West Australian Labor premier Mark McGowan backs ban on Indian arrivals

Mark McGowan has backed the federal government’s threat to fine or jail Australians who try to skirt a ban on arrivals from India.

Airline crew and passengers at Sydney International airport before being transferred to hotel quarantine in Sydney. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Flavio Brancaleone

West Australian Labor Premier Mark McGowan has backed the federal government’s threat to fine or jail Australians who try to skirt a ban on arrivals from India, despite condemnation of the move by human rights groups and those unable to get home.

An advocacy group for stranded Australians, Free and Open Australia, attacked the ban as “morally reprehensible”, while federal Labor said the government should have got its ­citizens home already.

But Mr McGowan, who stopped short of locking down his state on Sunday despite ­several new COVID cases, said he supported the “very harsh” measure instituted under the Biosecurity Act on Friday. “We are obviously in a dangerous world and we want to make sure we prevent the ­importation and the spread of the virus within Australia,” he said.

Federal Labor frontbencher Brendan O’Connor said the threat was “a political distraction” from what should have been the government’s main priority: getting stranded Australians home.

 

“Unfortunately the government has chosen not to do the things that matter at an appropriate time including, for example, ensuring that we have facilities for quarantining Australians returning home,” he told the ABC’s Insiders program.

Free and Open Australia spokeswoman Deb Tellis, who was trapped in India for more than six months, said the decision was at odds with Australia’s international human rights obligations.

“Experience in other countries shows that it is absolutely achievable for governments to put in place sufficient and safe quarantine arrangements so that those of their citizens and permanent residents who wish to return home during the pandemic can do so, in a manner which is safe for the resident population and safe for the returning individuals,” Ms Tellis said.

But newly released polling shows a clear majority of Australians have backed the federal government’s approach to getting stranded citizens home.

A Lowy Institute poll, taken before the government shut the border to India until at least May 15, found 59 per cent ­believed the government had done “about the right amount” to bring Australians home.

Foreign Minister Marise Payne said the hardline policy was justified on medical grounds, saying 57 per cent of arrivals from India just before the ban had tested positive for COVID-19, up from 10 per cent last month. The Australian Human Rights Commission said the government “must show that these measures are not discriminatory and the only suitable way of dealing with the threat to public health”.