- The relaxation of the restrictions will allow citizens to travel abroad when their state’s vaccination rate hits 80%
- Currently, people are only able to travel out of Australia for exceptional reasons, including necessary work or to visit a family member who is terminally ill.
- Return to Australia is currently restricted by strict arrival quotas and those returning to the country have to undergo a mandatory 14-day hotel quarantine.
Australia initially closed its border back in March of 2020, banning its citizens and residents from traveling abroad without official permission and leaving thousands of Australians stuck abroad.
“It’s time to give Australians their lives back,” the country’s Prime Minister Scott Morrison said today, announcing that Australia would begin to ease the severe border restrictions it had enacted early in the COVID-19 pandemic, allowing vaccinated citizens to travel internationally.
The easing of the COVID-19 border restrictions will allow Australian citizens to travel abroad when their state’s vaccination rate hits 80% – a goal set nationwide to ensure that an outbreak of the virus would not overwhelm medical facilities.
Currently, New South Wales is the closest state to that threshold, being set to reach it in a matter of weeks, while Victoria is expected to be the second to meet the requirement.
At this time, people are only able to travel out of Australia for exceptional reasons, including necessary work or to visit a family member who is terminally ill. Return to Australia is restricted by strict arrival quotas and those returning to the country have to undergo a mandatory 14-day hotel quarantine.
Morrison also said that, as well as making it easier for vaccinated people to travel, the hotel quarantine measure – which costs AUS $3,000 ($2,100) – will be wound down and replaced with a seven-day at-home isolation.
The relaxation will not immediately apply to foreign inbound individuals, although the government stated that it was working to ensure the country could soon be “welcoming tourists back to our shores.”
Australia’s partial relaxation of its travel restrictions comes despite its two biggest cities, Melbourne and Sydney, and its capital, Canberra, remaining in lockdown due to a surge in cases that occurred in those urban hubs earlier in the year.
