With regard to the proposal that borders stay closed – except for strict hotel quarantine – until some indefinite date a few years from now when COVID has been eradicated not just locally but worldwide and there is no more threat of variants, see, for example, the interviews which Devi Sridhar (one of the main advisors to the Scottish government and a fan of Australia’s approach) gave over the last several months.
Not true. There's repatriate flights weekly out of both NZ and AU. You just have to quarantine coming back in.
There's a process for approval, but it's fairy straightforward. If you can afford a ticket and the destination country will take you, you can go.
The hard part is - most countries or connecting countries if you can't fly direct require 2 week quarantine or limit people entering. ANY inter-country travel is a bureaucratic nightmare.
What if you are not taking a "repatriate flight", but rather you are simply an Australia citizen who wishes to travel abroad e.g. to see family or be with a lover? My understanding is that Australia has forbidden its own citizens from freely leaving the country over the last year.
And having to do a strict hotel quarantine upon reentering definitely does not qualify as being able to freely travel, and as I said in my original post above, many people would not stand for it. Most European countries that require quarantine, for example, allow one to do it at home and it is easily gamed.
Australia’s policy of a hard lockdown followed by strict hotel quarantines worked for Australia, but it wouldn’t work here, and it is always tone-deaf when Australians recommend it as some kind of universal solution.
