The suit will challenge WA's allegedly "unreasonable" border closure
The state of Western Australia may face a legal challenge against its hard-border mandate as Flight Centre considers filing a case in the Federal Court.
Flight Centre, a travel industry business, said that it might dispute WA's order only to open its borders when 90 per cent of the state's population above the age of 12 is fully vaccinated.
WA Premier Mark McGowan said that the state's target could be achieved in January or February 2022, and a specific transition day to reopen could be announced upon reaching an 80 per cent double dose vaccination rate.
Flight Centre CEO Graham Turner told ABC News that "the company was yet to make a final decision."
"We will be looking at a judicial review in the Federal Court, rather than a constitutional challenge in the High Court," Turner said.
Tasmania also has a 90-per-cent vaccination target for its border but Turner said that WA was their focus. "We are focused on WA because they seem most unreasonable," Turner said.
"The economic fallout is one thing – if you look at tourism, hospitality and travel, airlines have been badly hit, farmers have been hit," Turner then told The Guardian.
"Australia has a constitution for a good reason, we're a democracy, we should be able to travel freely," Turner added. He said that he believed that the company's legal team has a "reasonable chance of success."
Meanwhile, WA doctors slammed Flight Centre's possible court action.
The president of the WA branch of the Australian Medical Association, Mark Duncan-Smith, said that Flight Centre's possible action "has a focus on profits and not people, and would damage their business reputation in Western Australia immeasurably," he said in a report published by The Guardian.
"The arrogance that the people who run Flight Centre think they know better than the government, when they have all the modelling, is to me unbelievable. They need to pull their head in," Duncan-Smith said.
WA Health Minister Roger Cook said that the state government would be ready to face any dispute over its border mandate.
"We've had legal challenges in the past and we've faced them all. Our objective is to keep Western Australians safe in the context of a public health emergency," Cook said in an ABC News report.
