Why did Australia border earlier than most other states in response to the outbreak of COVID-19? Between mid-January and March 2020, the Australian government adopted increasingly restrictive travel bans that led to the country closing its borders to all non-residents, adopting mandatory hotel quarantines for 14 days and a travel ban on Australians travelling overseas. These actions were in contravention of the World Health Organization advice to states on travel restrictions. Australia’s border closure was one of the strictest and, ultimately, longest in the world. In this article, we complement existing explanations on bordering that include critical border studies, securitization and bio/necropolitics with theoretical approaches from public policy literature to examine the domestic conditions that inform border closure policies and practices. We demonstrate that the decision to border, in this case, was not a rejection of World Health Organization advice but a turn towards the domestic pull factors – including domestic expert advice – to border.