I'm not sure we've paid enough attention to how creepily excessive it is that we're banning Australians from leaving the country. It's supposedly tied to the issue of our capacity to handle returning travellers if/when they need to come back

But we're going to be in this situation of wanting to have border controls for quite a long time, if hotel quarantine has capacity constraints and isn't viable long-term at a large scale, we need to critically examine what other options are

We need to be able to allow people who need to travel in and out of the country to resume doing so. Presumably one of the first options for managing this would be to look at different quarantine regimes for arrivals from different countries depending on risk levels

People will be wary here because of the NZ situation, but there are still various countries where the risk of importing cases is so low that at least allowing home isolation rather than mandatory hotel quarantine should be acceptable

For people arriving from countries where we still think risk is sufficient that more strictly managed quarantine is necessary, given we'll be doing this for a while, we need to consider if there's options other than city hotels that might be safe, comfortable, but cost-effective

such as the possibility of establishing dedicated quarantine accommodation facilities.