Australians losing out as premiers play political, nonsensical border games
There was once a time Australians could travel freely in their own country but navigating interstate travel has become a nightmare, especially to South Australia.
Opinion
Don't miss out on the headlines from Opinion. Followed categories will be added to My News.
Exactly 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 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, or had really heard of, QR coding 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 in these pages about the toll Covid 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 a lone female officer checking forms.
A return trip to Victoria, with Mum in tow, required no entry applications and, incredibly, Melbourne had a lockdown-free pre-Delta Christmas.
Fast forward 12 months, and what a complicated border nightmare health officers and jumpy politicians have created, especially South Australian Premier Steven Marshall.
Marshall has fixed terms of government and will test his lockdown and lockout policies in March next year. The poll will be held on March 19 and is as good an indication as any that the federal poll will probably be in May.
With that election looming for him — and after hiding behind his Police Commissioner Grant Stevens — who has been given extra power so the bad news doesn’t fall on Marshall’s shoulders — the SA Premier 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 realised it was impossible and destructive to achieve it.
Marshall hasn’t gone down, though, 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 right now what you would have to do to enter South Australia from Victoria, NSW or the ACT. It would be easier to get into North Korea.
At least with Western Australia you just realise it’s an impossible task, and not even the best cricketers in the world could get in.
Despite a friend holding an approved entry permit to go home – something she’s been unable to do for three months – an email she got after Marshall’s latest border move is extraordinary.
The changes are based on an irrational fear of the Omicron variant, which not one person in Australia has been hospitalised with.
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, which would be far cheaper and faster.
It doesn’t stop there.
On your sixth day in the South Australian paradise you must test again. You are banned from going to any aged care facility 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.
The entry permit is a one-off and you must apply again and go through it all again each time. There is even more, believe it or not.
On the day of your expected arrival, you will receive an SMS asking you to click on a link to confirm your arrival in SA. 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.
This is crazy, over-the-top nonsense when you consider in the case of Victoria and NSW you are dealing with two of the most-vaccinated jurisdictions in the world.
It’s not as if you are allowing anyone who is not already double vaccinated to even come, so what and who are you actually protecting?
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 a state that is marginal as a tourist destination at the best of times?
There is an Ashes Test match there next week starting on Thursday and guess what, yet again the professional sports people, 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 – 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. South Australia is a typical example but Queensland and Tasmania aren’t much better.
At least Victoria and NSW have woken up to the destruction this stuff causes with Sydney typically even allowing Hollywood actor Rebel Wilson to fly in from the US and skip the mandatory 72 hour self-isolation requirement to go to an awards show.
Just as well it wasn’t held in Adelaide.
LIKES
• The great Shane Warne back in commentary for the Ashes
• Perth having its Test match taken away, serves it right
• Vaccination mandates to be dropped in NSW from next week
• Premier Daniel Andrews bringing his end of year holidays forward to next week
DISLIKES
• Electric scooters in the hands of dangerous hoons in bike lanes.
• Melbourne traffic back to the bad old pre-Covid levels.
• Gender quotas introduced on State government projects – silly, just hire the best person.
• Length of time many bushfire victims from 2019 have waited to rebuild.
Australia Today with Steve Price can be heard live from 7am weekdays via the LiSTNR app
More Coverage
Originally published as Australians losing out as premiers play political, nonsensical border games
Bolt: Sam Kerr trial shows we’re losing power to race baiters
Kerr’s comments that a policeman was “stupid and white” were rude at best but was her angry abuse racist? The jury said no, but it’s not that simple.
Bolt: Mass immigration has imported hatred — and it’s tribal
As two NSW nurses boasted of how they’d kill Jewish patients, our politicians have been flailing around for something to make us feel safe from what they unleashed when they opened the doors to mass immigration from the Middle East. But now we must pay.