It wasn’t a policy. It was a reaction. It was good in some respects, but to lock out your own citizens from their own country, bending rules for LNP sponsors to go abroad and generally rort where it suited the LNP was not.
In fact locking out your own citizens from their own country would be a first. And a bad one. Just goes to show, decisions on a whim, not policy by the way, can be totally wrong in many ways.