I wrote a Facebook post that changed Australia’s national border policy.
(For a day.)
In 2020 Australia imposed strict quotas on their borders due to Covid-19.
Only 6000 people were allowed to arrive each week.
This might sound like a lot.
It wasn’t.
By November, 40,000 Australians were registered as “stranded overseas,” with planes consistently cancelling flights, or tickets costing upwards of $10,000.
I had booked a ticket home for Christmas seven months in advance (before the price hike), from NYC to Sydney.
Even then, it was a gamble whether this flight would ever take-off.
Getting to Australia from the Northern Hemisphere is never an easy feat. A 20+ hour flight over two legs — 6 hours to a travel hub, then 14 hours to Sydney or Melbourne. Coupled with extreme Covid precautions and anxiety, it was going to be nerve racking flight.
On November 25th the plan was to fly from:
NYC to SF - 6 hours
SF to Sydney - 14 hours
The first leg went off without a hitch. The two friends I was traveling with were cautiously optimistic — we were on time, there was no racing through terminals, we had time for snacks, a change of clothes, things were feeling good.
In SF we boarded our second plane at 10pm.
There were 30 of us Australians in total onboard a 190 seat Boeing 737 — that’s a lot of extra leg room on a very expensive plane. Because of Australia’s bureaucratic red tape United weren’t allowed to fill the extra empty seats. Now this … this is where things get stupidly Covid messy. Everyone on that flight was registered to arrive specifically on November 27th, ticking the nation’s arrival quota box. United kept this one flight going throughout the pandemic at a loss in order to keep the valuable flight path. This meant each day 30 lucky, registered Australians could make it home. It’s one of the reasons the price of admission got higher and higher as the pandemic went on.
So we sat on on our Boeing 737 feeling pretty ok about our situation.
We sat on that tarmac for three hours and slowly that good feeling ebbed away.
There was a mechanical problem with the plane we were told, and at 1am all 30 of us exited the plane.
A United spokesperson told us the plane wasn’t fit to fly and that we would all have a night comped at an airport hotel.
What was the backup plan? There wasn’t one.
We couldn’t fly on the next day’s plane — all 30 tickets were taken. Because of the arrival quota Australia wouldn’t exceed its numbers on November 28th, just because we had missed our November 27th window.
We had two choices:
Pay $6,000+ for a new ticket due to leave either SF or LA in five days time.
Give up.
After a teary call to my family in Australia and fresh out of options, I looked to a Facebook group — Australians In NYC. While most of FB is pretty irrelevant, this little group is still an extremely active community focused on helping out Aussie expats in the Big Apple.
So as a last ditch resort, I posted this at 8am:
From there, things started happening quickly.
Group members jumped onboard the cause, tagging their journalist friends and sending emails and numbers to try in the Australian government.
Suddenly my DMs were flooded by journalists reaching out to hear our story. We got other passengers involved to tell their side of the story also.
From ABC News Radio
TV channels ran segments on us like Channel 10’s The Project, SBS News, Mornings Shows, The Washington Post, countless FB groups…
Like I said, this group is active.
Then things really started happening.
Our story was trending amongst politicians in Australia —a State MP had retweeted my post.
Then the Chief of Staff for the leader of the Opposition Party, Anthony Albanese, reached out.
By lunch we were on a zoom call with Albo, telling him our story. This was a pretty big deal for us, we really couldn’t believe how far our little story had travelled. It was basically the equivalent of jumping on a video call with Joe Biden when he was running against Trump.
Then something ridiculous happened — as we trudged near our airport hotel seeking out a snack, United called us to tell us everyone from our cancelled flight was getting re-booked on the flight that night. Australia made the decision to change its national policy just for us— instead of 30 Australians flying into Sydney on November 28th, 60 of us would be.
We were going home.
We had wondered if our little story had anything to do with this, or if the government had just taken pity on our situation.
But then Albo called a press conference, where he told Australia how he had immediately called the Federal Minister For Transport after speaking with us.
Turns out, the change in foreign policy didn’t have anything to do with us. It had everything.
Now, this is quite a long and quite definitely a very privileged story.
But if one short piece of copy could do all this, well, imagine what else it could do.
Endnote:
In 2021 Albo became Prime Minister of Australia.
He had my vote.