Four top businesses call for radical overhaul of border lockdown
Coronavirus has wiped billions of dollars worth of transactions from his businesses alone. Now, the boss of one of the country’s top firms has a grim warning for where we could be headed if borders are not opened.
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The leaders of four of Australia’s top businesses will launch a public campaign calling for a radical overhaul of border lockouts, saying the human cost has grown too high to ignore.
Competitors Flight Centre and Helloworld and fierce rivals Qantas and Virgin have come together to launch the public plea for a rethink of the state’s lockout, saying the knock-on social effects from crippled businesses and lost jobs have not been properly factored in by the State Government.
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Spearheaded by Flight Centre founder Graham ‘Skroo’ Turner, they will launch the public appeal as the State Election campaign begins, urging both parties to urgently find ways of safely opening the state borders.
The Sunday Mail can also reveal discussions between New Zealand and New South Wales about a travel bubble, sparking fears Queensland’s hard line could lock it out of the benefits of visits from one of the state’s most valuable tourism partners.
Mr Turner, whose company has been smashed by the near-total collapse of international travel and off-again, on-again state travel rules said business and the community could not afford to rely on a total lockdown and the hope of a vaccine.
“Talking about economic recovery and business survival without open borders and free trade between states is meaningless rhetoric,” Mr Turner said.
“As an industry we are putting a four-week advertising and publicity campaign together over the next two weeks to make sure we can get the public behind us and to ensure the political parties cannot get away with arguing that business revival can come with closed borders.
“We cannot see any chance of this happening with closed borders.
“We need to work together as one Australia for our economy in Queensland to recover.
“A travel and tourism restart will be the key to Queensland coming out of the depths of the current recession.
“Borders need to be opened immediately for any recovery plan.”
Qantas boss Alan Joyce said he feared Christmas could become a crunch point for families who had been kept apart by the border lock outs.
He urged leaders to look for ways to safely open first state borders, then internationally.
He said tests were already underway in the United States on COVID scanners at airports that operated like breathalysers and detected whether a would-be flyer had been exposed to the coronavirus.
Mr Joyce said new ways needed to be found to get business and travel moving without the toll of two-week mandatory quarantine.
“It has to be done safely. But there are heartbreaking stories,” Mr Joyce said.
“They are grandparents who haven’t seen grandkids, they are people who can’t go and visit relatives, they are families that have been separated for months.
“We are one country and we have to figure out how we minimise these human costs which are significant as well.
“New South Wales have shown that the suppression strategy, with the track and tracing, can minimise the amount of cases and life can go back to normal. It’s how you open up the travel environment with those same types of protections at the same time they can see their families and friends, they can see dying relatives and they can see the grandkids that have just been born. We have to get there.
“The landmark of Christmas is coming up, which I think will be very emotional for a lot of people if we still have these issues in place.
“We know it’s possible because it’s been done in other places.
“Where you have very low cases to low cases or no cases to no cases it seems the incremental risk on this is extremely small if not non-existent. We are asking those questions.
“The national cabinet aim was to have suppression. It was never elimination.”
Virgin chief executive officer Paul Scurrah said governments needed to look at ways of safely opening links between areas with low or zero COVID numbers.
“I think the whole approach to COVID has lost context and I think we need to open up the discussion about a more sensible approach to borders,” Mr Scurrah said.
“There needs to be consideration given to opening borders where there is very low to no risk between the cities.”
Helloworld boss Andrew Burnes said his firm had gone from having 2000 full-time equivalent staff in February to the full-time equivalent of 600.
COVID had wiped billions of dollars worth of transactions.
He said Queensland and Australia needed to find a way to live under COVID or face 20 per cent undemployment come March.
“We need to start taking the conversation forward to focus on actually how we get out of this,” Mr Burnes said.
“There doesn’t seem to be any logical reason why WA, SA, Tasmania, the ACT and Queensland haven’t got their borders open to residents of each of those states given that they’ve got virtually zero current cases of infection.
“For our tourism and hospitality industries, all we’ve got is each other.
“What they’ve tried to do is implement blanket rules with very limited exceptions.
“There seems to be exceptions if you are a Hollywood movie star and there seem to be exceptions if you've got anything to do with the AFL but if you’ve got deeply personal reasons for legitimately wanting to cross the border it seems those requests have met a brick wall.
“There’s a certain lack of compassion but also a lack of appreciating the complexities of the world we live in that has driven this blanket approach.
“We are going to have to learn to live with it, we are going to have to learn to manage it and we are going to have to learn to minimise the risks but we are going to have to accept a level of risk that allows a sustainable level of economic activity to continue.
“It doesn’t appear to me that we have got that balance right.
“We can’t just keep extending these lockdowns and border closures if we expect to get into 2021 and through 2021 with a viable economy and a less than 20 per cent unemployment rate.
“It’s brutally stark. People’s lives have been destroyed.”
