Coronavirus: Scott Morrison’s travel cap ‘too tight for our expats’

When Grant Dansie heard Scott Morrison’s tighter restrictions on stranded Australians, including reducing the caps on overseas ­arrivals, his heart sunk even lower.

‘I want to go home and lay Mum to rest’: Grant Dansie with his wife and son.

When Grant Dansie heard Scott Morrison’s tighter restrictions on stranded Australians, including reducing the caps on overseas ­arrivals, his heart — already grieving for the loss of his mother, who had been murdered by his ­father — sunk even lower.

Mr Dansie, the married father of a five-year-old son and one-year-old twin daughters, works for Norway’s aid agency in Oslo and had been planning to return to Adelaide with his wife and children to lay his mother’s ashes to rest.

His wheelchair-bound mother, Helen Dansie, drowned when her husband, Peter Dansie, pushed her into a pond in the Veale Gardens in Adelaide parklands in April 2017.

‘‘There is no way we can come home now,’’ Mr Dansie said after the federal government halved cap arrivals for NSW, Queensland and Western Australia.

‘’It has already been three years to bury Mum and if this keeps going it will be at least another year.’’

Mr Dansie had just received his mother’s remains from South Australian police as his 71-year-old father had legal custody of them throughout the murder trial and appeal.

Only after Peter Dansie’s court appeal against his conviction was rejected in November were police able to retrieve the ashes, found covered in rubbish in the back of Dansie’s car.

‘‘I want to go home and lay Mum to rest in a dignified manner where she can be placed with her dad and brother,’’ Grant Dansie said. “However, given the current situation, this seems impossible.’’

The earliest it appears he, or other Australians in Europe, can book a seat is six months away, costing more than $15,000 for a one-way economy seat.

Flight costs have soared even more as airlines have begun bumping nearly half their already meagre numbers of passengers and most Australians working and living overseas have given up hope that they can return home. Only the very richest can afford the house-deposit size airfares. Some of those bumped this week have not been offered any alternative flight.

Before Christmas, flights were allowed to carry about 30 passengers into various Australian capital cities, and now numbers have been halved, raising fears that the few airlines flying into the country will now begin to cut services.

Amid a maelstrom of anger on social media forums, there is also dismay at the new requirement imposed by the Prime Minister for a negative PCR coronavirus test, impossible for many to obtain at all in many countries; where tests are possible, it is difficult to organise a result within the 72-hour limit.

With that one edict, the Australian government has created a barrier that practically culls huge swaths of Australians from being able to return, angering them when Mr Morrison had told them last March to stay put and wait it out.

Mr Dansie said the pressing issue was a lack of a co-ordinated plan, and no indication from the federal government when the caps would be eliminated.

Australians stranded overseas insist they don’t require repatriation flights, but rather a lifting of the caps so the planes that are flying into the country can take many more passengers.

‘‘For us, the issue is the financial cost, finding a seat and the quarantine cost,’’ Mr Dansie said. ‘‘But what is the government’s plan? Their decision might be politically popular but it is not the morally right thing to do.

“I have seen Australians over here losing jobs. They are struggling to find accommodation and they are not eligible for any support from their host country, nor from Australia and so have eaten into whatever savings they have.

‘‘Australians feel criminalised, when they have done nothing wrong. Australians in Europe see all the issues with the caps, but then the government opens up the numbers in the push for inter­national students and prioritising sporting events like the Australian Open tennis when 40,000 Australians can’t get home, some quite vulnerable.

“It seems very unfair.’’