Commercial flights will be your best way out of Middle East, Wong tells stranded Australians

The Australian government has deployed six “crisis response” teams to the Middle East to help deal with the consulate overload caused by the huge number of Australians stranded by the conflict that has spread far and wide in the region.

Foreign minister Penny Wong said on Wednesday the best way for Australians to get home was via commercial flights.

While Wong said the government was working on a number of contingency arrangements, it has not yet raised the prospect of using military or government-chartered planes for repatriation. But sources said their limited use might be an option for vulnerable people.

She told a news conference: “We are conscious of how distressed many people are. I want to assure you that we will continue to do all that we can to get Australians home and to keep Australians safe.

"The quickest way to get people at scale home is for there to be commercial flights returning. We anticipate that it’s likely to be sporadic, but I’m very pleased to see we do have one commercial flight en-route, as we speak.” This was a Wednesday flight from Dubai to Sydney.

There are an estimated 115,000 Australians in the region and 24,000 in the United Arab Emirates.

Wong said she could not say where the crisis response teams were going or how they were travelling, for security reasons.

The minister has had conversations with her counterpart in the UAE.

The governments of the UAE and Qatar are accommodating and feeding stranded Australians at the expense of those countries.

Wong said that Australian government staff were dealing with an “unprecedented number of registrations” of Australians. “There has to be a process of considering their registration and assessing their eligibility for the purposes of taking further action.”

Shadow foreign minister Ted O'Brien said while there were limitations on air travel there were options, in terms of land travel, that some of our partners were looking at.

Opposition defence spokesman James Paterson told the ABC “the government’s response to this crisis has been a bit flat-footed.

"So far, we have 115,000 Australians stranded in the Middle East, many of whom might have chosen to leave had they been more directly warned by the government last week that this was a possibility, when the foreign minister did not make a single public comment herself in the week leading up to these events.

"We obviously had enough notice to know that we should withdraw family members of DFAT personnel from the region, which the government did on Friday. But on Friday, why didn’t the foreign minister make a public statement?”