According to a report by our friends in the USA at Cruise Industry News Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and Attorney General Ashley Moody are so frustrated by the delays by the CDC regarding cruising restarting, that they are keeping all options open to restart the cruise industry in Florida.
As a result, the Governor speaking at Port Canaveral during a roundtable discussion on Friday said they are discussing legal strategies, adding. ““The Attorney General and I have been discussing what potential options we have on the legal side”.
He also said, “Let’s appeal to the CDC and let’s try to get the guidance without having to go down that road,” adding though, “Obviously at some point we need a way forward.”
DeSantis noted a strong effort in 2020 to lift the CDC’s No Sail Order and admitted he thought they had a plan in place to have it lifted by the end of the year, adding, “The previous administrative was supportive of doing it, but the CDC was not”, and “I think what we’ve seen is a continuation of that”.
He also said that, “If you keep this No Sail Order in place, Americans are still going to be taking cruises, they are just going to be taking them from the Bahamas or Bermuda.”
While accepting that the situation in Australia is rather different, the economic impact of the Federal Government’s ban on cruising, not just on travel, but on a wide range of industries is massive.
Clearly as evidenced by similar cruises operating without incident in Singapore and elsewhere, where even in Singapore, around 150,000 Singaporean cruisers have enjoyed cruising in the last several months and domestic cruises starting in the UK, the Australian Federal Government’s cruise ban needs to be lifted on larger vessel, at least to allow domestic, intra-state or inter-state cruising.
Sadly, there appears to be no current indication that Federal Government ban on larger vessel cruising will be lifted any time soon, even though cruise operators and CLIA have been doing stellar work in trying to convince the Federal Government. Currently, very sadly at least to those of us like you and me on the outside their efforts appear to have been to no avail.
They may have done so already, but I hope that the cruise operators and CLIA have been and are considering legal options as and I am no legal expert, but the Federal Government’s what appears to be a relatively uniformed about cruising and highly risk averse approach preventing the restart of cruising, appears to fall within some considerable degree of unfairly preventing the cruise companies from trading and surely that has to be illegal.
An opinion and edited report from Cruise Industry News by John Alwyn-Jones.
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