The queues outside the Australian Passport Office in Melbourne, are 50m metres long these days, with people anxious and desperate to find out where their new or renewed passport is, after waiting for more than six weeks for it to arrive.

Some have a scheduled flight overseas the very next day, and many only a few days away.

Calls to the designated phone number (131 232) get cut off due to high demand, and people have been going straight to the passport office hoping to inquire in person about the status of their application. Families with small babies stand for hours in the line patiently hoping for some answers.

A security guard and an officer speak to each person lining up to assess the urgency of each traveller. If travel is due to exceptional circumstances or if a flight has been booked, in the next couple of days, they make an effort to fast-track their applications.

On the APO website, the advice to travellers is to allow up to 6 weeks for a new passport, or a renewal, however many of these people lining up, have been waiting for much longer than that.

“In the first three months of this year, we issued nearly 400,000 passports, more than double the total number we issued over the same period in 2021.

With passport demand on the rise, we strongly urge you not to leave your application to the last minute,” is the APO’s advice to travellers on the website.

Priority applications typically take two business days to process, but in many cases, it takes longer.

Nadia Keisho, a mother of two who lives in regional Queensland, is facing a 2,000-kilometre round trip to collect the passports from the Brisbane passport office, so she can have them in time for her flight to the UK in June.

Ms Keisho explained to the ABC that despite having applied for her passport in March and for her children’s passport in April, paying earlier this month a $380 priority fee, it took two weeks for her passport to be dispatched, even though she was told that her application was “escalated”.

“It was a long, stressful, incredibly difficult process and it took a superhuman effort to finally get some clarity on it all,” she told the ABC.

The queues are long also in Sydney and in Brisbane, as no one is answering the phone anymore.

Paris Smith told the ABC that she paid for a passport renewal in March for her first overseas trip, but ten weeks later she is still waiting.

The 20-year-old from Noosa on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast plans to fly to Europe in July for a business trip.

She says that she has called the Australian Passport Office (APO) several times in the last month.

“Sometimes, I’ll be waiting for an hour and a half and then I’ll just get sent to an automated message and then it will cancel the call on me, so I haven’t even been able to speak to any [one] at all,” she told the ABC and added that if she knew that it would take three months she would have paid the extra money to get her passport fast-tracked.

The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade told the ABC that they are experiencing an “unprecedented” demand for its passport services since the reopening of Australia’s international border and the Australian Passport Office has a four-week backlog in its processing queue.

More than 1.1 million passports have been issued, this financial year, with 800,000 of those since November 1, 2021 when international borders re-opened.

Customers were advised to allow six weeks to renew their passport but new applications and those for children could take longer.