“Just being able to come home without having to go to
quarantine is huge,” Carly Boyd, a passenger who had traveled from New York,
told reporters at Sydney’s Kingsford-Smith Airport, where Peter Allen’s
unofficial national anthem “I Still Call Australia Home” was playing.
“There’s a lot of people on that flight who have loved ones
who are about to die or have people who died this week so. For them to be able
to get off the plane and go see them straight away is pretty amazing,” Boyd
added.
Australia is betting that vaccination rates are now high
enough to mitigate the danger of allowing international visitors again after
maintaining some of the lengthiest and strictest border controls anywhere
during the coronavirus pandemic.
Thailand, too, was reopening its border Monday. Fully
vaccinated tourists arriving by air from 46 countries and territories no longer
have to quarantine and can move freely. And local restrictions such as a curfew
in some areas were being lifted.
Before the pandemic, Sydney was Australia’s busiest
international airport but until Monday had been almost deserted.
The new freedoms mean that outbound fully vaccinated
Australian permanent residents and citizens can leave the country for any
reason without asking the government for an exemption from a travel ban that
has trapped most at home since March 15, 2020.
Incoming vaccinated Australians are able to come home
without quarantining in a hotel for two weeks. The cap on hotel quarantine
numbers had been a major obstacle for thousands of Australians stranded
overseas. That cap now only applies to unvaccinated travelers.
Sydney was the first Australian airport to announce it would
reopen Monday because New South Wales was the first state where 80% of the
population aged 16 and older have been fully vaccinated. Melbourne and and the
national capital Canberra also opened on Monday after Victorian state and the
Australian Capital Territory achieved the vaccination benchmark.
Sydney had 16 scheduled inbound international flights on
Monday and 14 outbound. Melbourne, Australia’s second largest city, had five
scheduled in and five out. Canberra had none.
The first regular international passenger flight to land in
Australia was a Singapore Airlines flight from Singapore that landed before 6
a.m. local time, followed by a Qantas Airways flight that had flown 15 hours
from Los Angeles.
Qantas customer service manager Paul Wason said landing in
Sydney was a “huge day” for passengers and crew alike.
“Very much mixed emotions, great emotions, lots of
happiness, lots of sadness, lots of excitement as well,” Wason said.
An Australian who lives in San Francisco, who identified
himself only as Jeremy, said he had been trying to fly back to Sydney with his
wife and baby daughter since July. They had been prevented at short notice four
times from flying, twice because flights were delayed and twice because
quarantine caps had been reduced in response to the COVID-19 delta variant
taking hold in Sydney in June.
“At every moment until we were sitting on the plane, it just
felt like something was going to go wrong and I’m so glad that it all worked
out and that we’re here,” Jeremy told Australian Broadcasting Corp. at Sydney’s
airport.
Initially only Australian permanent residents and citizens
will be free to enter the country. Fully vaccinated foreigners traveling on
skilled worker and student visas will be given priority over international
tourists.
But now the government expects Australia will welcome
international tourists back before the year ends to some degree.
Some of Australia’s 1.6 million temporary residents feel
left out of Australia’s reopening plan and unsure of their travel status.
“I think that it’s vague around the definition of residents
and where we get to be involved in that national plan,” said Jennifer Clayburn,
an American living with her family in Melbourne since January last year on a
short-term visa for skilled workers.
“We have been doing it tough, alongside all Australians. We
too want to be around the table at Christmas with our family, but we do not
want to be summarily locked out of Australia upon return,” she added.
Graham Turner, chief executive of Australia largest travel
agency Flight Center, said international travel to Australia was not expected
to return to normal until mid-2024.
“It will come back quickly for those people who really want
to travel. Initially. it’s the friends and relatives. People who haven’t seen
each other for a long time,” Turner said.
“That will be the first wave. And the travelling wave will
tend to come a little bit later, once people see what the scenario is like,”
Turner added.
While Australians are now free to travel overseas, four
Australian states and a territory place pandemic restrictions on crossing state
lines.
Australian Ethen Carter, who landed at Sydney’s airport from
Los Angeles expressed his frustration at having to apply for permission to
visit his dying mother in Western Australia state.
Western Australia has little COVID-19 and has the nation’s
lowest level of vaccinations, with only 63% of the target population fully
vaccinated.
Carter pleaded through the media to Western Australia
Premier Mark McGowan to let him in. McGowan has said the state border will not
open this year.
“Mark, think of the people that are suffering, like,
mentally to see their family. That’s also a health issue. And we know we’ve got
to protect people’s lives, but you’ve got to bring families together again, you
have to,” Carter said.
McGowan said his government would consider allowing Carter
to enter the state if he applied for an exemption.
“These situations are very sad and very difficult and we’ve
seen much of this over the course over the last two years,” McGowan said. -AP