Welcome to Prison Australia where unvaccinated citizens are not able to leave. (And Canadians thought they were the only ones). If your best friend is getting married in Madagascar, the Africans will let you fly in, but you can't go because Australia won't let you out.
Australians who are unvaccinated or not-jabbed-enough can apply for permission to leave. But unless you need foreign medical care, live or work overseas, or are flying in the "national interest" (meaning you're a politician) you may not qualify. Trips need to be "longer than three months" for no good reason I can think of, except that it stops most holidayers. Which is obviously the point.
People may get an exemption if they need to work overseas. Which is fine if your boss wants to send you to conventions in the Greek Islands but you can't take the wife and kids unless she owns the company, and the kids are your employees. Otherwise, there's no pleasure cruises for the unjabbed peasants from Oz.
© Bijay Chaurasia
Unvaccinated Australians who want to leave pretty much have to escapeWe can always drive to Broome. We might
find an Indonesian fishing boat and get a lift back the other way, in a kind of reverse boat-people maneuver. With luck, Australian-boat-people might be able to apply for political asylum in Bali. But will Indonesia accept them? Otherwise it's only 150 kilometers from the top end of Queensland to Papua New Guinea. It's possible to swim or paddle across the Torres Strait, it's just that the crocodiles may appreciate your trip more than you do.
The ban doesn't apply to unvaccinated foreigners in Australia, (luckily for Novak, eh, or he might still be here?).
Non-Australians are free to leave, so dual nationals could always
renounce their citizenship but the rest of us just have to go stateless.
Right now, there are about
70 countries which allow unvaccinated travelers in. Places like France, Spain, Greece and the UK, as well as Norway, Israel, Denmark, and those bastions of freedom: Cuba, Russia and parts of Africa and central America.
When nations with medical systems as good as Haiti aren't afraid to welcome the Unvaxxed, it seems a tad odd that Australia is afraid to send them.
As it is, the
Australian made vaccine is not on the approved list in Australia, so unvaccinated Australians aren't able to fly out of Australia to go to Iran where they could get an Australian vaccine.
It's almost like we're owned by Pfizer.