Australian border closures could work for Britain. Here’s why

Australia has been a rare success story during the pandemic. There have been around 29,000 cases of Covid, 908 of which have proved fatal. There are currently just 125 active cases in the entire country, a mere 25 of which have required hospitalisation. For a population of 25 million, this is a vastly different experience to that of Covid-beleaguered Europe and North America. No wonder the British government is considering whether it might be time to copy Australia’s approach, to help save an economy and society battered to a degree Australians can scarcely comprehend.

Australia benefits from being a remote island continent with no international land borders. When it became clear that Wuhan was the epicentre of a new, fast-spreading virus, Australia quickly self-isolated. First, flights from China were halted, to howls of outrage from the Beijing government. But by late March last year, prime minister Scott Morrison had extended travel bans to all non-residents and non-citizens. Australia’s external frontier was cauterised, and almost a year on mostly remains so.

Australians can only return home on the few expensive flights available. As a result, 40,000 Aussies are still stranded overseas. Morrison is now under heavy political pressure to hang the expense and bring these people home. There are limited exceptions for non-residents — for the Australian Open in Melbourne, for instance — though these are much resented by the locals, who see foreigners getting privileged treatment while taxpaying Australians languish abroad, un-able to afford to come home.

With borders closed, state governments, with federal backing, are using -mandatory quarantine, mostly in otherwise empty inner-city hotels, to control the spread of the disease. Each state has its own rules, but the fundamentals are essentially the same. When you arrive from overseas, or even from another Australian state designated as a Covid hotspot, you’re hustled under police or army escort on to a coach and taken to a designated quarantine hotel, unless you’re exempt for a special reason.