A travel loophole being used to circumvent the India flights ban has been shut down by the federal government.
Two Australian cricketers, previously stranded in India, arrived home yesterday after travelling through the Qatar capital of Doha.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison addressed the issue while speaking with Ben Fordham on 2GB this morning.
LIVE UPDATES: We will be taking more action about that loophole, Mr Morrison said.
He said the Federal Government was told earlier this week by Qatar authorities that connecting flights from India would be closed by Wednesday, but that the flight the cricketers were on had taken off before the shutdown.
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In the early days of the Hawke government, when Labor and a dynamic young treasurer, Paul Keating, kept confounding a hostile and suspicious business community with market-friendly policies, the cartoonist Patrick Cook would draw the then previous treasurer, John Howard, as a battle-scarred veteran.
Howard was covered in plasters and bandages of the battles â of which the legends grew â that he had had with his prime minister Malcolm Fraser, to try to push a deregulatory agenda that was then sweeping other parts of the Western world.
Travellers can still easily fly into Australia from coronavirus-riddled India through the sneaky loophole of flying through Qatar.
The federal government suspended all direct commercial and chartered repatriation flights this week as India s second horror wave of the virus worsens.
The decision left 9,000 Australians stranded in India until at least May 15 - the earliest date the flight ban will end.
But travellers are able to get around the ban by transiting through the Qatar capital of Doha.
Australian cricketers Kane Richardson and Adam Zampa used the loophole to flee India and arrived in Melbourne on Thursday night.
Cricketer Adam Zampa (pictured with his fiancée Harriet Palmer) used the loophole to flee India and arrived in Melbourne on Thursday night