disembarking in Brisbane, 75 in Perth and another 70 in Adelaide. Sydney has slightly more capacity: 350 passenger arrivals a day, but that’s basically it. Melbourne is taking no international arrivals, nor is Hobart. Darwin is dealing with each plane on a case-by-case basis, as is Canberra, but essentially nobody is getting in.

Thus you have desperate people abroad, madly booking and rebooking economy-class tickets, and getting bumped for those who can afford more expensive seats.

You think we don’t live in a class-based society? Just try getting home right now.

And maybe you’re one of those people thinking: well, who are all these people who want to come anyway? They are Australians.

They are people who were living and working overseas, who now need to come home, for a million COVID and non-COVID-related reasons (the job is done, or finished, or gone). They are young people who were studying overseas, whose courses are now complete. They are people who were outside Australia when the borders slammed shut, assisting or visiting elderly relatives, or children, or having the trip of a lifetime.

Some have one or two-year working visas that hadn’t yet run out. Many were told not to come home while the Australian government tried to manage quarantine, when the pandemic first hit. Having abided by that request, they now find themselves hit by the cap.

They can’t get back. They have no jobs. They often have nowhere to stay. They are running short of cash, or else they never had enough in the first place, because when an airline can take only 30 passengers, which ones do you think they are going to take? Business and first class.

That’s not the airlines’ fault. They have to try to make some money somehow.

But let’s say Mum or Dad or somebody steps in, or you borrow from the bank, or crimp from the mortgage, and scrape together the $10,000 or $20,000 to pay for tickets for you and your family. You still have to get a seat. And with the caps in place, there are basically no seats. People are getting pushed back to September, October, possibly November.

They are staying with relatives, or in cheap hotels, fast running out of money, their jobs or university places in Australia at risk, longing to see loved ones, just needing to get home.

This is not about quarantine. Everyone agrees there must be some kind of quarantine although why you can’t do it in your own house, if you live alone, or have been travelling for months with the people who are going to be living with you, is anyone’s guess.

Again, these people are Australians. Some went abroad for gap years, and some for jobs, and some for love, never envisaging a day when they would not be able to get back.

Like all media, The Weekend Australian has been inundated with their stories these past few months.

Much of the attention has been on the plight of those who do get home, the so-called quarantine travellers.

A family of six, for example, living with four children in one room with two beds (one is the pullout) sitting on the floor to eat, in a room where they cannot open the window.

But imagine not being able to come back at all.

The national cabinet has recently voted to extend the arrival caps until October 24. The decision has been greeted with despair.

Australian traveller Jemima Bentley tells The Weekend Australian she has been offered only “business-class or first-class flights, for insane amounts of money”. This is not the Australian way. We are sophisticated, outward-looking people.

The Prime Minister has acknowledged “it will be more difficult” for Australians to return home but says this is not “unreasonable”. It absolutely is unreasonable.

If your elderly parent here in Australia has had a fall, or has just been diagnosed with terminal cancer, it is completely unreasonable for the Australian government to apply caps in a way that prevent you from coming home.

If you’ve lost your job overseas, if your time away has gone awry, if you’re returning from a semester abroad, if you’ve been volunteering, you should be allowed to come home.

Jacki Warnock needs to be in France for work, then Southeast Asia, then Britain. Let’s say she gets an exemption to go. With such limited seats on the planes, how will she get back?

Alyssa Argento says: “Airlines are prioritising the wealthy … people that are able to buy up all the business-class and first-class seats, and those who can’t afford a $15k ticket are stranded.”

Fay Boo says: “I left Australia a week ago and I’ve basically been told there is no way home.” Gabriela Pavledis is a Swiss-Australian dual citizen, with an exemption to leave Australia with her husband to visit her 85-year-old mother. “But the fear is, what happens coming back?” she says, “It’s uncertain if we can get a seat on the plane.”

Again, it’s quite separate from the problem of not being able to leave Australia for who knows how long.

Australia is still the only democracy in the world that has a ban on outbound travel.

It is not the role of government to prevent people from reaching home, or indeed to tell them that they can’t leave. It’s the role of government to manage the public health risk, which is nil, provided arrivals do their quarantine.

A government that prevents its own people from leaving the country isn’t a democracy. Not allowing people to come home is practically unprecedented. It represents an erosion of civil rights.

Milosh V. Ivanovich has been an Australia Day ambassador for years, but he has now quit.

“The way Australia has reacted to this has absolutely made me change my entire core set of beliefs about it as a system and society,” he says.

He cites numerous cases of people unable to get home to see loved ones who are dying. How many children are distraught because one parent is here, and the other caught over there somewhere?

It is hardly uncommon for Australians to head overseas to work, or play. The deal is this: I will live and work abroad but, in case of emergency, I am only a flight away. That is no longer the case.

Rachel Smylie is a British citizen, with an Australian partner, and her first baby on the way. Her whole family lives abroad. “I’m pregnant with my first child and I am slowly coming to terms with the knowledge that my parents won’t be able to support me in the weeks after the birth, and the horrible uncertainty of when I will be able to introduce my son to his family,” she says.

She can’t leave, and they can’t come here. “I have no idea when I will be able to hug my mum again … I know it’s not necessarily headline-worthy but I just wanted to share some of the pain that so many people are suffering.”

It is headline-worthy. We are free people.

It isn’t right, to have the well-heeled flying into this country on business-class tickets, while ordinary Australians sit abandoned abroad, for months on end. It is bad policy, with cruel outcomes. The caps have created a class system. Those with money can see their loved ones and those without cannot.