The Department of Home Affairs did not follow its own policies and was inconsistent in its approach to family members separated by international travel restrictions, a new audit report has found. 

The new review by the Australian National Audit Office exposes flaws in the system administered by the Department of Home Affairs and Australian Border Force for permission to enter and leave Australia during the pandemic.

The review found:  

• Home Affairs failed to give applicants specific reasons for refusal decisions, forcing some people to apply more than 50 times before being approved.
• Government assessments about family relationships were inconsistent and relied heavily on evidence of cohabitation before the pandemic. Only 11.8 per cent of requests involving de facto partners were approved across a key period  
• The system overseen by Home Affairs lacked adequate mechanisms for review.

The Human Rights Law Centre warned the watchdog in a submission in July 2021 that a range of restrictive policies?were?keeping families apart.   

The federal government recently announced that planned easing of travel restrictions for people on most visas would be delayed by two weeks to 15 December 2021. This change means people on temporary visas and humanitarian visas continue to be subject to the federal government's flawed exemptions process. 

A recent paper, ‘Still left behind’, from the Human Rights Law Centre highlighted the serious problems in the federal government’s system of travel restrictions during the pandemic.  

The centre has called for changes including extending automatic exemptions to temporary visa holders living in Australia, lowering the harsh threshold for compassionate exemptions, giving humanitarian visa holders the same right to travel to Australia as other permanent residents, and replacing the flawed inward travel ban and exemptions process with fairer systems.  

“All of us in big and small ways have experienced the difficulty of being separated from the ones we love during the pandemic," senior lawyer Scott Cosgriff said. "The Morrison Government must ensure that decision-making on something as critical as whether a person can be with their loved ones is fair, transparent and subject to oversight. 

“These findings reflect the strain on people who have been separated from their loved ones during the pandemic, and forced to beg for rare exemptions simply to avoid missing out on critical moments in their lives.

“The process for granting exemptions from the travel ban lacks parliamentary oversight, has no review rights, is opaque, and does not have adequate grounds for compassionate exemptions. The recent extension of the exemptions system for people on temporary visas due to the new COVID-19 variant only underscores the need for it to be overhauled.”

Did you apply for an exemption to travel overseas during the pandemic? How did you find the process? Was your application successful?