Scott Morrison Announces New Roadmap To Get Australia Out Of Lockdown

Scott Morrison has address the nation for the first time in several days to outline how the country will get out of lockdown.

Multiple cities and areas are in some sort of lockdown or have introduced restrictions as a result of the latest outbreak of coronavirus infections.

To overcome this, the Prime Minister says they will be cutting the number of commercial international arrivals by more than half.

The number of arrivals will be slashed from a little more than 6,300 across all the major ports to just over 3,000. However to make up the shortfall, the Commonwealth will increase the number of repatriation flights.

He told reporters: "The Commonwealth will facilitate increased commercial flights, those are the facilitated commercial flights we have been running, to increase international repatriations during this period of reduced caps - commercial caps at the major airports and they will be channelled into Darwin for quarantine at the national resilience facility at Howard Springs.

"Where we will lose some capacity for inbound flights of those coming back through commercial flights, the Commonwealth will directly seek to mitigate that by upping, wherever possible, those commercially facilitated flights that the Commonwealth is pursuing."

Mr Morrison also said the National Cabinet has agreed to only bring in lockdowns as a last resort.

The government will also be doing a trial to see whether vaccinated people could spend seven days in quarantine rather than two weeks.

"There is clear medical evidence to suggest that vaccination means that shorter periods of quarantine is possible without any compromise of the health and safety standards that is currently delivered by a 14-day quarantine for unvaccinated persons," he said. "Getting vaccinated actually clearly helps and the medical evidence backs that up, particularly for quarantine."

He also hinted at doing this quarantine from home, however stressed the finer details were still being ironed out.

The second phase includes relaxing restrictions for vaccinated Australians 'such as lockdowns and border controls'. This phase will also see international arrivals increased as well as a boost in the capped entry of student and economic visa holders.

The third phase will be trying to get the country back to normal.

Mr Morrison said: "That is to manage COVID-19 consistent with public health management of other infectious diseases. What does that mean? It is likely we may be in that position in phase two but in phase three, that basically means that the hospitalisation and fatality rates that you would see from Covid-19 would be like the flu.

"Arguably, even better. We are seeing evidence of that in other jurisdictions that have higher levels of vaccination. When it is like the flu, we should treat it like the flu and that means no lockdowns, these are the measures that may include no lockdowns, the vaccine booster program underway, exempting vaccinated residents from all domestic restrictions, abolishing caps on returning vaccinated travellers."

Topics: Australia

Stewart Perrie

Stewart Perrie is a Trending Journalist at LADbible. His first job was as a newsreader and journalist at the award winning Sydney radio station, Macquarie Radio. He was solely responsible for the content broadcast on multiple stations across Australia when the MH17, Germanwings and AirAsia disasters unfolded. Stewart has covered the conflict in Syria for LADbible, interviewing a doctor on the front line, and has contributed to the hugely successful UOKM8 campaign.

@stewartperrie