It’s the season when long-term travellers are traditionally on their way north to avoid the southern winter … but this year there are no caravans on the roads and the grey nomad hotspots are very much grey nomad cold spots.
Towns like Port Douglas in Far North Queensland have been described as ‘ghost towns’ as the coronavirus travel restrictions hit them hard. Although Port Douglas only has a permanent population of 4,000, this number normally quadruples over the coming weeks and months, but not this time around.
The CEO of Tourism Port Douglas Daintree, Tara Bennett, told the ABC that the situation was grave.
“It’s really grim for everyone in our community,” she said. “We are 80% reliant on tourism so this is affecting everyone … restaurants and cafes have made every effort to pivot and find a way to keep trading but the reality is there are only 4,000 people living in Port Douglas … and there are 60 eateries available!”
The situation has sparked a plea from businesses and tourism operators to relax domestic border restrictions by July, and to increase the Queensland Government’s 50-kilometre recreation limit to 100 kilometres, to allow visitors from Cairns.
“The easing of travel restrictions is welcome but regional centres need additional consideration,” Ms Bennett said. “Cairns is 67 kilometres away and Mareeba to our west is similar, so unfortunately those bigger centres still can’t come and visit our area.”
Steve Edmonson from Sailaway Reef and Island Tours normally takes 20,000 tourists out to the Great Barrier Reef each year, but he says his business has effectively been closed since March 23.
He told the ABC that it was critical that border restrictions in Australia were lifted by July to ensure the future of the town, and he suggested tourists could sign up to the Federal Government’s COVIDSafe app as a condition of travel.
“It could form part of a control measure that keeps travel achievable and mark a return to some normal level of experience and confidence,” he said. “We need domestic travel and access — Melbourne, Adelaide, Brisbane, Sydney from July, August, September.”
However, Queensland Premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk, has said that any moves to reopen the domestic tourism market would be ‘negligent’.
“I know that tourism operators are struggling, Cairns is a tourism industry mega-centre,” Ms Palaszczuk told the ABC. “We don’t want to give any false sense of hope [to people] that suddenly there are going to be planes flying in the sky in the next two months and tourism is going to be back to normal because we are in a world pandemic.”
I do believe signing up to an app needs to be a precondition, it the LNP one needlessly tracks your location. Hopefully, an apple/android API based version arrives soon.
Anyone travelling outside their home suburb should be using the app correctly and hopefully there aren’t people downloading, registering boosting numbers then deleting app afterwards
surely they could open caravan parks to self contained only, shut their showers and toilets, and let us use their water and dump point
The app is not compulsory so why should be a pre condition to be able to travel . When the government get there act together and make the app compatible to all platforms I’ll download it but at present it’s not compatible with my mobile operating platform and I’m not going to buy a new phone to be able to download the app.
Absolutely. Some people seem to be so dead against it, you have to wonder what they have to hide.
We are being track with our credit cards fly buy cards every thing we do. Just looking at a web site someone is tracking you. So you could be like a dim witted polly. And think the Gov. is checking on who you are sleeping with.
But as Phil said not all phones can down load the app.
There has to be a better system, if old phone’s cannot down load the app.
After all, it to our benefit.