Health minister Greg Hunt gave a chilling message on Tuesday: “Vaccination alone is no guarantee that you can open up. If the whole country were vaccinated, you couldn’t just open the borders.”
Which begs the question: what are the benchmarks to re-open and allow Australia to be part of the wider world?
From far away in London, and immersed in the pandemic as deep as one can go, it seems that Australia’s zero-Covid attitudes, and mistaken belief that coronavirus can be somehow “beaten” has pushed federal politicians — facing an election while the vaccination program could still be in trouble — into the darkest of corners.
If a country actively banned its citizens from leaving with aggressive Border Force questioning and rules; closed its borders to its own citizens trying to return home by way of punitive quotas, leaving tens of thousands stranded, many penniless and most utterly desperate, despite a willingness to undergo quarantine, we would immediately think of democratic-backward North Korea, not freedom loving, free-spirited Australia.
Yet while trade minister Dan Tehan is headed to Europe to beg for vaccines which the Federal government ordered, amid a final push for free trade deals with both the European Union and the United Kingdom, it’s ironic that more Barossa and Margaret River wine might soon be winging to the northern hemisphere, but people can’t.
Mr Tehan might also find it hard to convince European countries that Australia — with minuscule COVID-19 cases and a contentment to keep borders firmly shut — should be any priority. This is as new Novovax delays may threaten Australia’s vaccine choice for under-50s.
Australians appear to think they have the coronavirus threat under control, but the reality is the country is under one giant lockdown.
Australia’s multicultural and expat families have been driven apart for more than a year, attracting only a smattering of concern from mainstream Australian politicians. Vaccinations were to be the freedom card, but if having the jab makes no difference to the opening of borders and movement of people, it will only add to vaccine-reluctance, particularly among young people.
There has to be a national conversation about what level of circulating coronavirus the country will accept and how it can be handled without hysteria.
The global image of Australia has taken a battering: it is no longer the land of the free, but the land of the risk-free.
International events in Australia are now in serious doubt if Australia remains shut: the FIFA Women’s World Cup in 2023, international cricket including The Ashes, the world cross country at Bathurst, the Formula One, even next year’s Australian Open tennis.
In the coming months as vaccination programs elsewhere help reduce the numbers of people being hospitalised and death numbers plummet; travel and tourism between many countries will intensify. But the only certainty as far as Australia is concerned, is that it will remain an outlier.
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So now Australians know the bottom line: regardless of the coronavirus vaccination drive the country will remain a hermit enclave.