Australia's chief health decision-making body, the Australian Health Protection Principal Committee, says it is monitoring the situation.
In a statement, the AHPPC says it has "no current concerns for spread of this variant in Australia".
The UK variant has already been detected in New South Wales and Victoria, with returned travellers testing positive in hotel quarantine.
An infectious disease expert at the University of New South Wales, Professor Raina MacIntyre, warns the virus could escape into the community.
We have to be really careful. Everything that's come into Australia has come in through the international borders. So if this is the dominant strain in the UK, we're going to be at risk of that strain being imported into Australia. The strain also seems to be more transmissible in children and more likely to cause infectious disease in children, so that might change the whole landscape in terms of school closures and the safety of keeping schools open. And all of that needs to be considered.
Professor MacIntyre says it's possible a new strain of coronavirus could emerge in Australia if there are high rates of community transmission.
She's calling for Australians to be inoculated sooner, ahead of the planned rollout of the Pfizer-BioNTech, AstraZeneca and Novavax shots in March.
Professor MacIntyre is urging the government to secure more doses, amid fears current vaccines may be ineffective against the mutations.
The MRNA vaccines, Moderna and Pfizer, are much less likely to be resistant to this mutation than other vaccines made using more traditional methods. That's another reason why we really do need to diversify our vaccine stockpile. It's not enough to just have lots of the AstraZeneca vaccine, a little bit of the Pfizer vaccine and some Novavax. We need to diversify, we need to be making deals with lots of different companies.
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The federal government's coronavirus tracing app COVIDSafe is available for download from your phone's app store.
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