Opening nerves
Is Australia really ready for tourists?
Australia’s borders will open to fully-vaccinated visa holders on February 21.
But do we really want tourists to come?
I’ve been surprised by the discourse on Twitter and in newspaper comments this past week. It’s impossible to know the numbers without research, but there seems to be more than a few Australians who are extremely anxious about ‘opening the floodgates,’ as some people have phrased it.
Are you worried?
I think I understand what concerns people.
We’re still in a pandemic and we may be in a version of it for a long time. There remain a lot of vulnerable people who have not been adequately immunised. Many are waiting for the boosters that are necessary to battle Omicron. It’s likely that some people, the severely immunocompromised and the very elderly, will never be completely safe.
And our healthcare system is already worryingly overburdened. Can it withstand an influx of thousands of tourists who will do touristy things like party too much, fall off cliffs, drown in big surf or catch COVID along the way, especially as we don’t know yet what other surprises the mutating virus has for us?
(Tourists better bring their own RATs - and maybe some for us.)
In 2020 we adapted fairly quickly to an ‘island’ mentality. The drawbridge came down with a clang. There was a certain comfort in being surrounded by a moat. And I would argue it was the right thing to do in the first year, as we were trying to work out what the virus meant and how best to handle it. I think we did save lives.
But did we grow to love our island isolation too much? After all, a large piece of our country over in the west is happy to keep it that way, for a while longer at least.
Every time ‘borders’ are invoked by our various governments, whether that relates to asylum seekers, or keeping the pandemic off our shores, it successfully creates an offshore enemy that we should fear.
It was the pandemic this time - and the hosts who would bring it here. That included Australians who happened to be living or visiting overseas.
The border wasn’t technically closed to Australians, but the crippling flight caps imposed on airlines meant they were stranded anyway. The fact that the government was too lazy or unimaginative to work out a way of getting around this still rankles with me. After all, business people and politicians went in and out without creating a national health crisis. It was fear, not logic, that shut our borders to our own.
But Australians, mostly, were OK with Fortress Australia. It was a popular decision. Even heartrending stories of families torn apart, or people made homeless because they were stuck overseas without job or visa didn’t seem to move the sympathy needle one centimetre.
It’s the On the Beach syndrome - just as the citizens of Melbourne in Neville Shute’s 1957 novel are the the last people on earth to die of nuclear holocaust, we’ve taken comfort in the fiction that our isolation will protect us from apocalyptic disasters unfolding in the rest of the world, or at least give us a head start on avoiding them.
Spoiler: It didn’t go so well for the characters in Shute’s novel.
A moat doesn’t work very well when the enemy is airborne.
So we need to think differently about our island.
Tim Soutphommasane, the former Race Discrimination Commissioner, told a tourism conference this week that reopening required a mental shift.
‘The last two years have given me an insight into what Sydney might have felt like in the ’50s and ’60s,’ he said. ‘I think we’ve got smaller from the pandemic and if we are to entertain this idea that we’re a global city, a globally engaged country, that we can lead in the world - as we should - then we’ve got to prepare ourselves psychologically and culturally again.’
As the drawbridge creaks open, ever so slowly, we’ve seen expatriot Australians trickle back home, to scenes of tears and jubilation. (Some, sadly, didn’t make it in time to say goodbye to ailing loved ones.) Agricultural workers and international students have started arriving.
Some Australians have already flown out on business and holiday, like birds released from a cage.
Soon, there will be backpackers in Bondi and St Kilda again, driving the locals crazy with their parties and badly parked campervans.
But never fear - that word again - it won’t be a flood.
As much as the $160 billion tourism industry deserves a speedy recovery, the return of tourists will be more of a slow trickle.
The airlines aren’t yet geared up to bring in anywhere near the numbers of visitors they did before March 2020. It will take a long while for travellers to have the choice of airlines and schedules they enjoyed pre-COVID.
Our big markets for tourists, such as China and New Zealand, can’t travel at the moment.
And, ahoy, the cruise industry is still on hold. Even if cruising from our shores gets the green light soon, ships won’t be bringing in passengers for several months, if not 2023, due to the tremendous amount of planning to get ships here.
Europeans and North Americans may very well decide they need to explore their own backyards first. Australia may be one stopover too far.
And then there’s the reputational damage Australia has suffered as a destination. We’re seen as a risky proposition now, given our propensity to shut out our own citizens and expel famous tennis stars.
‘What’s going on down there?’ is the question I’m most often asked by Brits and Americans. Usually followed by ‘Australia is crazy!’
I’ve never met a visitor to Australia who didn’t love it here.
But this time Tourism Australia will have to work very hard to convince them we’ll love them in return…
How sad that Tim Soutphommasane feels Sydney's mentality was returning to the claustrophobia of the 1950s. This is what the pandamic has done to us. A plan to once more become that globally engaged country is what we need. Please!
We absolutely want and need tourists to return, both from a social and economic perspective. The Big Island mentality, and reality, is not good for the economy, or our commitment and love for diversity, not to mention the delight most of us have in meeting fellow global citizens on the back of a dive boat or cycling around a regional winery. Open the borders and keep them open, I want to see our cafes, streets, rural regions and CBDs buzzing with people again. The sooner the better.