Australia and the ‘Biosecure Border’ in the Age of COVID-19

This transcript was generated using AI and may contain inaccuracies. If you notice an error, feel free to email [email protected].

CHAPTERS 

[00:00:00]: Australia's strict border controls and quarantine 

[00:05:33]: Why quarantine leaked; how it operates 

[00:09:26]: Trans-Tasman travel bubble status and timeline 

[00:14:57]: International cooperation on biosecure borders 

[00:19:27]: Mandatory quarantine as current risk mitigation 

[00:20:39]: Post-9/11 comparisons and absent global standards 

[00:21:54]: Coordination hurdles without clear effective measures 

[00:23:15]: Policy uncertainty amid evolving understanding 

TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:02.080] 

Hi. Welcome to Moving Beyond Pandemic, the new podcast from the Migration Policy Institute about travel, migration and mobility. During COVID-19, the pandemic has scrambled just about every aspect of mobility and it will have long lasting, if not permanent effects. Our podcast will dig into issues such as Is this a 9/11 moment for travel and health? Do quarantines work? Could COVID testing in airports revive the ailing tourism industry? And how might border closures affect the business models of smugglers and traffickers? I'm Meghan Benton. I am Director of International Research at MPI and also our sister organization, MPI Europe. In this episode, I'm talking to Brendan Dowling. He's the senior representative for the Australian Department of Home Affairs in the Americas region and he leads Australia's international engagement on migration and border policies. Countries have been taking baby steps towards reopening borders that really slammed shut back in March amid growing recognition the pandemic had gone global. Now we're seeing the EU is welcoming tourists from select countries across the block. Flights have started up again in places, but it's all very tentative and everyone remains unsure of how to do this safely. Basically in the dark about how well different tools work, from thermal scanners to quarantine or testing.

[00:01:26.930] 

And many countries and actually individual airports are basically going it alone, which doesn't bode well for a coordinated response. I was thrilled to speak to Brendan about how Australia has responded and the broader implications for global mobility and international cooperation on what some are calling the biosecure border. Australia's kind of a test case for the rest of the world. It's one of the only places that was able to contain the virus. It locked down its borders hard to prevent further infections from abroad. But despite pretty tough quarantine rules, it's had new outbreaks. It's not planning to loosen border and migration restrictions anytime soon. And its plans for a travel bubble with New Zealand are on hold. It's even reimposed internal borders for the first time in a century, which some would think unthinkable in places like the U.S. Which is also grappling with a highly asymmetrical caseload. Well, hi, Brendan, Thanks. Thanks so much for agreeing to chat to me. We could start by just talking a little bit about what's happening in Australia right now. So Australia quite famously quickly got on top of the virus, in part because it's an island, but also because of its quite forceful border closures relative to other countries.

[00:02:51.530] 

But now you're seeing a bit of a bit of resurgence. Could you just sort of describe what's happening and what the sort of plan is now for reopening borders.

[00:03:02.090] 

Sure, sure. So that's right. Australia acted very quickly to put in very tight border restrictions both inbound and outbound. So still have mandatory quarantine arrangements for everyone who's arriving into Australia internationally. And those are supervised quarantine arrangements. So in a designated hotel under watch for two weeks after arrival. But we've also had outbound travel restrictions for some time now as well where Australians and permanent residents, if you wish to leave the country, need to apply for special exemption and there needs to be good reason for that. So I think that's been a pretty key part of our response to the pandemic at this point. But I think the really telling part of that is that half of those cases diagnosed in Australia have been overseas acquired. So for us, the border controls, partly because of our isolation, have always been one of the really pivotal responses to the pandemic. And I think in terms of keeping things under control will continue to be a really key part. At the moment we have in Victoria, which is the state where Melbourne is, we do have additional restrictions having come into place because we have seen community transmission commence again.

[00:04:35.440] 

There were yesterday another around 250 cases testing positive in Victoria. We've had a smaller outbreak in Sydney with 13 cases diagnosed yesterday's testing positive. But some of those cases are a result of transmission from people who have arrived back from overseas circumstances. It's really underscored for us one, we were successful in getting an early move. But for the community and for the government it's demonstrated how fragile that is and that any complacency, any premature loosening of the restrictions in Australia can very quickly see this resurgence of cases. So it's been a fairly alarming, I guess wake up call for us over the last few weeks to see how quickly you can spread from a very small number of cases to a much

[00:05:33.760] 

higher number, especially given these quite stringent quarantine rules and all the rest of it. A lot of international transmission, I mean Australia has been quite remarkable in the way that it's enforcing quarantine. Other countries just require you to fill in a form and it's all to do with just kind of self compliance. Why is it still leaky and what's happening with quarantine that means that it's not working. I mean maybe you could describe a little bit about how it works. So is the government still paying for quarantine and where does it happen? Is it still in hotels?

[00:06:15.550] 

Yes.

[00:06:16.030] 

So when you arrive into one of the international airports, you are supervised and taken to an allocated hotel. So you don't get to choose where you're going. You're allocated to a hotel or to an apartment complex, particularly for families who are arriving there. Is that ability now to be put in a two or three bedroom apartment according to your family size. And it's very strictly supervised in those quarantine arrangements. Basically, very limited contact with anyone outside food delivery, contactless food delivery and that sort of thing. So they're extremely stringent. I think some of that transmission that we saw from quarantine situations really just demonstrates how hard this is to do and how hard it is to get right. And that even when you put in those controls, the insidious nature of this virus is that it transmits so quickly that when there is some of that leakage, some of that sort of imperfect bubble around quarantine, that you can get unlucky and that you can see that transmission out of those facilities. And I think that's why we're seeing some of the states implement caps on the numbers of people that can arrive internationally. Including, for example, Sydney Airport is limited to 450 international arrivals per day, Brisbane Airport, 500 arrivals per week.

[00:08:04.110] 

To essentially ensure that we have that we are able to manage those quarantine arrangements fairly strictly, seeing that they are such a critical part of the response. What we're seeing now is that some of the states are looking at implementing charges for people who are in quarantine. That's something that the state governments are responsible for rather than the federal governments. But I think they're quite expensive to operate, obviously. And a few months into the pandemic and seeing that that initial rush of people trying to get home from wherever they were globally has tapered off in some respects. And there is that view from some of the states that it's time to look at what cost sharing arrangements there are in place where people take a bit more responsibility for the cost of quarantine.

[00:09:02.450] 

And how much has this resurgence set back plans for the Trans-Tasman bubble? We were hearing a lot about that a few weeks ago, a few months ago, this idea of having a sort of a travel corridor, travel and migration corridor between Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands. Is that still on the cards and what's the timeline?

[00:09:26.990] 

Sure, so it's still on the cards specifically with New Zealand. So we're not in talks with any other government at this point. The focus of the talks is on New Zealand. I think it's given, the recent resurgence, has given a degree of pause, I think, for us to say, well, let's be very cautious about rushing into anything. So the talks are happening at the moment, but neither the Australian government or the New Zealand government has been prepared to commit to any sort of time frame as to when it would be sensible to implement that sort of arrangement. There's a lot of community interests, a lot of business interests on both sides of the Tasman to getting it in place. But I think it will take some time yet before we actually see it in action with the confidence that both countries know that the risks of transmission across those borders is manageable and is mitigated. So it wasn't imminent, but I think the resurgence has really sort of reminded that we really do need to be extremely cautious about stepping into these sort of arrangements, because if it doesn't work well, you can potentially have quite a damaging effect on both sides.

[00:10:58.630] 

So at this stage, there's no particular time frame, but it's. It's a little way off, I would say. And there's still quite a lot of detail that needs to be worked through between the two governments before that actually comes into play.

[00:11:14.580] 

So is it largely about having a similar rate of transmission and a certain agreement between the two governments, or is it also about building up a kind of infrastructure for contact tracing between the two countries or for COVID testing at airports, for instance? Is it about not having to have any of those additional checks or-

[00:11:40.320] 

Yeah, I think the ideal scenario would be that. And perhaps going back a month, perhaps there was thinking on both sides that maybe we'd be getting to the point where the risk of community transmission in both locations had been reduced to such a level that you could be confident that if someone was coming from the respective sides of the Tasman, that the risks that they were carrying were essentially negligible. And so perhaps that means you don't need as much of the infrastructure around quarantine and testing and such things as you might have otherwise. I think. Where it's at now, saying, well, that idea of having reduced it to negligible levels is probably some way off now. So are there mechanisms that you can put in place to increase confidence in that international travel? I think the challenge there, and this goes to a broader point around international travel, is that it's really difficult to know what of those measures that will make international travel safe again and will allow us in other countries to open up our borders is very tricky. When you look at asymptomatic transmission and the questions that Remain over that. When you look at the speed of transmission that can happen.

[00:13:23.230] 

I think some of the measures that we, we would in the future look to put in place that people have talked about, anything from temperature checks to detector dogs to testing at airports, all those measures, I don't think anyone anywhere sort of sees their perfect solutions yet. I think there's too many questions that remain before moving forward with those. So that sort of remains a bit of a question mark in the development of these sort of measures. Whether you can actually implement measures at the border or airports or otherwise. It can give you that degree of confidence.

[00:14:02.440] 

Yeah, that's really interesting. I mean I've heard a few times people talk about how this is a 9/11 moment for health screening of procedures. But that broader transformation and what safe travel looks like, it still seems a long way off really in the sense that very few airports are currently providing COVID test on arrival. We don't really know where to put people while we wait for their test results, how to enforce that and whether it could be scaled. You mentioned temperature checks, but they're really quite a blunt tool for something that you know, doesn't always have fever and can be asymptomatic.

[00:14:43.010] 

Exactly.

[00:14:45.730] 

What is Australia doing and to what extent is this part of a broader international effort or is it individual countries kind of going it alone right now?

[00:14:57.680] 

So we're talking to a lot of partners, a lot of the countries in our region. We have exceptionally close relationships with the United States and Canada and the UK and New Zealand on what our border policy settings are. So we're in a lot of conversations with countries around what's being contemplated and I think it's a really difficult area at the moment. I think there's this notion, as you say, the notion that it's a 9/11 moment for health screening. The other sort of concept which a number of countries talk about is the notion of a biosecure border. I think our thinking is evolving as more becomes known about the virus and the way it transmits. And I think again if you go back a few months, the conversations we were having with international counterparts were around well in a security sense for a couple of decades now we've been far more active at this idea of pushing the border out and that by the time someone boards a plane you are confident that they have met your requirements for entry into your country and that they don't represent a security risk to your country through physical screening, through intelligence analysis, all those sorts of things so that you're not dealing with the risk when someone arrives in your country.

[00:16:32.040] 

And I think when you apply that sort of analogy to the health side, it's really tricky to do the same thing you look at in previous epidemics or pandemics. If you look at Ebola or SARS, there was that sense of people self-identifying if they felt had certain symptoms. There were in some places around the world temperature checks on arrival and trying to identify people who were carrying those conditions so that they could be quarantined and to limit that spread. I think what we're looking at now with this virus is those are all manifestly inadequate. And so looking at what could you put in place before someone arrives or before someone boards a plane? Because if someone who is carrying the virus is on the plane or is arriving, it's already too late in many ways. So what could you do beforehand? You could have people test, but the speed of transmission means that unless you're testing directly before someone gets on a plane, it's probably not actually worth the paper it's written on. Do you test and then quarantine people pre0arrival temperature checks? I think you're right and really not going to be adequate to actually reduce the risk.

[00:18:04.030] 

So of all those options you might look at, none of them quite look like they're being. They're likely to be adequate to provide a high level of confidence. So then you sort of go back to what we have in place at the moment, which is to say, well, we cannot be confident that anyone who arrives at the border does not have the virus. Therefore, a mandatory quarantine arrangement is the best way to mitigate that risk. The problem is it's expensive and it's not scalable. You know, you could not return to the levels of overseas travel or migration that we had in Australia while you have these quarantine arrangements in place. It's simply not possible. So I think for us and for a lot of other countries, this is an area where we don't quite have the right answer yet. The decision in Australia is to say, well, while there's so many unknowns and while there's so much risk for international travel, we will keep in place what are very aggressive requirements and restrictions. Other countries are obviously not applying the same approach. But for us, until you kind of get to whatever new new world for international travel and migration is, I think we will see our restrictions in place for months to come.

[00:19:27.400] 

And when they are eased up, they'll be eased up in a very slow and measured way so that you don't all of a sudden create a whole new level of risk.

[00:19:38.200] 

So in a way it seems to me as if perhaps the conversation we're having about transforming border architecture to be more to be biosecure rather than to be focused on other types of security risks is actually not something that's happening right now, but more of a long term conversation about what will happen when we get a vaccine. Because it seems as if we're starting from a much lower point than perhaps we were after 9/11, where there was already quite a lot of security based infrastructure and the US was a really strong leader in that effort. Right now there's a bit of vacuum, a coordination vacuum and not much movement because there aren't very easy answers about how you do anything at scale. So is the conversation about health screening and health procedures and the biosecure border actually about what we do when we have the vaccine?

[00:20:39.180] 

I think that's a reasonable, reasonable point. I think that the one of the other differences as compared to 9/11 is that you had a much greater idea of what the threat was. And yes, it evolved and yes, there were sort of, you know, issues around, well, we screen for certain things but we don't screen for others. What should be, how do we improve that? But there was a bit more clarity, I think of this is what we missed and this is how we can get better at not missing that sort of threat in the future. Whereas I think the difference here is we don't actually know what's going to work for that sort of international travel to mitigate this risk. It's a far more difficult conversation. It's a far more difficult. There is no sort of technological solution that while it costs a lot of money you can deploy and you can increase your level of confidence, there isn't that ability, which I think we saw post 9/11, where some countries essentially raise the expectations for what everyone needs to do. And there was a real attitude of, you know, yes, we have some shortcomings here, we need to come together to work on this.

[00:21:54.590] 

But you have that vanguard of countries who say here is what we expect in terms of a baseline level of screening to take place if you want to fly planes into our country. And that creates a real pressure that starts to spread and sees actually a global lift in what those baseline standards are. I think one of the big differences here is you aren't able to say to another country you need to do X, Y and Z to mitigate the risk because that X, Y and Z is still a bit of an unknown. So I think to a degree there's yes, It's a difficult time for that global coordination to occur in the same way. But there's also a lot less clarity as to what that coordination should result in. And I kind of feel, I think your point about the vaccine is perhaps right, but I also feel, I think it's a lot of people do that every week brings a new understanding about this virus and how it's behaving and what the right response is. And so knowing sort of where we're at in three months time and what we know then is really difficult to predict and that will still shape what our response is.

[00:23:15.860] 

So it's a really frustrating area, I think, to make policy because there's still so many unknowns around it.

[00:23:25.630] 

Yeah, that's great. Really fascinating stuff. I feel like I could talk to you for another few hours, but we are about out of time. It's been really fascinating talking to you and such an interesting, well, Australia's such an interesting case, but all of the themes that you've touched on are just so fascinating and so fast moving that I'm coming away with more questions than answers. So thank you so much for talking to me. Have a good day.

[00:23:52.130] 

Cheers. Thanks, Meghan. It's been a pleasure.

[00:23:59.570] 

Listening to Brendan. I'm struck by two things. One is the non-linear nature of these border closures. We think of the process of reopening as one way, but as countries get on top of the virus, they actually have more incentive to close off from the rest of the world. The second is the length of of time these border closures might last. Australia, for instance, hasn't offered any sense of when it might lift its border closures. In coming episodes, we'll be looking at this issue from different angles. What's happening on the ground in airports? How are countries working together or are they not? And what does health proofing look like for different types of migration? So thanks for joining us today on Moving Beyond Pandemic. If you like what you hear, you can subscribe anywhere you find your podcasts. We'd love a review. You can also get our podcast at migrationpolicy.org/podcasts I'd like to thank my colleagues Lisa Dixon, Michelle Mittelstadt and Sarah  for producing this podcast. The music you heard today was Juno in the Space Maze by Loopop. I'm Meghan Benton. I'll see you next time.