The nation's top medical chief has branded new travel requirements for people from China as unnecessary and inconsistent with Australia's COVID-19 management.
The Albanese government moved on New Years Day to require people travelling to Australia from China, Hong Kong or Macau to test negative within 48 hours of departure.
People transiting through will not be affected and those who test positive after arriving in Australia will need to follow the local health advice, including the recommendation to isolate while symptomatic.
Chief Medical Officer Paul Kelly advised the health minister on December 31 to consider enhancing COVID surveillance.
But he said the requirement to test negative was "disproportionate to the risk" given Australia's high vaccination rates, ready access to treatment for vulnerable people and the lesser risk of transmission in summer.
"I don't believe there is sufficient public health rationale to impose any restriction or additional requirements on travellers from China," he wrote.
Professor Kelly suggested testing plane wastewater, voluntary sampling of arrivals, an increase in community wastewater testing and following up with returned overseas travellers who tested positive for the virus.
Health Minister Mark Butler said while there was no evidence of an imminent threat to Australia, he made the decision out of "an abundance of caution".
He cited the need for more data out of China to ensure authorities were able to quickly detect and assess the impact of any new COVID-19 variants and maintained the measure was modest.
"Other countries have expressed concern we don't have information about a very fast-evolving COVID wave in the largest country on the planet," he told Adelaide radio station 5AA.
Mr Butler said similar measures will not be put in place for travellers from other countries such as the United States due to the timely reporting of information and genomic sequencing data.
Beijing recently scrapped strict "zero-COVID" measures in favour of a new policy of living with the virus, which resulted in an eruption of infections and the prediction of three winter waves.
Infectious disease expert Professor Robert Booy said the Australian government's decision was reasonable as there is the potential for a new variant to emerge with tens of millions of people getting infected.
Opposition leader Peter Dutton said the government needed to explain why they went against the health advice when there was no new variant of concern coming from China.
Mr Dutton said Chinese travellers needed more certainty in their travel plans, with the requirements disrupting families and businesses.
"The most relevant health advice for Australians is our chief medical officer's advice," he said.
"In the absence of Australian health advice to put the restrictions in place, the prime minister must justify why he has deviated from what has been previously agreed."
Treasurer Jim Chalmers said Australia already had a big enough challenge managing COVID "without unnecessarily exposing ourselves to a part of the world that's got an extraordinarily large wave right now".
The US, UK, France, India, Japan, Spain and South Korea have all imposed similar testing measures on arrivals from China.
China also requires travellers to produce a negative COVID test.
