Once you touch down in Australia, the Government does allow exemptions from hotel quarantine in some instances

The case of a 53-year-old Australian dual citizen and her son who were incorrectly allowed to travel to Victoria and avoid hotel quarantine after flying into Sydney has put the spotlight back on quarantine exemptio

While police wrongly believed these two travellers had a valid exemption to avoid quarantine, the Australian Government does allow travellers exemption from hotel quarantine in some instances.

Here is a rundown on who can enter Australia by air or sea and be exempt from hotel quarantine for 14 days on arrival.

International transit

People arriving in Australia can leave on another international flight out of the country and can avoid hotel quarantine as long as they stay at the airport where they entered Australia and the next flight leaves within eight hours.

If the wait time for your next flight is from eight to 72 hours, travellers are required to go into mandatory quarantine.

You must stay in the quarantine facility until the time of your departing flight.

If you intend to spend more than 72 hours in Australia waiting for a connecting flight, the Department of Home Affairs says you are not considered to be transiting Australia and will need to request an exemption from travel restrictions.

Government officials and their dependents

Government officials and their dependents may quarantine at their home or private accommodation as long as they are returning to Australia from official government travel.

Once in Australia, these officials cannot travel on a domestic connecting flight within 14 days of arrival.

These officials must be travelling on an official or diplomat passport to qualify for this exemption.

However, Queensland does require consular employees to quarantine for 14 days in hotel quarantine or other government-organised quarantine.

Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk banned diplomatic and consular staff returning to the state from overseas in August after a Government contractor entered Queensland on an consular exemption tested positive for coronavirus.

Foreign diplomats

Similarly, foreign diplomats can quarantine for 14 days at their mission or usual place of residence.

This is in line with Australia's legal obligations under the Vienna Convention to ensure foreign diplomats freedom of movement and travel and protection from detention.

Compassionate or medical exemption

Applications for exemptions on compassionate or medical grounds are taken on a case-by-case basis by states and territories.

The Department of Health says travellers seeking a hotel quarantine exemption need to apply with the relevant state or territory "well before" they travel to Australia.

If you need to travel through multiple states or territories within the quarantine period an exemption must be granted from each of these states or territories.

Aviation crew

Australian air crew arriving in Australia after working on an international flight are exempt from hotel quarantine.

They are required to self-isolate at their home or hotel until their next international flight departs, or for 14 days — whichever is shorter.

These exemptions also apply to medevac and air ambulance crew.

But these exemptions do not apply to Australian air crew arriving internationally as passengers.

Similarly, foreign air crew are not required to enter hotel quarantine but must self-isolate at their hotel until their next flight and use privately organised transport to travel to and from their hotel.

Foreign air crew may fly domestically to their next point of departure from Australia if necessary.

Flight crew of domestic flights are subject to the same quarantine restrictions as the general public.

Maritime crew

Maritime crew are exempt from hotel quarantine, but the conditions of their exemption is a little trickier.

Maritime crew are required to self-isolate for 14-days after leaving their last international port of call. This means that maritime crew can spend their entire self isolation period at sea prior to arriving in Australia as long as no illnesses have been reported on board during that time.

Therefore, maritime crew who have spent longer than 14 days at sea on a commercial vessel, with no illness reported on board, do not need to self-isolate on arrival in Australia.

If maritime crew arrive in Australia within 14 days, they are required to self-isolate at their home for the remainder of the period.

Support staff on maritime vessels, such as livestock handlers and veterinarians, are also considered maritime crew and are subject to the same exemptions.

But these exemptions do not apply to cruise ships.

Also, international maritime crew flying into Australia to join a vessel are not required to undertake hotel quarantine but they must proceed directly to the vessel or self-isolate in their accommodation.

They may travel domestically to reach their vessel, but must self-isolate in their own accommodation during any layover time.

Workers on offshore gas and oil operations are also exempt from hotel quarantine, under the same exemptions as apply to maritime crew.

Travellers from a Safe Travel Zone

The Department of Health website says that travellers arriving in Australia from a Safe Travel Zone country do not need to quarantine as long as they have not been in any other country in the previous 14 days.

Currently this exemption applies to travellers from New Zealand, as New Zealand is the sole country to be designated by Australia as a Safe Travel Zone country so far.

Once you touch down in Australia from New Zealand, you may still be required to undergo health screening.

But in the Safe Travel Zone you will not come into contact with passengers from other countries.

However, according to the Department of Home Affairs, quarantine-free travel from New Zealand is currently only available to NSW, the ACT, NT and Victoria.

If you arrive into any other state you will still be subject to mandatory quarantine.

Once in Australia, travellers are subject to the same social distancing and health guidelines that Australian residents are.

www.samigration.com

Cyber crime costs the global economy over $1 trillion, or just more than 1% of global GDP, a figure which is up more than 50% from a 2018 study that put global losses at close to $600 billion.

This was revealed by a new report by McAfee dubbed “The Hidden Costs of Cybercrime,” which examines the financial and unseen impacts that cyber crime has around the world. The report, conducted in partnership with the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), was compiled from interviews of 1 500 IT and line of business decision makers.

The report explored the damage reported beyond financial losses, finding 92% of companies felt effects beyond monetary losses.

A wider attack surface

Steve Grobman, SVP and CTO at McAfee, says the severity and frequency of cyber attacks on organisations increases as adversaries hone their techniques, new technologies widen the attack surface, and work expands into home and remote environments.

“While industry and government are aware of the financial and national security implications of cyber attacks, unplanned downtime, the cost of investigating breaches and disruption to productivity represent less appreciated high impact costs,” he says.

In SA, organisations had to scramble to establish work-from-home infrastructure for their staff to ensure business continuity through the COVID-19 lockdown, but compared to more developed markets, few company’s security infrastructure was up to the job for this shift,” adds Carlo Bolzonello, country manager for McAfee SA.

“While many managed the shift, they were unwittingly vulnerable to security breaches, whether they were accidental data leaks, private data being maliciously shared by disgruntled employees, or targeted hacks from global crime syndicates. Organisations equipped with a cloud-based advanced threat management solution that offers complete coverage across the attack lifecycle, would have had the ability to prioritise and protect what matters, easily and efficiently,” he adds.

Hidden costs

The report also scrutinised the hidden costs and the lasting impact and damage cyber crime can have on a business, including system downtime, which is a common hazard for around two thirds of respondents’ organisations. 

The average cost to organisations from their longest amount of downtime in 2019 was $762 231, and a third of respondents stated IT security incident resulting in system downtime cost them between $100 000 and $500 000.

Another hidden cost emerged as reduced efficiency, as system downtime saw organisations losing, on average, nine working hours a week leading to reduced efficiency. The average interruption to operations was 18 hours.

Then there's incident response cost. The report highlighted that it took an average of 19 hours for most businesses to move from the discovery of an incident to remediation.

Finally, the report looked at brand and reputation damage and found that the cost of rehabilitating the external image of the brand, working with outside consultancies to mitigate brand damage, or hiring new employees to prevent future incidents is another cost, with 26% saying they had suffered brand damage from the downtime experienced due to an incident.

Ill prepared

Unfortunately, the report also uncovered a lack of organisation-wide understanding of cyber risk, which makes businesses vulnerable to sophisticated social engineering tactics and, once a user is hacked, not recognising the problem in time to stop the spread.

According to the report, 56% of the participants admitted to not having a plan to either prevent or respond to a cyber incident. Out of the 951 organisations that actually had a response plan, only 32% believed the plan was effective.

www.vsoftsystems.co.za

 

 

JOHANNESBURG - Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs (Cogta) Minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma on Tuesday said that international travel has not changed under the country’s level 3 lockdown.

Briefing the media, the minister said the 18 land borders, which were partially operational, would be fully operational.

She said the 34 land borders, which were closed will remain closed, except for the Kosibay Border Post between South Africa and Mozambique that would reopen on 1 January 2021.

The minister also said initiation schools will have to be closed under the adjusted level 3 lockdown.

She said initiation schools that had already opened prior to the implantation of the country’s level 3 lockdown regulations, would be allowed to continue to operate in order to complete their processes.

However, Dlamini-Zuma said no new initiates may be taken, and celebrations after the initiation are prohibited.

Earlier, Dlamini-Zuma said people could go to restaurants, museums, gyms, casinos, galleries, cinemas, and theatres.

However, the venues must allow a maximum of 50 people only sitting 1.5 metres apart and alcohol is prohibited from being sold.

If the venue cannot accommodate the 1.5 metre distancing, then the number of people allowed inside must be less than 50.

Following Monday night's address by President Cyril Ramaphosa on developments in relation to the country’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, Cabinet ministers are giving more details on the new adjusted regulations.

Dlamini-Zuma is joined by Health Minister Dr Zweli Mkhize and Police Minister Bheki Cele on Tuesday morning.

www.samigration.com

 

Confidence in African digital payment solutions is essential to minimising fraud and corruption while improving the free flow of funds to boost business and economic activity. Their value is illustrated in statistics released by the South African Banking Association (SABRIC) in June 2020.

The report found that digital banking fraud had risen by 20% but that the fraud losses on banking applications had only increased by 1%, despite a significant rise in transactions

Mobile digital payments offer consumers and businesses a convenient method to manage funds, make payments, and gain visibility into accounts and transactions – effectively putting a bank in every pocket. Accessible and reliable, they’re the oil that lubricates the formal and informal economies, enabling financial inclusion at all levels of business and society. 

Payment technologies have the potential to open access to financial services for people from all walks of life, and can scale-up with organisations of all sizes.

Micro-enterprises are able to leverage digital payment platforms to receive payments, cut down on cash transactions to reduce cost and risk, improve financial management, and deepen their relationship with formal finance for great access to financial services.

Small to medium enterprises (SMEs) can benefit from digital payment solutions, increasing access to customers and the ability to reach new markets with eCommerce, reaching remote areas and reshaping how they do business – a particularly relevant step in a pandemic controlled market. 

The fraud conundrum 

According to Deloitte, COVID-19 has made digitised payments and payment solutions critical, minimising reliance on cash transactions and improving financial inclusion. The report found that around 90% of retail outlets in the financial sector are still using cash exclusively, largely due to issues around friction and cost with cards in remote and rural areas.

The lack of connectivity and the risk of fraud make cards a low priority for these merchants. However, the situation is being shifted somewhat by the arrival of intelligent, digital point-of-sale devices, and mobile payment platforms that allow both merchant and customer to transact using mobile devices.

But, if the mobile payment is made via a card to the account, the cost and friction are only reduced. A mobile, digital card linked solution is better than plastic and will minimise the risk associated with card payments – a risk that SABRIC’s report identified as on the rise by 20.5%.  

The problem with legacy is that it is a legacy. All of the main card schemes (Visa, MasterCard, UnionPay; and all of the BigTech, Ant Financial/AliPay, WeChat, Amazon, Facebook, Google et al payment offerings) use super-apps with payments attached to cards that harvest customer data and ultimately dis-intermediate the bank from their customer.  

In any card transaction, whether or not it is a virtual, mobile, QR payment experience, customer information travels with the payment and has to be encrypted, decrypted, and re-encrypted. There are two big risks with legacy. Fraud risk where customer information can be compromised, and disintermediation risk where a third party harvests data with the intent to get in between the bank and their customer.  

Modern account-rail-based payments use anonymous digital tokens that represent a customer but have no customer data associated with them. The anonymous 20 digital number is unique to each transaction, lives for four minutes or a single-use, and is only associated with the customer’s information inside the bank. This makes compliance with General Data Protection Regulation (GDRP) and Payment Card Industry (PCI) data security standards a moot point and it assures the bank and the consumer that their information is safe, privacy assured. 

Undermining the bank and consumer relationship is not a positive disruption. It introduces risk and off-shore dependency in the financial market, and it weakens domestic financial intermediation that is essential for a healthy financial system for domestic economic growth.

Cards and cash can be stolen or faked, but secure anonymous digital transactions are safe because there is no information to steal. Although there are regulations and measures in place to protect consumers and businesses from card fraud, these are often not effective. The risk to consumers inhibits the use and undermines trust in digital payments. The risk to banks is expressed by increased service fees for the payment. These fees are passed on to merchants and built into the cost of goods and services.  

With digital account rail-based payment secure solutions, security is baked in. This “zero-knowledge” of customer information in the payment ensures identities are protected for the consumer while ensuring absolute financial transparency of the merchant to the bank. 

Unpacking financial equality 

The consumer, who was once unbanked or is underbanked and suspicious of traditional forms of electronic banking, is now given the opportunity to experience new ways of paying from any funding source that is account-based – loyalty points, prepaid gift cards, bank accounts, or with funds in a non-bank financial institution.

This benefit is tightly aligned with the SMEs who serve the customer. They can now include value-added services for digitally-empowered clients, which allow them to interact with the business in entirely new ways. SMEs can create digitally accessible discounts, vouchers, and loyalty plans that engage with customers and drive transactions. This increases inclusion adds to a company’s credentials and gives greater room for growth. 

Fraud may be endemic in many financial systems, and risk may always be present but, with the right digital payment platform and investment, SMEs and their customers are given protection and privacy over their transactions, increasing confidence and providing a safe and convenient way to pay from any account to any merchant.

The digital transparency provided by the financial institution provides the data and assurance needed to bridge the financial inclusion gap left behind by traditional legacy banking solutions.

A new digital payment system for Africa – independent of foreign legacy and in defence of local financial markets development for everyone. 

www.vsoftsystems.co.za

 

 

Founded in 2017, My Washbay is a local tech startup that is focused on digitising and reinventing the car wash industry by providing a tech-based service for car wash owners, adding value for its customers. 

My Washbay aims to digitise the car wash industry

In an interview with Ventureburn, Prinesh Pillay, founder of My Washbay explains that the startup aims to shake up the car wash industry with technological advancements and tools to enhance the customer experience. 

“A large number of car washes are still utilising legacy or manual systems of dealing with their operation, inclusive of reports and customer experience.”

With an app currently in the development stages, My Washbay is currently web-based and offers a unique service for both car wash owners and customers. 

The service is currently available in Johannesburg but My Washbay plans to expand its offering nationally and globally. 

Benefits for users

As a web-based app, the startup offers the following benefits for customers; 

• Cashless payment for car wash services via a secured paygate, reducing contact and supporting social distancing measures during the pandemic
• Use of vouchers to pay for car wash services 
• Purchase of car wash service bundles at reduced costs 
• Information and access to car events, test drives, and more
• Online notification when the car wash service is complete.

Customers are able to scan a present QR code at the car wash facility to check in their vehicle and payments are made via the app with Zapper digital payment service integrated. 

Car wash businesses

Local car wash businesses are able to effectively benefit from the My Washbay services as it offers a comprehensive range of services to transform the traditional methods employed. 

Here is a list of benefits for car wash businesses: 

• Use of an online dashboard for payments, reducing the possibility of theft as each transaction is recorded 
• The platform allows for traffic monitoring 
• Implement and offer customers discounts
• Presence on the app, reaching more customers online 

A monthly fee is applicable for car wash companies to utilise the service. 

Social impact

As a self-funded startup, My Washbay supports autistic individuals secure a form of employment at a car wash through My Washbay’s client network. 

A statement on the My Washbay provides further insight into their aims of supporting the disabled. 

“Working is really important to the human experience. It is with this in mind that we will aim to deploy people with Autism (not limited to) into our car wash network and a chance to feel empowered through work. Employment rates for the disabled in South Africa have dropped to below 1% and we aim to change this one person at a time.”

The startup liases with its existing car wash network to identify roles suitable for candidates to apply. This system provides employment opportunities for disabled individuals allowing them to improve their quality of life and enter the job market. 

www.vsoftsystems.co.za