Steve Price: Crossing the borders should be easy, but SA has made it a nightmare

It would be easier to get into North Korea than into South Australia these days, writes Steve Price.

About a year ago, according to the time stamp on my Instagram account, I was in the backyard of my elderly mother’s unit in the Adelaide suburb of Brighton.

Melbourne and Victoria were briefly free of one of the tedious 2020 lockdowns caused by Covid-19 and the trigger-happy South Australian government was letting Victorians in.

Vaccination status, believe it or not, wasn’t even a thing back then and nobody used QR codes or green ticks. It had been an emotional year of separation, including tears from me on national TV on The Project.

Mum agreed to let TV film the reunion and I wrote a column about the toll Covid-19 was having on families, and particularly the loneliness many older Australians were experiencing.

The visit, which started on December 9 last year, was made by road and required a relatively simple SA border-entry application done online in a few minutes. There was a police roadblock on the border with one officer checking forms.

Traffic crossing after the borders to South Australia opened to NSW and Victoria at midnight on November 23, 2021. Picture Dean Martin

Fast forward 12 months and what a complicated border nightmare health officers and jumpy politicians have created, especially Premier Steven Marshall.

With an election looming, he has been forced, it seems to me, by his Liberal colleagues in Canberra, to keep the border open.

Border politics in this country has become a game of chicken, at the expense of Australian businesses, tourists and the economy. It seems unless you are a professional footballer, a Hollywood actor or a billionaire, you are trapped in your own state.

Idiotic ambitions to remain Covid-free have been ditched by Victoria, NSW and even Queensland as leaders realise it is impossible and destructive to achieve it. Marshall, though, hasn’t gone down without a fight, resulting in the most complicated ridiculous set of tests and twists and turns of any jurisdiction.

I’ll try to do my best to explain what you would have to do to enter SA from Victoria, NSW or the ACT. It would be easier to get into North Korea. Despite a friend holding an approved entry permit to go home, an email she got after Marshall’s latest border move is extraordinary. The changes are based on a fear of the Omicron variant.

As a given, you must be double vaccinated. To get in, you need a negative Covid test taken 72 hours before arrival. On arrival, you must get tested again and stay at home if you live there, or in registered accommodation if you are a visitor. Testing must be with a qualified healthcare worker, which means no rapid-antigen testing.

It doesn’t stop there.

The South Australian border – good luck getting across.

On your sixth day, you must test again. You are banned from going to any aged-care home for seven days, so forget visiting an elderly relative in care if you have less than a week.

But they’re not done with you yet. On the day of your expected arrival, you will receive an SMS asking you to click on a link to confirm it. You will then get another SMS to confirm you are actually in SA with a code to activate an app within 24 hours declaring your arrival.

SA is my home state – I was born in Adelaide and enjoy going home. But what casual tourist is actually going to go through that crazy set of rules to visit?

For the Ashes Test match starting on Thursday, guess what, yet again the professional sportspeople, unlike interstate spectators, won’t need to do this.

The Test, if it goes the distance, lasts five days and the sixth-day additional test – Covid-19 – won’t be necessary, and the players will be off to Melbourne for Christmas. Border wars must stop for Australia and Australians to feel like we really are getting back to normal.