Scott Morrison reveals ‘first goal’ for vaccinated Australians to travel overseas and return via home quarantine

Scott Morrison says vaccinated Aussies will be able to travel overseas for ‘important purposes’, flagging a home quarantine system.

Scott Morrison talks to locals during a community vaccine forum at the Stirling Community Centre in Perth. Picture: Getty Images

Scott Morrison has revealed his “first goal” to reconnect Australia to the rest of the world will be allowing vaccinated Australians to go overseas “for important purposes” – like work, medical reasons or funerals – and return via home quarantine.

Australians already abroad who had been “properly vaccinated” would also be able to come back in the same way, significantly freeing up the hotel quarantine system, but it was unclear what brand of COVID-19 vaccine they would be required to have.

“The first goal I think is to enable Australians who are vaccinated to be able to move and travel, particularly for important purposes. And secondly, for Australian residents and citizens from overseas who have been properly vaccinated, they will be able to come back in that way,” Mr Morrison told a community forum in Perth.

“That would enable Australians to travel first for business and those sorts of things but ultimately if that worked well over a period of time and the data was showing that home-based quarantine was not creating any additional, scaled risks, that could lead to something more significant. That is how we move to the next step.

“That would require being vaccinated and I think that would be an important incentive to do that.”

The Prime Minister also nominated Singapore as the next country for a travel bubble and said if Australia was going to manage the coronavirus like the flu, the states could not shut domestic borders or place new restrictions on football games if community transmission returned when the international border reopened.

“If we were to open up, we’d have to open up with an agreement that if there were cases in Australia that the rest of Australia internally wouldn’t shut down because that would seriously damage our economy,” he said.

“That would require us all to get on the same page on that and having lived through that experience in the past year, we’d have a fair bit of a journey to travel on that one I’d think before we got to that level of agreement.”

The federal government will only give the green light for vaccinated Australians to travel once it receives medical advice on the transmissibility of the disease among people who have been immunised.

As national cabinet prepares to meet on Monday under a “warlike footing” to try and fix the delayed vaccine rollout, local governments are demanding to be involved in running mass vaccination hubs.

National cabinet will consider establishing large-scale sites to administer AstraZeneca vaccines for people aged 50-70 by the middle of the year and mass hubs for under-50s once the Pfizer and Novavax vaccines come online, likely in the fourth quarter.

The Australian Local Government Association, which wants a seat at the national cabinet table, said councils could run vaccination hubs using buildings they own.

“Councils own buildings in every part of Australia from town halls, baby vaccination clinics, childcare centres, youth facilities. They have a wide variety of infrastructure and assets that could support the hosting of mass vaccination clinics, particularly in regional and remote areas,” ALGA president Linda Scott said.

“We are here to help as a third level of government to safely vaccinate Australians.”

Ms Scott said regional mayors were concerned about how people in their communities would access vaccination facilities.

Australian Medical Association president Omar Khorshid, who offered advice to Mr Morrison on Thursday and is against mass vaccination hubs for the AstraZeneca vaccine because it is being “capably administered” by doctors, said there was no point having large centres with a very small supply of vaccine.