State premiers, along with top travel industry and business figures, are calling for faster, bolder action on vaccination, fearing that the current snail-paced inoculation rollout, along with a vaccine-hesitant population, could consign Australia to closed-border hibernation for years.
Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce is among those who feel that once everyone has been offered vaccination and given the chance to accept it, Australia’s international borders should be unlocked. The key should be the number of Australians who are offered a vaccine, rather than how many people take up the offer. To do otherwise makes Australia hostage to perpetually jab-shy people with various agendas.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s four-stage National Plan out of the Covid-19 pandemic, released last Friday, was vague on timing. It did not include timetables or a vaccine target to ensure international borders could safely reopen.
Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk and Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews are in favour of reopening international borders once everyone has been offered the vaccine.
“If the logic of Dan Andrews and Annastacia Palaszczuk applies, once we’ve got every adult who wants a vaccine to be vaccinated, then surely that should be the threshold,” Alan Joyce told The Australian. “I support that logic.”
Australia has one of the lowest Covid-19 vaccination rates in the developed world, with less than 8% of the adult population fully vaccinated. Reports keep surfacing of people desperate to get the jab, who can’t obtain the vaccine. Targets set early this year (with talk of the population vaccinated by October) have long since disappeared.
Simon Bernardi, managing director at Australia & Beyond Holidays and a well-known travel industry figure, pointed out recently to Reuters that while Europe was opening up, Australia was “for some reason not in a hurry”.
Bernardi said Australia’s stance was “driven by politics because it’s easy for people to win elections if they lock everyone down”.
Others have concluded likewise. Numerous polls and elections indicate that leaders taking a very conservative posture on border closures and hair-trigger lockdowns, get re-elected with whopping majorities. People just want to be kept safe and some politicians have taken the hint.
The Council of Australian Tour Operators (CATO) is yet another industry body calling for fixed timelines and transparency around the trigger points for each phase of the government’s Covid-recovery plan, to allow the industry to protect their businesses until international borders open.
Businesses in the travel industry cannot continue to borrow financially in order to keep their doors open for an indeterminate period of time, CATO chairman, Dennis Bunnik, says.
Bunnik says the federal government should realise that travel businesses need more than a commitment to create a plan – they need dates and specific numbers.
“The travel industry needs clear trigger points regarding vaccination levels for easing both domestic and international border restrictions. We need a simple and easy-to-access Vaccination Passport for non-restricted domestic travel – this can be used to incentivise vaccinations so that Australians can see the positive benefits of getting the jab. We also need approval of a 7-day home quarantine option for returning, fully vaccinated international travellers.”
The three-month interval between the first AstraZeneca vaccination and the second is another sticking point. Bunnik called for more public messaging about planning ahead for travel and not waiting till the borders open before deciding to be vaccinated, “as this may prolong travel further for consumers (three months plus) particularly for the over 50s and 60s”.
Bunnik added: “The Government needs to protect the remaining high-skilled jobs in the travel sector through extending grant schemes and improving eligibility. In tandem, it needs to work with the travel industry to prepare for a return of international travel to avoid massive skills shortage and enable Australians to travel safely.”
In short:
- Many companies are fully extended financially and need transparency on how much longer they need to subsist without an income, in order to determine whether they can afford to go deeper into debt.
- Businesses need to know if (a) they can afford to keep staff on until borders open and (b) manage the workload if travel resumes across domestic borders and international.
- Travel companies need to start creating travel products – this takes time and investment
Vaccinations need urgently to be offered to the entire population, Bunnik said.
Meanwhile, Tourism Accommodation Australia has welcomed the NSW Government’s policy change to make vaccination compulsory for all staff working in quarantine hotels and has called for other states to immediately follow suit.
Tourism Accommodation Australia chief executive Michael Johnson says that once you exclude quarantine figures, true hotel occupancy rates in Sydney are hovering around the 2% mark.
Johnson says quarantine business is the only thing keeping the struggling Sydney hotel market operating.
“Sydney hotels are currently operating at 20% occupancy, but that figure is misleading because the majority of guests are quarantined travellers,” he said.
“This figure will be halved again after 14 July, when the cap for international arrivals drops from 3000 arrivals per week to 1500 per week. Under the current lockdown most other Sydney hotels are closed or operating at less than 2% occupancy, with most staff stood down. The ones that have managed to stay open have seen a 98% drop in revenue compared to this time last month.”
Written by Peter Needham
