After two years of borders shut tight in support of a doomed Zero Covid strategy, Australia is to welcome vaccinated tourists again by March, with the Government set to announce a reopening date as early as Monday. The Daily Mail has the story.
Home Affairs Minister Karen Andrews said allowing the return of vaccinated holidaymakers and business visitors was a “priority” and the Federal Government was “very close” to announcing the re-opening.
“We are going through the process of preparing to open, and we will continue to talk to the health professionals, so as soon as they say yes, we will work with the states and territories and we will re-open our international borders to tourists,” she said.
A meeting of Cabinet’s National Security Committee on Monday will discuss the re-opening with a senior Government source reportedly confirming this would likely be within the next three weeks.
Vaccinated Australian citizens have been able to travel through the country’s international border since November 1st, while skilled migrants and foreign students were welcomed back in mid-December.
But with case numbers in Australia and abroad falling, focus is now shifting to non-essential travel such as holidays.
Covid cases and hospitalisations have been on a downward trend in recent weeks in almost all states except Western Australia. …
The first tourists will arrive by plane with the return of cruise ships likely to be much later as agreements with state governments that control ports need to be reached.
The Government also recently relaxed testing requirements for those flying into Australia with negative rapid antigen tests within the previous 24 hours now accepted along with PCR tests within the previous three days.
Ms Andrews said she could not guarantee the international border would not close again but the Government would make every effort to ensure it stayed open.
“I was very keen to reopen our borders to the economic cohorts and also to international students on December 1st, but then we were hit with Omicron and that was delayed by two weeks,” she said.
“We are prepared to deal with what comes our way, and hopefully once the borders are open, they remain open.”
Now they just need to abandon their superstition in thinking vaccination makes a difference to infection rates, and of course drop all the testing…
Worth reading in full.
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Australia – not so young and certainly not free!!
Even if I had fallen for the snake oil, there is no way I will ever visit Australia again. The psychos aren’t getting a single cent of my hard earned!
Hands up; it was never high on my list of places to visit, but one can be certain it no longer makes the list.
Gee, thanks Australia. You know where you can stick it, cobbers.
Who now would want to visit the East German tribute state?
I’d planned a lengthy holiday in Aus and NZ when I finally decide to retire. You couldn’t pay me to go there now ….. it would be like visiting East Germany under the Stasi.
But as I’m unjabbed and staying that way, they won’t want me ….. or my money ….. anyway.
And they still haven’t understood that the virus is already GLOBAL??
And they still haven’t understood that natural immunity following recovery is FAR more effective and long lasting than the so-called vaccines??
And they haven’t realised that ‘safe and effective’ is the LAST thing these so-called vaccines are??
And they still haven’t realised that there are cheap, safe, effective and PROVEN therapeutics for early stage treatment and prophylaxis??
And they still haven’t realised that NONE of their NPIs had any effect whatsoever, but were in themselves very destructive??
But they have realised that if they now drop any vaccination requirement for inbound travellers, they could be sued to high heaven by those they’ve already denied entry.
Australian concentration camps….?
https://brandnewtube.com/watch/australian-concentration-camps_TTFeonlyQteChaJ.html
Yes vaxxed tourists only, why, because then they can all get covid together. Non vaxxed stay the hell away from places like Australia.
After Australia went for full-on lockdown tyranny so quickly after the start of this so-called pandemic, it would be a foolish tourist who would travel there thinking they are certain of being able to return on their planned date.
Wow.
Not even two weeks since Boris scrapped UK’s covid rules, and the smug is spreading faster across the comments here than the spike virus at a double vaxxed BHP minesite.
Big pharma and NIH push Remdesivir as treatment while killing patients with this drug. Dr Harvy Risch stated HCQ and Ivermectin have similar results and government and corporate corruption illegitimately cut it off from treament protocols. Dr Richard Urso also stated that even if HCQ and Ivermectin are blocked from doctors to use these medicines as treatment for Covid. Get your Ivermectin today while you still can! https://ivmpharmacy.com
“Tourists”? Whoever in their right mind would want to go there?
Went to Oz in 2019 to see the F1 and a few of the wife’s relies and to do a little touring. Loved every minute of it. But now…. not on your life. I am not vaccinated and will never be . I now have a healthy mistrust of all governments, pharma, so called experts etc etc.
I expected that TPTB would at least acknowledge natural immunity, especially following a bout of covid. How can these so called experts not acknowledge something which has been happening for thousands of years!!!
the pity is that most countries on the planet are adopting this stance as well, so it looks like I am confined to barracks for the duration until the world comes to its senses. Won’t hold my breath on that one. Missus not at all happy with me. 🙄
Sadly for me, I will now never visit Australia, New Zealand and Canada given what their Governments are capable of. As for CANZUK which pre-Covid seemed like a sensible idea, forget it – it would be like joining the Third Reich or rejoining the EU.
It’s very hard to reconcile the things I hear about Australia lately with the country I lived in 25 years ago. However (at the risk of generalisation), there is a complacency about Australian culture, with its high standards of living, great weather, beautiful environment and limited immigration which have combined to create an island mentality and perhaps a slightly naïve attitude to authority. Maybe this has made Australian society sitting ducks for totalitarianism? Of course there is also a famous sense of fairness and justice, which means that public anger and vengeance will be harsh once enough Australians realise they’ve been had.
I admire you’re optimism, but I doubt they’ll ever wake up. As the saying goes ” it’s easier to fool people than it is to convince them that they have been fooled”.
Sadly CG I don’t think anyone but a few will emerge from this with the sense that they’ve been had. In Australia or anywhere.
We are in the last stages of the global coup. In two years they’ve put in place a global health pass system and now, anyone who wants to travel internationally will need to demonstrate their compliance to the new world order with their health pass.
Want to be part of the new global system? Get yourself a jab and show you are compliant. Don’t want to get a jab. Stay in your country and your national government will decide how much of a normal life they’ll let you have.
I suppose Australia seems to be more aggressive about forcing people to participate in the new world order. Countries like the UK appear to letting people, for the most part, get there in their own good time. But every country is playing ball in their own way.
As of today, I don’t see any significant nation in the world not intending to join the new world order. They’re all doing the same things. Relax domestic measures. Travel privileges only for the jabbed.
And it’s this way because… Read more »
Granted it’s a bleak outlook, however there is at least some push back in most countries, the following lengthy reports are worth reading to help get some perspective: https://www.eugyppius.com/p/containment-collapse-reader-reports
On bad days I would agree with every word of what you say, but I’m more inclined to believe that this coup is going to fail, for all kinds of reasons. If this is the prelude to a financial crash as some people think, then I think the chances of micromanaging the lives of billions with QR codes and slave privileges in the midst of economic turmoil has no chance of working. They’ve managed to make international travel difficult, sure, but in the most tenuous, inconsistent and incoherent way. And we know who these people are, 70-80 years old, corporate-minded megalomaniacal, greedy, corrupt and out of touch with reality. That they could reshape the entire world to their advantage seems fanciful to me.
We thought we were a lucky country. We thought we were lucky. Sent to a sunny paradise for punishment! Turning a blind eye to the conditions of those who were already here helped, of course.
I would have sworn that totalitarianism could never happen in Australia. We would laugh it to scorn – bugger off! Who says?
Maybe those of us who believed in fairness and justice were a smaller minority than we imagined, but we are fighting. People are driving across the country, defying checkpoints, to protest in Canberra. We are marching every week, even when the temperature is over 40. There are hundreds of thousands of us, maybe as many as a million or more.
I think you’re right about a “slightly naïve attitude to authority”. We thought they were a joke. There’s nothing funny about the repressive tyrants who rule us now. Our “Labor” and “Liberal” parties are parodies of their names.
That’s encouraging to hear and good luck to you. I lived in Perth, a place where by all accounts I would not now be allowed to work. I can’t quite believe what’s happened but look forward to a time when we can all put our respective authoritarian lunatics behind bars and return to some kind of normalcy.
Harsh…. I hope it’s bloody catastrophic for TPTB. They deserve no less!!!
Me too!
The trucker convoys are growing, there is still hope.
But still not reported in the MSM. How much coverage did the MSM give to BLM compared to the truckers?
Like every other country, Australia will increasingly gaslight and claim it was all worthwhile as they arbitrarily move to ‘liberalisation’.
Precisely why there have been millions of contradictory approaches and rules to a single ‘objectively real’ disease around the world, remains one of several pachyderms in the now very crowded room marked ‘Covid BS’.
Im heartened that Will is saying the injections do not make any difference to infection rates. But what about lessening the severity of illness? What evidence supports that assertion?
Would like to know the answer to this
Or, in fewer words: “We are preparing to open..”
Verbal flatulence..
Why would I want to risk my health by going a Vax only country?
Who would want to go to Australia these days? Especially with no guarantee you’ll get there or not be trapped there as they can’t guarantee they won’t close the border again.
Who on earth wants to go to that antipodal hellhole?
Even if they opened to us unclean so-called “unvaccinated” tourists, I don’t have any intention of ever setting foot there. The Australians have shown who they really are these last two years. I’d rather holiday in a mental asylum.
Though it would be hard to tell the difference!
Why would anybody in his right mind run the risk of being forcibly deported from Austrialia for being suspected to have opinions the government disapproves of?
The most restrictive place I’ve been in in the past was the GDR. There were long lists of activities tourist were prohibited from engaging in but for as long as one stuck to the rules, one would be left alone by public authorities. In the free state of Australia, this is, as recent events have shown, decidedly not the case.
It’s certainly a long way to fly only to be rejected as ‘unwholesome’.
Altogether now!
Tie me citizens down, sport
Well, I never felt the urge to visit Australia, and now they won’t have me anyway. Their loss.
Well I’m not going, they can keep their miserable country to themselves.
Wouldn’t go anywhere where time was spent forced to prove my health status, they will never admit they were wrong in their hysterical overreaction to a mild virus
I now have as much desire to visit Australia and NZ as I had to visit the Germany Democratic Republic in the 1970s. (Mind you as one of the pure bloods I wouldn’t be let in).
(Now that it appears that the wheels are falling off the Covid cart, I’d like to congratulate all sceptics especially Toby for their fortitude and shear bloody mindedness. But please don’t let our guard down the bastards haven’t finished with us yet).