Border Skips owner Paul Abernethy fears his won’t be able to operate his Tweed and Gold Coast business when Queensland closes its border

A Tweed business owner who relies on crossing the Queensland border daily fears the closure will make it ‘impossible’ for him to operate.

A TWEED business owner who crosses the Queensland-NSW border daily said the closure would make operating his business “nearly impossible”.

Border Skips owner Paul Abernethy crosses multiple times a day to dump rubbish at a private commercial facility in Queensland and said he couldn’t see how he could keep it up if police intended to check the identification of every driver entering the state.

Border Skips Gold Coast and Tweed owner Paul Abernerthy says the closure will make it nearly impossible to operator his business. Picture: Jerad Williams.

He said each time a new hotspot was declared with a change to declaration passes it took more than an hour to pass checkpoints.

“They stopped me once and asked if I had been in Liverpool in the last two weeks and I said, ‘Why would I do that?’,” Mr Abernethy said. “We both had a laugh and he let me through. That was a five second delay and yet I think I sat in Ducat Street for an hour.

“I don’t know how they’re going to do it.”

Mr Abernethy said he timed his day to avoid peak hour traffic and had tested most checkpoints.

“Opening up Ducat Street has helped,” he said. “I was going in (to Queensland) via Twin Towns, but ever so slowly people caught on it was easy to cross there, and the same with Ducat Street, it’s starting to get busier now. The M1 is full of tourists and truckies and that can be up to a 45 minute wait.”

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He felt the Premier didn’t understand the impact border restrictions had and believed it should have been shut south from Newcastle.

“I had trouble one day. I lined up for an hour and got refused. I had my son in the truck, I’d just picked him up from the sick bay, and they refused us entry because he didn’t have a border pass.

“It’s just silly little rules like that, it’s frustrating. It’s not like we were going to the beach, I’m driving a commercial vehicle.

“I’ll just have to put up with it I guess.”