This was published 4 years ago
Travel and COVID-19: 'Holiday criminals' the latest blame game target
By Anthony Dennis
Passengers from cruise ship the Greg Mortimer arrive at Melbourne Airport on Sunday.Credit: AAP
There's a term, "holiday criminals", used somewhat jocularly and common in corporate human resources circles, which describes those employees with excessive and underused leave balances.
These days some might apply the epithet to the legion of Australian travellers stranded overseas just before or after the historic declaration of a global pandemic and the sudden closure of borders around the world.
The latest holiday criminals are the passengers aboard the ill-fated Greg Mortimer expedition ship, which has emerged as a mini-Ruby Princess, with 128 out of 217 of them testing positive for coronavirus. They returned to Australia on Sunday and have been widely decried, along with the operators of the ship, for taking a cruise during a pandemic.
Video: Inside the ADF aircraft taking Australians home from Vanuatu
The ordeal for the Australians and other nationalities, including the ship's crew, was ended only a few days ago thanks to the humanitarian approach of the government of Uruguay, working closely with its Australian equivalent. Humanitarianism is a commodity conspicuously in short supply of late with countries such as Chile and Argentina - direct beneficiaries of the lucrative Antarctica cruise industry - having refused to allow cruise ships in distress like the Greg Mortimer to berth at their ports. If those countries had accepted the Greg Mortimer, its now-quarantined passengers could have likely been home a few weeks ago and with possibly fewer coronavirus cases among them.
It doesn't benefit anyone for travellers and the travel industry to be conveniently demonised by governments, medical experts and the media, and drawn into an epic blame game.
The Greg Mortimer, after all, departed on March 15, shortly after the Prime Minister, Scott Morrison vowed to attend a rugby league game while Chief Medical Officer Brendan Murphy still considered handshaking an acceptable practice. That was followed by the blithe bathers of Bondi who notoriously demonstrated their poor comprehension of the none-too-complex concept of social distancing.
Travellers and the travel industry are by no means beyond reproach, and certainly could have been far more prudent. But they, along with the rest of us, including the passengers and crew of the Ruby Princess, have been victims of the initial widespread confusion around social distancing and self-isolation, as well as the waves of denial and scepticism surrounding the gravity of the pandemic.
The rapidity and ruthlessness by which countries, including Australia, have abandoned travellers they have profited from in the recent past (and will seek to do so in the future) is breathtaking. Borders, in an "every country for itself" approach, were closed with little or no warning literally overnight and flight after flight cancelled, trapping travellers with scant regard for their welfare.
Now the Northern Territory government is the subject of Federal Court action by Australian Pacific Touring, or APT, operators of the MS Caledonian Sky cruise ship, which, currently carrying up to 75 crew, has been refused permission to berth in Darwin.
The NT government, along with the federal government, is demanding the ship leave Australian waters and return to the Bahamas, where it's registered for tax purposes and labour laws. It's another example of nations treating travellers and the travel industry as expendable and, shamefully, a contrast to the courageous and ethical conduct of the Uruguayans. A decision on the Caledonian Sky case is due later this week. Elsewhere, crew members aboard the Ruby Princess languish beside a Port Kembla grain terminal.
Many mistakes have been made during the pandemic. Travel and the travel industry will never be the same in the post-pandemic world. But the conduct of the so-called holiday criminals is not much different to the politicians, medicos, journalists and members of the public who either failed to recognise the seriousness of the impending crisis or were much too sluggish and hesitant in addressing it.
In reality, few of us, politicians and tourists alike, were able to predict, or conceive, the scope of the damage the pandemic has wrought on the world, with the global tourism industry one of its gravest casualties.
Anthony Dennis is travel editor of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.
See also: Only one country was willing to help trapped Australian cruise passengers
See also: Three cataclysmic events changed travel forever – this is the fourth
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