Immigration Lawyers and Migration Agents

Your Australian Visa Our Focus

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinta Arden announced yesterday that travellers from Australia will be able to enter the country without mandatory quarantine starting 11:59pm on Sunday, April 18 New Zealand time.^[i]

An exemption to travel restrictions, allowing people to leave Australia, will not be required for those travelling to New Zealand.^[ii]

This bubble will effectively allow people to travel freely between Australia and New Zealand, subject to certain conditions.

To help prevent the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Australian government has used the powers under the Biosecurity Act 2015 to prevent most travel out of Australia.

Travel Ban

The Government has banned Australian citizens and permanent residents from leaving Australia.
This is to prevent Australians from participating in the global spread of COVID-19 and to prevent them from
becoming infected overseas and returning to Australia with the virus (as Australian citizens and permanent residents are not affected by the incoming travel restrictions).
This is an important measure to help facilitate Australia’s plan to reduce the number of cases of COVID-19.

In many cases, this is a second layer of restriction, as many countries have restricted their incoming travel in a similar way to Australia.Australians looking to travel abroad at the moment may find it difficult to enter other countries, even where an outgoing travel exemption has been approved (see below).

Who is allowed to travel?

• Residents of other countries
• Aircraft or vessel crews
• Freight workers
• Essential offshore facility workers
• Travellers on official government business

• Are involved in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, such as aid workers
• Are critical workers
• Require urgent medical treatment which needs to be carried out outside of Australia
• Have urgent/unavoidable “personal business”
• Have compassionate or humanitarian reasons for doing so
• Have a national interest reason to travel

All of these will need to be determined on a case-by-case basis and it is not necessarily clear who will fall within this and who will not.

If you plan to travel overseas in the next 3 months, travel exemption requests can be made here.

What’s the penalty for travelling without exemption?

The mantra of it being better to “ask for forgiveness than permission” doesn’t apply here.

Other considerations

There are also heavy restrictions on travel into Australia.
The circumstances for which you can be exempted from these inbound restrictions are similarly restrictive to those above for outbound travel. In many circumstances, you will need to apply for an exemption to enter Australia or risk having your visa cancelled at the Australian border.

The circumstances for requesting an exemption include:

• Immediate family of Australian citizens and permanent residents
• Persons invited by the Government to assist with the COVID-19 pandemic
• Those providing critical medical services
• Persons with critical skills examples given are engineers, ship crews and specialised medical professionals
• Certain diplomats
• Where there are humanitarian or compassionate circumstances
• An exemption must be applied for in the border restriction exemption webform, and a positive outcome must be received before travelling.

Do You Need Help?

If you meet the circumstances to request for a travel exemption, contact us for assistance. We have successfully obtained travel exemptions for our clients.

Contact us on +61 8 8351 9956 or email us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. 

Sources