Australia has announced plans for a one way travel bubble across the Tasman, with New Zealanders able to travel to New South Wales and the Northern Territory without having to quarantine, from October 16.
Australia's Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack revealed the move this afternoon and signalled this would be the first stage in what is hoped will be trans-tasman travel across all Australian states.
There are some limitations - anyone arriving from New Zealand can't be coming from an area descrived as a 'Covid-19 hotspot' - somewhere where there have been fewer than three cases for three days.
But the changes will not allow Australians to travel to New Zealand.
Jacinda Ardern says New Zealand isn't ready for that at our end - and anyone heading across the ditch will have to complete their two weeks in managed isolation on their return.
"It's a crack in the door... Someone might want to buy a one-way ticket to Australia to reunite with family but no-one's going to hop on a plane and go for a weekend's shopping in Sydney and come back into two weeks' isolation in New Zealand," Tourism Industry Aotearoa chief executive Chris Roberts told Checkpoint.
"It's the first development of opening up the Tasman, but it's fairly inconsequential."
Roberts said he think internal Australian politics is behind the announcement.
"The federal government in Australia and the government of New South Wales are working together to put pressure on the other Australian states to open up, because there are still barriers to travel from state to state in Australia. What they really want is for all of Australia to open up. New Zealand is sort of being used to get that to happen.
"In a way we're happy to be used because it starts the conversation. We can start having talk about how that safe travel can happen. But until we can have isolation-free travel on both sides of the Tasman it's not going to make a big difference.
"We think once we get past the election we can have some further discussions between the two governments, hopefully the borders can open in a proper fashion before Christmas."
