Australia doesn’t expect to reopen its international borders until well into 2022.
The border has been closed since March 2020. That decision has been instrumental in the nation containing COVID-19, but there are big social and economic costs.
The social costs – of families separated, of students and others losing their jobs but being denied government assistance and so on – are hard to quantify.
But we’ve done our best to calculate some of the economic cost. By our reckoning every day the borders remain largely closed is costing at least $36.5 million in lost expenditure.
Calculating the costs of the closed border