Officials would be treating border closures as a dress rehearsal for large-scale regional and suburban lockdowns as local forces braced for chaos at Tweed Heads, where Australia's busiest state boundary was to close on Wednesday night.

The Queensland and NSW border runs just south of the Gold Coast, one of Australia's major metropolitan regions. The closure of the border is being seen as a pilot for when other states move to more drastic measures to contain the spread of the coronavirus.