Australians asked to spend more on domestic holidays in $9m campaign

The federal government has suggested Australians won’t be able to travel overseas until at least mid-2022 as it launched a new $9m tourism campaign encouraging people to take longer holidays within Australia.

As the world continues to grapple with the Covid pandemic, including a devastating second wave in India, the federal finance minister, Simon Birmingham, on Thursday downplayed any possibility of the international border reopening by early 2021, even as more Australians are vaccinated.

“We won’t be seeing borders flung open at the start of next year with great ease,” he told the Australian newspaper.

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“They’re not reopening anytime soon,” he later told Sky News. “Australians do not want us to reopen borders and risk Covid entering into this country, and risk the consequential loss of life, economic damage and loss of jobs across Australia.”

Birmingham said any decision on travel overseas was some way off.

“We’re dealing now in May 2021 with arguably a more uncertain environment in the management of Covid than we had a few months ago,” he said.

The minister said India’s record number of cases and outbreaks in other parts of the world meant he was reluctant to name a date for overseas travel to resume. “Australians would be surprised if it resumed at the end of this year or frankly any earlier than that,” Birmingham said.

Dean Long, the chief executive of the Accommodation Association, said politicians needed to stop picking dates for when the international border might reopen. He said the sector doesn’t expect it to reopen tomorrow – but wants a framework for when it could happen safely.

“At the moment all that is happening is people are stoking fear rather than building confidence and being open and transparent about how decisions are being made,” Long told Guardian Australia.

He said a roadmap similar to that which the Victorian government used to explain how the state would emerge from its second lockdown in 2020 – where it detailed benchmarks for each step – would be ideal. The roadmap would indicate when travel might be allowed, for instance after 50% of the population was vaccinated.

“It doesn’t have to have dates but there’s no reason, with the number of public servants they’ve got working on it, they can’t release a roadmap with environment factors demonstrating where we need to be,” he said.

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That would provide certainty for the tourism sector to plan for the reopening, Long said.

The federal tourism minister, Dan Tehan, launched a $9m tourism campaign on Thursday starring Hamish Blake and Zoe Foster-Blake. It encourages Australians to “go big” and book a longer holiday in domestic locations most frequented by international tourists.

The campaign features the couple on the Great Barrier Reef, Purnululu national park, the Otways, as well as shots of Bondi Beach and other iconic locations around Australia.

Foster-Blake said on Instagram that making the ad was the “stuff of dreams”.

“My husband and I are the luckiest pigs in Australia getting to shoot (together!) at these breathtaking locations, place’s we’d always dreamed of visiting but ‘never made the time’.”

Tehan said Australians typically spend more overseas than foreign tourists spend in Australia “so we want Australians to treat their domestic holiday this year like an overseas trip”.

– AAP contributed to this article