The impact of Australia's closed borders: These four graphs tell the story

Australia will have new rules for its international border in coming weeks.

From February 21, our border will reopen to travellers who have been fully vaccinated.

It will be a major step towards returning to more traditional travel patterns.

It comes after travel restrictions were eased for fully-vaccinated Australian citizens and permanent residents in November, which saw overseas arrivals and departures pick up noticeably.

However, there's a long way to go before Australia's travel and airline industries return to "normal", given the damage they have suffered.

The graphs below tell some of the story.

International, domestic travel severely disrupted

When our international borders closed in 2020, the number of travellers passing through our major airports dried up quickly.

Government data show what happened to international arrivals and departures in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth airports.

See the graph below.

You can also see what happened to domestic travel.

After international borders closed and strict lockdown rules were enforced, domestic flights also fell dramatically.

However, they picked up in late 2020 as we emerged from the original lockdowns, and that momentum continued into 2021.

The mood in Australia was relatively buoyant then.

We did not have a large-scale vaccine program at that stage, but we had largely kept COVID-19 out of the country and many people felt relaxed about travelling domestically.

However, when the New South Wales government lost control of the Delta variant in June last year it sent half of the country's population back into lockdown, and domestic air travel was hit hard again.

See the graph below.

Altogether, when you look at the total decline in airline passenger movements over the last two years, it is striking.

According to government data, the combined number of international, domestic and regional airline passengers in the 2020-21 financial year hit levels last seen in 1991.

See the graph below.

Flights are slowly returning

So what has been happening recently?

According to provisional data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), in December we had the highest volume of overseas arrivals and departures since international travel restrictions were introduced in March 2020.

There were 197,000 overseas arrivals to Australia, and 229,000 overseas departures from Australia in December.

Jenny Dobak — ABS director of migration statistics — said the increase could be attributed to government decisions to ease international travel restrictions late last year.

That occurred on November 1, 2021, when fully vaccinated Australian citizens and permanent residents were allowed to travel to and from Australia without an exemption.

However, there's long way to go before we see pre-COVID travel patterns.

“While the number of border crossings have increased since travel restrictions were eased in November, there are still far fewer crossings than before the COVID-19 pandemic," Ms Dobak said recently.

"For example, in December 2019, there were 1.9 million overseas arrivals and 2.2 million overseas departures, 10 times larger than December 2021 volumes.”