Australia welcomes two-way Trans-Tasman travel
Australia s flight-path to recovery is well underway with the Australian Government welcoming the New Zealand Government s announcement that it will join the Safe Travel Zone between Australia and New Zealand.
This announcement will enable quarantine-free travel between Australia and New Zealand on both sides of the Tasman helping to reunite families and friends and giving tourism operators a significant boost.
It follows Australia s opening of a one-way Safe Travel Zone from New Zealand to Australia six months ago, with more than 34,000 arrivals into Australia from New Zealand during that period.
This latest major step in the resumption of international travel has only been possible due to the internationally recognised, world-leading responses to the COVID-19 pandemic by Australia and New Zealand.
Transtasman bubble: Travel Agents Association of NZ says demand is huge nzherald.co.nz - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from nzherald.co.nz Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Watch: Chris Hipkins and Dr Ashley Bloomfield provide a COVID-19 update. Credits: Video - Newshub; Image - Getty.
After a short, sharp lockdown, Auckland is back under alert level 2 while the rest of New Zealand has dropped to alert level 1.
The moves comes despite three new community cases of COVID-19 being reported on Wednesday. All three, however, are connected to the original trio from the weekend and there is no evidence yet - either from community testing or wastewater testing - of any wider parallel transmission.
Of the 31 close contacts of the original cases, 30 have tested negative while the last is one of the three new positive cases. The test results of more than 360 casual-plus contacts - many from Papatoetoe High School - remain outstanding, but 1159 have tested negative. Contact tracing is now underway for the three new cases.