Face it, what we had is gone and it’s never coming back. Something new is going to take its place. You can spend your energy two ways; pining about what you lost or building your new future. Your choice.
This kind of 'fortress' rhetoric is old, dangerous and needs to start to be called out more often. It's this style of talk that is responsible for the predicament we are in now re vaccines and hesitancy. You'll find it in the comments of any news article/facebook post related to borders or aussie covid. Usually baby boomer and white (yes, important because you have little/no family overseas - o/s travel isn't just holidays). Just the small scare down in Vic has driver vaccine rates through the roof so the tides are changing. From personal experience, everyone we know has done their token domestic holiday and is now dumping their savings in the offset for an o/s trip when borders open.
I constantly see alarmist rebuttles to any border argument 'WELL DO YOU WANT TO END UP LIKE INDIA?!!' or my favourite 'ONE WORD, INDIA.'
We're not a third world country the size of QLD with 1.35 billion people crammed in. End of story.
Let's keep it really simple, not like the old capt's briefs
Let's call up to the vaccine rollout 'Phase 1' and the part we are in now vaccinating, 'Phase 2'
Let's compare to to our big friends the US/UK whom we share a lot with culturally.
USA/UK
Phase 1 =
bad
Phase 2 = good
AU/NZ
Phase 1 = good
Phase 2 =
bad
And note the resilience score for Australia with it's current rules set? I'll give you some time to pick up your dummy.
This reference to how we did in Phase 1 is no longer relevant, it's done, dusted, finito. We need to move forward onto phase 2.
The vaccines have now been proven against all variants (including the more contagious NOT more deadly Indian variant).
Like a few others have said, once the vaccine rollout hits that golden number, we need to stop counting cases. The world will open again - here's a fun experiment, go to flightradar24 on global view and filter to show any aircraft 767 or larger. You may be surprised.