Tony Sammartino has no idea when he might next hug his three-year-old daughter, but the wait is almost guaranteed to last another year, or possibly more.
“These are the best years of her life, and they should be the best of mine, too, and they’re slipping away,” Sammartino said.
Tony has not seen Maria Teresa, nor her mother and his partner, Maria Pena, since March last year, when he was in the Philippines with their other daughter, Liliana.
Illustration: Mountain People
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the family of four split their lives between Melbourne and Subic, a coastal city northwest of Manila, spending roughly half a year in each parent’s home country.
Now, the Sammartinos are one of countless Australian families that find themselves separated by an almost hermetically sealed border, an enduring aspect of Australia’s harsh response to the pandemic that continues to prevent even its own citizens from freely returning to or leaving their country.
About 40,000 Australians have at any one time remained stranded overseas, missing births and funerals, losing jobs, and even dying from COVID-19 despite pleas for help to return home.
As countries around the world vaccinate their populations and reopen to freer travel, Australia — which has recorded 910 deaths from COVID-19 and zero community transmission for most of this year — is progressively tightening its borders.
The hardline approach appears to have gained support among the Australian public, with demographers and sociologists observing that Australian leaders’ attitudes toward risk management had shifted Australians’ views about being global citizens. Others, such as Amelia Lester in a powerful essay for Foreign Policy, have asked: What does it say about the collective Australian psyche that a proudly multicultural country can be so supportive of such strict border closures?
NO SOLUTION IN SIGHT
At the beginning of the pandemic, a permit system was introduced for those wanting to leave Australia, with even some compassionate pleas rejected.
A strict mandatory hotel quarantine system was introduced to absorb an influx of returning citizens; about 1 million Australians lived overseas pre-pandemic.
Then in July last year, a cap was placed on the number of people that quarantine hotels would process, leading to months of flight cancelations, and an almost impossible equation for airlines to remain profitable on Australian routes.
Seat prices on airlines that continued to fly into the country soared by tens of thousands of dollars, with jumbos flying as few as 20 passengers per flight.
Meanwhile, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison routinely rejected calls to build facilities to repatriate more citizens, insisting that state governments were responsible for quarantine.
The country’s border crackdown peaked at the end of last month, when Morrison used sweeping biosecurity laws to issue a directive threatening to imprison any citizens who attempted to fly to Australia from India via a third country while a temporary direct flight ban was in place during the recent outbreak.
While a “travel bubble” was established with New Zealand last month, repeated delays in Australia’s vaccine rollout have made the government hesitant to announce a timeframe to reopen its borders.
Since the government revealed an assumption in its annual budget last week that the border would remain shut to international travel until after the middle of next year, Tony Sammartino is struggling with the lack of outrage at the policy.
“I haven’t really absorbed that, because I know for me there has to be a solution sooner. It can’t take that long for them to come home,” he said.
Tony Sammartino’s partner was born overseas, and was not a citizen or permanent resident when the pandemic began. As the parent of an Australian-born child, she could apply for a visa and exemption to Australia’s border ban on all non-citizens. However, she cares for a child from a previous relationship in the Philippines, who would not be able to gain entry to Australia.
Meanwhile, Maria Teresa Sammartino is too young to travel alone, while Tony Sammartino cannot secure an exemption and flights for him to travel to escort her to Australia, where he had been planning to enroll her in preschool. He does not want to risk becoming stranded in the Philippines indefinitely.
This has not stopped Tony Sammartino from waking up at 4am most mornings due to the stress of his situation, and going online to search for flights. He has become obsessed with flight radars, to monitor the few passenger flights that still enter Australia each day, to calculate how many passengers they are carrying, and what a route home for his daughter and partner might look like.
“I just don’t have the money to fly there and pay A$11,000 [US$8,535] each to fly home, and then quarantine [about A$5,000]. If you had money, you could get here easily,” he said, a reference to international celebrities who have paid their way into Australia.
The family connects on a FaceTime call every day, but Tony Sammartino is worried their other daughter, Liliana, who is in Australia with him, is losing interest in her mother, frustrated that she is missing milestones in her life.
“The embassy in Manila doesn’t help, but they sent us a link to a charter flight company in Hong Kong. The government has left us on our own. They haven’t beaten COVID-19 at all, they’ve just shut us off entirely from it,” Tony Sammartino said.
NOAH’S ARK MINDSET
Only one-third of Australians believe the government should do more to repatriate citizens, a Lowy Institute poll showed, and the Morrison government appears to be banking on the political safety of a harsh border policy as a national election looms.
Australian National University demographer Liz Allen said the popularity of Australia’s COVID-19 strategy was not surprising.
She said that although about one-third of Australians are born overseas, “protectionist narratives have operated quite successfully in Australia,” particularly because of an older population.
University of Technology Sydney sociology professor Andrew Jakubowicz is not surprised by the “cognitive dissonance” occurring in a multicultural nation supportive of the border closures.
“Something deep in the Australian psyche is the memory of how easy it was to invade this place, the idea that the moment you let them in, you’re in trouble,” he said.
Jakubowicz refers to the statistics showing that migrants to Australia are often the most opposed to further migration.
“There’s a long history of pulling the gate shut once they’re through the door,” he said.
“It’s this learned apprehension of letting in, it’s allowed us to accept hardline immigration policies in the past, and it’s allowed us to reprogram quickly to the stress of being stuck here in the pandemic,” he said.
Jakubowicz calls this the “Noah’s Ark model of survival.”
Allen agrees, and believes that the government’s strategy plays into Australians’ sense of security.
“Australia has not done anything marvelous or miraculous in containing COVID-19. It’s been about geography and dumb luck. We’ve dug a hole and stuck our head in it and that’s where we will remain,” she said.
“We like to view ourselves as larrikins and irreverent people who stand up to authority, but in reality we are scared, we’re petrified,” Allen said.
“We’ve become so comfortable because of our geography that we’re losing our greatness. We’re not even able to have a conversation about risk. The government is too scared of championing new quarantine facilities out of fear if something goes wrong,” she said.
Allen believes that the country “risks regressing” both culturally and economically without reopening to immigration, tourism and family reunions.
On Friday last week, a coalition of business, law, arts and academic figures echoed this call, urging the government to adopt a “living with COVID-19” strategy to avoid reputational damage to Australia.
“Australia benefits tremendously from our migrants and tourism,” Allen said. “Year on year, this country has [publicized] the wondrous kind of living conditions in this place to all corners of the world, to come join us, but now, so many who have made Australia their home, and taken a risk on us, we tell them to go home. Well, they were home.”
FORCED INTO RUIN
This view is shared by Vamshi Parepalli, who lives in Melbourne with his wife, Shruthi, having gained permanent residency status. In December last year, the couple gained an exemption and traveled to India to care for his mother in Hyderabad, having failed to get approval for her to come to them in Australia.
They have become stuck amid India’s devastating outbreak. Not only have there been no direct flights home, they face a A$66,600 fine and five years in jail if they attempt to return via a third country.
“How can it be criminal to return to our home? To be honest, I feel like it was a dream when I got my residency and stepped into Australia, and now it looks like it really was just a dream,” Vamshi Parepalli said.
In other countries, Australians left in limbo have been unable to work, forcing some into financial ruin.
The Vowels, a family of seven who live near the city of Newcastle, north of Sydney, spent more than six months living in a camper van in their cousin’s backyard in Crawley, England, after their initial flights home from a family holiday were canceled. Intense media pressure saw them offered flights home that would have otherwise cost them A$113,000.
However, Andre Rivenell is still living in a camper van. He has been stuck with his wife in Texas since their initial flight home was canceled when the pandemic first hit. His health deteriorated after a stroke and diagnosis of a chronic autoimmune neuromuscular disease, and he cannot afford healthcare in the US.
He hopes to return home to see his son before he dies. However, the Australian government did not approve him for an emergency loan for vulnerable Australians stranded overseas. He has since resorted to crowdfunding.
Meanwhile, Tony Sammartino was met with backlash from someone in his local park after hearing that his family was separated. Many hold a perception that those who traveled overseas did so frivolously.
He is worried that this type of reaction represents a larger lack of political support for any change in policies.
Allen believes that “an arrogance that we’ve fought a pandemic and won a war” is linked to the public backlash.
“We didn’t win a war, we’ve just bunkered down,” she said. “We’re a bunch of preppers, and we’ve gone in with baked beans and tinned spaghetti. There’s so much more to life than baked beans and tinned spaghetti.”
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