Opinion: Claytons border opening will be an absolute shambles

The reality is the Queensland border is not really reopening on December 17. It’s a Claytons opening, the one you have when you’re not really having one at all, writes Mike O’Connor.

IN ascribing a degree of difficulty to an event, both the New Testament and the Koran use the metaphor of a camel passing through the eye of a needle.

It is something on which the thousands of motorists who will sit in their cars for hours in the heat of summer might ponder as they wait to enter Queensland when the borders “open” on December 17.

The reality is that they are not really opening at all, the Coolangatta-Tweed Heads border crossing destined to become the eye of the needle to the camel represented by the 40,000 cars a day which police estimate will attempt to enter the state.

It’s a Claytons opening, the one you have when you’re not really having one at all.

The figure of 40,000 is at best a guess. It might be 50,000 or 60,000. What is known is that there will be an awful lot of camels trying to squeeze through the eye of the Palaszczuk government’s needle.

Police have admitted that they have no idea how the process will be managed, other than to admit that it will be “pretty untidy”, this being a technical law enforcement term for “complete and absolute shambles”.

If it’s 50,000 a day that’s 35 cars a minute around the clock which would pretty much guarantee that the traffic will be backed up to the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

Why would you bother even contemplating coming to Queensland to spend your holiday dollars if you know you will have to spend the best part of a day queuing in your car?

Police perform border checks at the Queensland - New South Wales border at Coolangatta on the Gold Coast earlier this year. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Dan Peled

The state government knows that it is completely impractical to maintain our version of the Berlin Wall yet is so bloody-minded that it will do so while ministers babble on about roadmaps and keeping Queenslanders safe.

It was Police Minister Mark Ryan’s turn last weekend to attempt to defend the indefensible while announcing that a number of surf lifesaving clubs would become vaccination centres.

So you go to the beach, have a swim and all the while you are worried by the nagging thought that for the past few months there has been something you have been meaning to do.

What was it? Get a haircut? No. Buy a dog? No. Put your name down to fly into space? No. Get a PhD? No. Get vaccinated? Yes, that’s it. Brilliant! I’ll just slip up to the surf club and get a shot.

There are people who will not get vaccinated unless you strap them to a hospital gurney. The government knows this, just as it knows that achieving a statewide figure of 90 per cent will probably never happen.

Rather than accept this, we are treated like children and told that while a lot of us have been good little munchkins, some boys and girls have been very naughty and not done what Nanna Anna told them to do and until they do, everybody gets kept in.

It is worth remembering that the people attempting to enter Queensland are coming from states where the vaccine rollout has been better managed and have higher vaccination rates than here so why not pull down the wall?

As a consequence of this lunacy, large numbers of police, whom it could reasonably be presumed have better things to do than peer through the driver’s windows of thousands of cars checking on the vaccination status of Mum, Dad and the three kids, will be deployed at the border.

A police officer talks to motorists as vehicles line up at a checkpoint on the Queensland-NSW border. Picture: NCA NewsWire / John Gass

You don’t have to be too bright to appreciate that a roadmap that directs you to a 20km traffic jam is not particularly helpful. Gold Coast operators fear keeping checkpoints will discourage holiday-makers and Queensland Tourism Industry Council chief executive Daniel Gschwind has called for “a lot more detail”, this being a tourism technical term for “another government stuff-up.”

Acting Deputy chief health officer James Smith has said “that we anticipate that it (Covid-19) will become endemic, or spread within the community probably before the end of this year. Eventually I’d expect to see hundreds of cases a day.”

That’s the reality, so why in the name of all that is sweet and holy persist with the farcical border checks? It only makes sense if you assume that the government, blinded by this oncoming inevitability, is frozen like a rabbit in a spotlight and incapable of rational action.

You would reckon that given the countless missteps, blunders, bumbling and inane hyperbole on the part of the government that we have endured over the past two years that by now, a glimmer of common sense might shine on the horizon, be it ever so faint.

Instead, there’s just a long line of camels trying to thread their way through the eye of a needle.