‘Mighty bleak’: economists warn delay in vaccinating Australians may devastate tourism | Australia information

The large boats at Cairns marina demonstrate the havoc Covid has already wreaked international tourism and point to further pain if Australia’s botched vaccine launch delays the reopening of international borders.

Local business consultant Pete Faulkner counted 10 large pleasure craft idling at the marina on Tuesday that would normally take tourists to the Great Barrier Reef.

Faulkner said a boom in domestic tourism helped keep businesses going, but the absence of foreign visitors left him nowhere near filling the $ 1 billion-a-year void in the local economy.

“You would need a 50% lift to make up the difference,” he said.

The already ailing education industry is preparing for further pain if it cannot be reopened to international students in 2021. Their top board said the sector would be “critically at risk” if it lost a third year of lucrative overseas enrollments.

Australia’s vaccination program was already unable to achieve his goalsBy April 1, shocks were 3.4 million short of the federal government’s original target of 4 million, and also fell short of the rate required to meet a later, less ambitious target.

The fighting program was messed up Thursday night when Scott Morrison said the AstraZeneca vaccine was not preferred for those under the age of 50.

The Prime Minister admitted over the weekend that not all may be Australians vaccinated by the end of the year due to “many uncertainties”. The original schedule was for everyone to be fully vaccinated by October. He offered a new destination.

On Monday the federal treasurer, Josh Frydenberg said of the delay: “The timing of the rollout is unlikely to affect the momentum of our economic recovery.”

However, uncertainty about when Australia can reopen to the world could delay the recovery of the tourism industry, said Adele Labine-Romain, partner at Deloitte Access Economics.

Qantas has already said It could postpone the restart of international flights, which was planned until the end of October.

International tourists flocked to Australia in the pre-Covid era alone – a number that fell to less than $ 16.4 billion last year as border closings sealed the country off from the world.

“Even before this setback, we had predicted that it would be three years before we travel before Covid again,” said Labine-Romain.

She said if Australians were still vaccinated by November or December, her prediction would hold.

“That means if we are in the first quarter of next year and we are still having this conversation, we will move this time frame back. Every quarter we postpone this is a quarter where we postpone the recovery and take the risk of cutting ourselves off from the world. “

Labine-Romain said there was a lot of pent-up demand for travel and Australia was moving slowly to vaccinate its population as its counterparts – other rich countries – were moving quickly.

“If everyone else opens up and we don’t, we’ll miss this first demand,” said the tourism industry expert. She expected great efforts from the government to get the vaccination program up and running again.

“If our vaccination program runs until 2022, we will lag behind countries like the US,” said Labine-Romain.

She said areas most under pressure included Cairns and the rest of the far north of Queensland, Western Australia and Australia’s two major cities, Sydney and Melbourne, which get between 30% and 40% of their tourism traffic from overseas.

“If you depend on international visitors, your future looks mightily bleak,” she said.

Simon Westaway, executive director of the Australian Tourism Industry Council, which represents small and medium-sized businesses, said the industry needed support to maintain specialized, high-yield tourism such as balloon rides over Melbourne’s business districts, which depend on international visitors.

“If we want to be a profitable tourism industry and we were, we were the most profitable tourism industry in the world … we will see the industry undermined in the next 12 to 18 months if we do not receive specific support. “

Westaway said the government needs to come up with a new schedule for the vaccination program so that companies can plan for the future.

“As an open economy, we will be at a disadvantage very quickly if the rest of the world vaccinates and we don’t,” he said. “It’s a real handbrake on recovery.”

Labine-Romain said the education sector, which before Covid was Australia’s fourth largest export industry valued at $ 37.8 billion annually, had problems similar to tourism.

International Education Association of Australia executive director Phil Honeywood said the sector couldn’t afford another lost year.

“Losing a third academic year would put our industry at risk,” he said.

“Many students have been patiently learning from a distance for two years and just don’t stick with it. We estimate that every academic year we lose $ 10 billion a year from the Australian economy. “

He said the education association had tried, with limited success, to get state governments to come up with “politically bold” plans to resume education for the federal government that would only agree to charter flight arrangements – so that Australians would not be stripped of seats in Stuck overseas – and quarantine outside the hotel.

“It’s diabolical and it comes down to social license to operate,” he said. “The wider Australian community has this misconception that international students take all of their jobs and student places.”