Australian border confusion “devastating”: tourism body

   CANBERRA, May 11 -- The tourism industry has warned the Australian government that it is being crippled by uncertainty over when international borders will reopen.
   Peak industry body the Tourism and Transport Forum (TTF) recently said the government's failure to set a date for reopening the country's international borders was "devastating" its recovery from the pandemic.
   The TTF has proposed a 1.8 billion-Australian dollar (1.4 billion U.S. dollars) package to help tourism survive the next 12 months.
   "It's not helpful to have a whole lot of different comments with different time frames and dates and different priorities around them in terms of when we'll reopen to the rest of the world," said TTF chief executive Margy Osmond, according to the report from News Corp Australia on Tuesday.
   "It's devastating from a lack of certainty point of view. We understand health must be the number one priority but what we need is some certainty around dates as far as possible.
   "National cabinet needs to come up with a set series of dates so restrictions and border requirements can be lifted against the vaccination process."
   It comes after the government confirmed recently that the borders would not re-open until 2022.
   Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said over the weekend that there was no "appetite" among Australians for the resumption of international travel to Australia, pledging that borders would re-open "when it is safe to do so."
   Following up on the PM's comments, Finance Minister Simon Birmingham, who served as minister for tourism from August 2018 until December 2020, said Australians should not expect significant movement on borders "until into next year and probably some distance into next year."  Xinhua