All people arriving in Australia will be required to self-isolate for 14 days and cruise ship arrivals will be banned for at least 30 days to prevent the spread of coronavirus, the prime minister, Scott Morrison, has announced.
Morrison told reporters in Sydney that the first meeting of the national cabinet on Sunday had agreed to legislate offences for people who breach the self-isolation rule and escalated advice to others to undertake social distancing, including refusing handshakes and keeping a distance of 1.5 metres away from people.
The suite of new measures comes after criticism the government has failed to give clear messages about social distancing. The chief medical officer, Brendan Murphy, advised as late as Sunday morning that handshakes between people who have not returned from overseas are still advisable.
On Friday the Council of Australia Governments decided to advise against “static, non-essential” mass public gatherings of 500 people or more, to apply from Monday, although Morrison reiterated on Sunday that this would not trigger “widescale” closure of schools, shops, airports and workplaces.
“We will impose a universal compulsory self-isolation requirement on all international arrivals to Australia effective from midnight tonight,” Morrison said.
“All people coming to Australia will be required, will be required, I stress, to self-isolate for 14 days.
“Further, the Australian government will ban cruise ships from foreign ports from arriving at Australian ports after an initial 30 days and that will go forward on a rolling basis.”
Morrison said that – until now – self-isolation had been a “voluntary arrangement” with “no potential sanction against a person for not following that requirement”.
“That will change,” he said, although penalties will be “a matter for the states and territories”.
“If your mate has been to Bali and they come back and they turn up at work and they are sitting next to you, they will be committing an offence.”
By contrast, Morrison played down the prospect of enforcement of social-distancing. “The states and territories … are not going to create event police or social distancing police or things of that nature.”
Morrison said the government’s national information campaign “is running and it will be available to all Australians” but claimed that social distancing was “pretty straightforward”.
He explained maintaining a distance of 1.5 metres would mean “ensuring that you refrain from that sort of physical contact, whether it might be a handshake or something a bit more intimate, unless they’re close family and friends”. “It’s all commonsense.”
For the first time, Morrison presented various scenarios for the speed of the spread of the coronavirus, using them as encouragement to slow the spread to help free up hospital beds for those who need them.
“If we continue to manage this but on how the virus impact on Australia, we will be able to ensure that we can continue to provide the services and support, particularly to the most vulnerable Australians most at risk from the coronavirus,” he said.
Morrison foreshadowed that there “will be further intrusions, further restrictions on people’s movement and their behaviour” in future in response to changes in medical advice.
The first of these will be new protocols for visiting aged care facilities, he said, with further work to be done to protect remote communities in South Australia, Western Australia, the Northern Territory and Queensland.
The Victorian premier, Daniel Andrews, has warned that school closures are regarded as inevitable, prompting many schools and universities to prepare for shutdowns.
But Morrison said there were “very good reasons” against moving to “broadscale closures of schools” at this point.
Although it may seem counterintuitive, schools should stay open at this time because taking children out may expose others to risk and would “put at great risk the availability of critical workers such as nurses, doctors and others who are essential in the community,” he said.
“The states and territories are not moving in that direction.”
The issue will be revisited at meetings of the national cabinet on Tuesday and Friday, although individual schools in Victoria and New South Wales have been allowed to close “based on the cases presented there in the circumstances that exist in those communities,” he said.
Earlier on Sunday Murphy and the health minister, Greg Hunt, confirmed that as advice changes, measures might escalate to include general lockdowns.
“It – it is potential that could be the case,” Murphy told ABC’s Insiders. “But that may be focal. One of the things we know about outbreaks of infections is that they can affect one part of a country, not another.”
Asked if Sydney could be locked down and not the rest of the country, Murphy continued: “Potentially you could. The Koreans did that for two provinces, very successfully locked them down. Everything is up for consideration.”
Labor has criticised the government for the slow pace of rolling out a national information campaign, and is expected to call for urgent support for the aviation sector in response to the new measures.
