Australia abandoned us – now we're homeless in Singapore
theage.com.au/national/australia-abandoned-us...
theage.com.auPosted Aug 30, 2020, 11:49 PM UTC
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theage.com.auImagine finding loopholes to get foreign students into the country for the Uni's who made themselves dependent on that, but not prioritise getting Aussies home when you have a duty to do so.
Just had a mate get his flight cancelled 6 days before it was to fly, as if the airline didnt know it was going to happen. The Govt has a duty to protect Australians abroad and they are doing a dismal job of it. The uncertainty it has thrown people into is absurd, they just receive a link to log their intention to return with DFAT and then.....nothing. Just book another flight and hope it happens.
This is appalling.
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The unis were just doing what the government told them to do. Don't like it? Stop electing conservatives.
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but not prioritise getting Aussies home when you have a duty to do so.
The thing is I don't believe the government actually has any kind of legal duty to do that. This is why our consular services are so shit. I became aware of how bad they are due to the Jock Palfreeman case.
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The Australian government has no duty of care to its citizens.
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I really hate how emotionally abusive TheAge titles can get.
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The whole post (I am not calling that a story) is a deliberately emotive QQ .. I feel for the guy's situation but statements like
| We saved you, the taxpayer, about $30,000 by staying where we were.
don't garner much sympathy.
He might have saved us 30K, wish he'd saved me from seeing his passive aggressive whinging as well.
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What's he meant to say?
Most of these articles are followed by hundreds of comments saying "you should have come home when you were told".
He's trying to counter this. People should be grateful they're not paying for his JobSeeker payments.
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He's saying that because he's seen how people criticize these articles.
He is pre tempting the normal abuse in the comments.
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Your gaslighted loaded question is abusive.
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I get people are desperate to come back but the government has to regulate how many people they can manage coming in.
I’m in quarantine now and the officers here have said the hotel is 90% full.
Resources needed to manage quarantine is huge. Three meals a day delivered to each persons room. Security to make sure people are abiding by the rules. Even taking a fresh air break for 30 mins is strained.
Now imagine if the flood opened with a few thousand coming in at once. There would be no place to put so many or resources to manage them.
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The governments have now had 6 months to organise the resources and implement a more expanded quarantine system and I can see no good reason why they haven't.
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Exactly. We have Australians in trouble overseas, and there's a significant contingent of people who are saying "it's their fault, let them rot".
We've become a very mean and small minded people. These are our fellow citizens. If we're not helping them, no one else will. I can't fathom the attitude behind this. We've become very selfish and callous. It's sickening.
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I agree wholeheartedly with this. It’s a really poor reflection on Australia and wake up call for a lot of people. My international friends are asking me what this is all about. My partner is mortified how little the gov are doing for their own people, it would never happen in her country. It’s embarrassing.
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It is embarrassing. I am in the UK and at the height of the pandemic the government organised flights back for it's citizens so they can come back home from all over the world. Meanwhile Australians attitude is stuff then they shouldn't have been overseas.
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We've become a very mean and small minded people.
I think personally that our collective national attitude towards asylum seekers and the unemployed - to name two groups - suggests we've been like this for a while.
I think the treatment of Australians overseas is terrible, but it also seems to be supported by a chunk of the population. We're infatuated with taking a hard-line approach because we're convinced it would never apply to us.
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We've become a very mean and small minded people.
Yep...it’s all the more obvious viewing Australia’s news from overseas.
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Your hotel would be full because its a quarantine hotel. Supposedly as a whole hotels are only at 10% occupancy compared to the usual 60-70%.
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More like 5% v 80% actually - depending on the source
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Sorry but I think this is a BS argument. This city hosts events like the Olympics 20 years ago and we managed to house everyone fine, let alone what has developed since then. We have resources like the Army Reserves if staffing is the issue
There are shitloads of available accommodation in this city being underused. The Govt is just keeping it in Easy mode for themselves rather than fulfilling their duty of welfare to citizens
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Its not a hotel, it's quarantine that happens to be in a hotel building.
The effort required to support a hotel room is a lot less than the effort required to support a room for quarantine.
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This is still a garbage excuse. I'm sorry, but we in Australia absolutely have the resources to carry out something like this logistically and you significantly underestimate our ability if you don't think it's possible.
Normally money is the problem, but when you're charging them $3k to stay that's obviously not an excuse
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quarantine outbreaks seem to suggest otherwise...
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The effort required to support a hotel room is a lot less than the effort required to support a room for quarantine.
Is it? There's no housekeeping,no room service, just stuff delivered to the door of each room. Sure, you need to set guards and cleaning once people leave needs to be more intensive, but if catering comes from outside, there would be fewer staff involved.
Furthermore, people are now paying for quarantine, so it's not a matter of money.
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That is the kind of attitude Victoria had to hotel quarantine and now everyone is in lockdown. It isn't a set and forget easy fix. Need competent people in charge, PPE with proper training, medical staff, mental health resources, infection control, extra cleaning, security.
These are not holidaying guests using a hotel room as a place to sleep, these are people being in forced confinement for 14 days.
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I did 14 days quarantine in Sydney. There is most definitely room service, and there is limited housekeeping (eg getting new linen delivered). There are also medical, police and adf staff on hand + 1 or more security guards on every floor.
So, yes, it's most likely true that quarantine requires more hotel staff than usual.
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There's a lot more than 50,000 overseas. Try ten times that. I was lucky, I had my contract renewed. My wife also had her contract renewed. I couldn't leave because of work and my wife hasn't received her visa yet.
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As evidenced by the Victorian second wave, they clearly didn't manage it for months before the restriction. That's why they put the cap in place.
Secondly, my comment was directed at the nonsense comment that we can somehow quarantine millions of people, as many people as attended the 2000 Olympics.
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Resources needed to manage quarantine is huge. Three meals a day delivered to each persons room
I don't understand this comment because individuals are staying at hotels whose core business is having people stay and feeding them.
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The vast majority of countries don't do hotel quarantine, why is it so essential specifically for Australia and NZ but nowhere else? If it isn't feasible nor absolutely necessary... has a huge human cost... and your citizens have a human right to return... just let people quarantine at home already
Taiwan is right next to China. About the same total population as Australia, yet much much much more densely populated. has had no local infections for over 100 days. 7 deaths compared to australia's 500-600. It lets people home quarantine.
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We learnt quickly in March that people don't do the right thing when it comes to self quarantine. Has to be mandatory.
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Why are people who have tested positive not put in mandatory hotel quarantine at their own cost?
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In some cases they are put in hotel quarantine, in SA they even put close contacts in hotel quarantine.
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So considering the question I asked, you're saying Australians are significantly less trustworthy than people in other countries? Or why do you think other countries have a different attitude to this?
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Can't really answer that as we don't have a control group. I would say hotel quarantine has made a big difference in controlling outbreaks. When you look at the UK which is also an island of sorts they were smashed with cases with over 40 thousand dead. I recall them talking about bringing in self-isolation after the first wave peaked, not sure what happened. But just look at the numbers in countries that didn't have any enforced isolation. Remember how they checked on people in Melbourne who were supposed to be home waiting the results of their Covid tests? A significant percentage was not there.
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That isn't the real question. Hotel Quarantine has protected most of Australia from large covid outbreaks and reduced the economic and social impacts. Other countries where the virus has sustained community transmission have already missed the boat on keeping it out, and others have such broad borders that it is impractical to stop the movement of people. Victoria is the example of what can happen if we don't have adequate quarantine, and those girls that skipped quarantine in Qld the other month are the follow up reminder to lessons in March about how we can't trust people to do the right thing.
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i wish this was the case. sorely i do. it would be infinitely nicer to quarantine at home but in the interest of public health, it's been shown in the past that we can't trust people to do the right thing. it only takes one foolish person to start another cluster.
state governments are worried about this. an outbreak like victoria causing shutdown is devasting.
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The difference is they haven't been scapegoated in the public perception.
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So why are other countries not doing it? I dont think the worldwide data supports the claim that hotel quarantine is such an essential requirement. You must have strong evidence to say 99% of countries are making a catastrophic error and the australian gov knows better
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Well in Italy we got down to 170 new cases a day at one point. Now we are at over a thousand. School starts in two weeks.
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Taiwan is right next to China. About the same total population as Australia, yet much much much more densely populated. has had no local infections for over 100 days. 7 deaths compared to australia's 500-600. It lets people home quarantine. How can you explain this?
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Taiwan is right next to China. About the same total population as Australia, yet much much much more densely populated. has had no local infections for over 100 days. 7 deaths compared to australia's 500-600. It lets people home quarantine.
Taiwan does limited home quarantine, mostly it's hotel or the government run operations. I know 2 people who did hotel quarantine in TW. If I recall correctly Taiwain was quite thorough with checking in on people doing it at home.
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Interesting to hear Anne Twomey suggest the outbound restriction is likely challengeable as well. Would be curious to see a proper piece from her on that.
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Not sure if there's a law but it very plainly violates the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that Australia signed (Article 13).
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You’d have to argue that leaving doesn’t endanger public health if you wanted to go down the human rights pathway.
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Not really; You can restrict the rights under the UDHR for public health, but not arbitrarily, it has to be the least restrictive means strictly necessary. It could be argued that the fact that Australia is practically the only country doing it proves that it is not strictly necessary.
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After excluding NSW, it feels fairly lame of Australia to be taking in six times less return travellers than New Zealand is on a per capita basis. We definitely can not argue about being in a worse financial position or that we have harder covid restrictions.
NZ doesn't have a cap on return travellers and allows non-essential travel out of the country though not that many want to leave atm.
The reasoning / maths below:
The current limits.
- Sydney – limit of 2,450 passenger arrivals per week;
- Perth – limit of 525 passenger arrivals per week;
- Brisbane – limit of 500 passenger arrivals per week;
- Adelaide – limit of 500 passenger arrivals per week;
- Canberra, Darwin – passenger limits on each flight to be discussed with jurisdictions on a case-by-case basis;
- Hobart, Melbourne – no international flights.
Ignoring NT and ACT, that is 3,975 per week nationally. This is the max upper limit. NZ is handling 2,560 per week on average for August.
Australia is allowing 15.6 per week per 100,000 back into the country. Credit where credit is due, NSW is taking 30.4 per week per 100,000 back into the country. That is over half of all returnees. If you exclude NSW, Australia falls to 8.7 per week per 100,000.
NZ is allowing 53.0 per week per 100,000 back into the country
They are taking in more than 3.4 times more per capita than Australia. If you exclude NSW, they are taking in 6.1 times more people per capita.
Population data from Worldometer and ABS. Caps from Federal National Cabinet notes 7 August and NZ Customs for traveller numbers.
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Even Singapore is accepting 1000-1500 people a day. And arrivals from Australia (except Vic) can do 7-day quarantine at home.
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If only we could trust people to self isolate :(
Singapore seem to actually be looking actively updating their polices with some common sense.
- effective travel bubble with Brunei Darussalam and NZ.
- 7 day Stay-Home Notice for Australia (excluding VIC), Macao, Mainland China, Taiwan, Vietnam, and Malaysia.
- 14 day quarantine for all other countries.
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Ok, but let's be honest, this is a bit of a bullshit excuse. Returning travellers have about a 1/300 chance of testing positive, and yet homeless people who HAVE ACTUALLY TESTED POSITIVE are not provided with hotel quarantine.
The solution, if I were in power, would be for everyone to have a quarantine plan on arrival, detailing how exactly they were going to maintain an effective quarantine. This would be checked at the airport, and it if were not sufficient or there was transit required, they would be given hotel quarantine. They would then be followed up by regular, random calls to a home phone number, and random police checks at wherever they had nominated on their plan. Significant penalties for breaching quarantine should be implemented.
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When the punishments in Singapore include caning, people are much more likely to follow them.
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I’m all for personal responsibility, but what more do you want when they have been assured by airlines that they would be on the flight they’ve booked, even trying to upgrade to business, only for it to be canceled anyway.
The government should at least be trying to help, many cases like this one tell me they aren’t.
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Regardless of what choices they made, you'd really hope your home nation would come to bat for you if needed. We can cough up hundreds of thousands each year for politicians to fly to parties, but fuck me we can't help our citizens get home?
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I don’t agree mate. If you read the article they have had 3 flights cancelled, 2 to Sydney and 1 to Melbourne. As far as I know, Sydney are still taking arrivals.
I just think it’s disappointing that the government are not providing enough support. It’s even more disappointing that the majority of Australians have no empathy towards those stuck (not saying you).
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The 14 days quarantine policy need to be reviewed. Other countries have opened up to international travel without it.
For example, people travelling to the UAE are required to take a COVID test prior to departure and then upon arrival where they self isolate until the results are processed which is usually within 24 hours. After a negative result, they're free.
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You can have a negative result and still have the virus. Thats WHY there is a 14 days quarantine period, as it may take time for symptoms and for the virus to be detectable.
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You can make it through 14 days of quarantine and still have the virus - with or without symptoms or even with symptoms 15+ days later.
There's at least a discussion worth having.
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Yes, the point is within that 14 days, you will show positive in a test, then you can be quarantined for as a long as necessary. They dont just let you go after 14 days if you now have the virus.
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Testing of isolating return travelers is not mandatory and most don't undergo one.
The thing is though, even if they where, the point I was addressing is:
You can have a negative result and still have the virus.
Yes, you can. A 14 day quarantine doesn't stop this from being true.
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I agree. I think there needs to be some sort of quarantine process (people quarantine at home like in most other countries?), but surely we are almost at the point where we can scale back the hotels and come up with a better strategy?
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We tried home quarantine. A large percentage of people don't actually stay at home during the quarantine period.
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More checks, gps tracking, more testing? I don’t know, I just think a lot of emphasis is on the hotels when it’s obviously a big operation and it’s still gone to the shit.
Also, why are Australians so untrustworthy that we can’t be trusted? Happens with everything haha.
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Yup, when I returned home to Singapore from Brisbane in March, I self-isolated at home. I would receive a link every few hours from the authorities to “check in” my location on a government website to ensure that I was at my place of residence, and it’s the same technology any other website uses to track your location.
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Why is it safe for positive patients in the community to isolate at home, but almost certainly negative travellers pose such a huge risk that they can't be trusted to do it?
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For most states and territories, returning travellers are the only risks to the population.
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So, despite him having a business & his wife having a (I presume) well paid job he was going to go on Centrelink payments?
In fact he seems to think all 100,000 who want to come back would have been eligible for Centrelink.
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They had well paid jobs in Singapore, not in Australia. Same with all 100k Australians who are trying to return- they had jobs overseas and have now been made redundant.
All will be eligible for Centrelink when they get back.
If Australia had told expats to all come home in March, we would have seen 1m returning and applying for Centrelink - triple the number that actually returned.
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I know they could have applied for Centrelink.
But, how many would actually be eligible? Surely not all of them.
If they had been made redundant the payouts may have meant they wouldn't be able to apply for Centrelink.
I know when I lost my job five years ago, I was told by Centrelink to live off the payout. The payout I didn't receive for another 5 months.
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They are all unemployed, liquid assets test was suspended, why wouldn't they be?
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Would entirely depends on if they are considered resident for Centrelink purposes.
Also the wait period for redundancy is from the date you are paid it, so if you hadn't received it yet you would've been able to get it for those 5 months, then your payment paused for a period based on the payout, then it would resume. Or at least that is the way it currently works.
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With the removal of asset testing and the decrease in the rate income affects your payments .. almost everyone was / is eligible.
Essentially the only way you were not eligible was if you had a shit ton in the bank and the interest from that was reducing your payment to zero, or other employment / rental income.. so with 500K in the bank and a couple of unrented properties, you would most likely be eligible to receive payments from Services Australia / Centrelink.
Source : 30+ years there.
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they had months to make a move
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Honestly I find it hard to feel sorry for these rich people. So he makes the choice to stay overseas but then his wife is offered a nice redundancy package so they take it and now expect the government to accept them as they are ready to come home now. He even made out like he is some hero because he wasn't on Job Seeker but you can believe he will be applying for it the minute he gets back.
He made that choice to stay over there and it sucks but he should take some responsibility. He acknowledged that flights were cancelled yet ended his lease ASAP. This should have been a Facebook post, The Age is not your personal blog.
He had a lease and a job. You can't expect people to just drop all of that in March to come home to Australia to be unemployed and be a burden to taxpayers. He was also following government advice to stay put and NOT come home. If you were in his position, wouldn't you have done the same?
Leaving a country isn't like flipping a switch. Up to the last minute he was being told the flight would move ahead, and he acted accordingly. It can take weeks of preparation to wind everything down, inform your landlord in advance, and ship your things home. He also needs to cancel his credit cards, phone lines, internet subscriptions, inform his bank. You can't just do all of these on the day of your flight.
I was living in France for 9 years and when Coronavirus happened I left behind my apartment, my life, and everything I owned.
I came back to Australia and applied for Job Seeker. I've since found a new job, but I had to rely on it in the beginning.
I'm not going to lie, I regret it. I should've stayed. I've been stuck living with my mother for nearly 6 months now. Depression is starting to hit. I miss my home.
This. I haven't had it as rough as you, but I absolutely wish I stayed where I was, and I very very much miss home. The shitshow I returned to here in .au is nothing like like what I remember.
I had a job with frequent travel to south east asia. Like 2 weeks on 2 weeks off. Work long hours party long hours all at company expense. Now its just a tedious office job that i can do at home. And i consider myself lucky because i am not like the people stuck overseas or those who have lost and will loose jobs or those we are going to suffer decreased income for a decade as a result of the recession.
All this sacrifice i don't think was worth the cost. But i can understand that there are people who probably get off on watching successful people suffer while their lives remain the same as pre-covid.
Currently studying in Europe. Considered coming back around March/April when corona was at peak. Glad I stayed here, Australia seems to be an absolute shitshow atm.
It’s more the fact that we’re not allowed out of the country once we’re here, so I’ve lost my residency in Europe because I can’t renew it. I don’t think I could handle going through the visa process again. It was so stressful.
I just feel stuck not knowing when I’ll be able to leave again. I’m not sure whether to start a whole life from scratch here, or just sit and wait until borders open...
But in saying that, I’m grateful that I can see my family in Australia. It would be hard not knowing when I could see them again if I was still in Europe.
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+1 on this.
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Turns out global pandemics are inconvenient to people. News at 11!
Especially so when the government is incompetent
The inconvenience is a choice. Like a lot of european countries with no or limited border restrictions we could have made different choices.
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Hindsight bias. Business owners couldn't have foreseen back then that this was going to last till the end of the year. I recall the consensus then was to wait it out for two or three months and then re-evaluate. As a business owner, he probably would have tried everything else to save his company before finally conceding that the only option was to close shop. Think about how you or people you know felt back then: Did you honestly think we'd still be in this situation come September?
My point is that it's unfair to judge him over an outcome that now seems obvious to us in hindsight. Back then, it wasn't very clear.
These are unprecedented times and we all just need to be a little bit more compassionate towards each other.
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The Australian tall-poppy syndrome in a nutshell folks. Note how it's phrased as "expect the government to accept them" like it's some kind of a favour for an Australian to be able to come to Australia and not a basic human right.
And then the nice little well-poisioning at the end about JobSeeker. Gross.
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I also remember DFAT urging Australians to return in mid-march specifically because transport could be difficult later.
I get that it is hard to give up business and jobs etc, but I would really like to see some evidence of the claim that the Australian government said not to return because you might have to go on JobSeeker.
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That section is not DFAT advising Australians to remain, and adding it as screenshot to remove the context is highly misleading.
DFAT advised back in March that people who cannot support themselves during the pandemic should come home ASAP, noting that it will likely get more difficult in the future. The website did, and still does, provide information for people who choose to remain overseas. The screenshot you provided is from that section.
The website with context for anyone interested is here. It has four sections:
COVID-19: Leaving Australia
COVID-19: Trying to get home
COVID-19: Arriving home
COVID-19: Staying overseas
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Did you even read your own link?
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The thing is transport never became difficult. People ignored DFAT's advice in March because airlines like Qatar put on more flights to Australia than pre-pandemic in May-July. Believe it or not, it became much easier, quicker and more comfortable (due to light passenger loads) to get between Australia and Europe at the height of the pandemic than ever before.
So the advice was essentially a load of BS.
But then, the government decided to put in place arbitrary passenger caps with no warning. This wasn't transport becoming more difficult; this was a government locking out its own citizens. No one could have seen that coming - after all, we are the only country in the world with such a policy.
Unfortunately as COVID has hit, media has shown that they're more than willing to drop the quality even further if it means more clicks
"Fuck off we're full?"
He's Australian. What are we supposed to do, let him rot in Singapore immigration detention?
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