James Campbell: Victorian government treating border situation with indifference

To say “tough luck, too bad” to the many Victorians set to be trapped on the NSW side of the border is heartless.

I don’t know about you but having lived through two lockdowns last year, I’m finding it hard to think rationally about the prospect of another one.

In retrospect, the first one in the late autumn doesn’t seem that bad, partly no doubt because it was pretty lenient compared with what came later, but also because there was a novelty to the whole thing.

Lockdown 2, as I am sure you don’t need to be told, was a different matter. After that grim experience, the last few weeks have seemed like an unexpectedly long school holiday break that has coincidentally arrived just as the nation was downing tools in early December.

The end of compulsory mask-wearing was the final sign things were returning to normal, though for some reason beyond me, a good third of the population of inner-city Melbourne refused to take them off. No doubt the masks’ comeback has them feeling vindicated and even a little smug.

For the rest of us, I suspect Acting Premier Jacinta Allan’s edict on New Year’s Eve sounded like the school bell being rung on playtime or a publican shouting last orders just as everyone’s starting on their third beer.

Acting Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan’s edict, on New Year’s Eve, sounded like the school bell being rung on playtime

On its own, the mask rule isn’t that bad and there’s no doubt it’s all for our own good but you can’t help wondering if it isn’t a bit of an overreaction for a hatful of cases.

But after what we’ve all been through this year, it’s hard to think clearly about these things.

The border shutdown with South Australia in November over the pizza-shop-outbreak-that-wasn’t, seemed over-the-top to the rest of the country but I remember vividly at the time thinking anything — anything — was justified to avoid being locked up again.

My reaction to the slow outbreak in NSW these past months has been similar.

Intellectually, I could see the case for thinking the authorities up there had things in hand. But I could also see that the lines connecting the Upper North Shore and, say Black Rock, socially were not likely to be very long.

Given what we knew about the hair trigger of Victoria’s public health team, it seemed we were running a great risk of being thrown into lockdown again by allowing people to come and go from there. And anything — anything — would be better than having to go through that again. But the border stayed open, in time for thousands of Victorians to head north for the Christmas holidays.

And now it has been slammed shut again. With almost no warning and no chance for many of the people in NSW to get back in time. How many are stuck there? The government doesn’t know.

Will it be able to provide hotel quarantine for all of them? Well, if it doesn’t know the answer to the first question, it can’t know the answer to the second but we already know the answer is no.

What is almost beyond comprehension is the indifference with which they are treating this unprecedented and horrible situation.

Traffic banked up for hours as many rushed to get home. Picture: Simon Dallinger

Victoria’s Coronavirus Testing Commander — who came up with that pompous title? — dismissed these concerns by saying “we’re not running a hotel quarantine scheme for convenience”, adding “we have been very clear for a number of weeks now around the risks of travel to New South Wales”.

Even if that were true — and I don’t think it is — it’s also surely irrelevant. The fact is there are unknown thousands of Victorians in NSW. To say “tough luck, too bad” is not just heartless but beside the point. They’re going to have to be allowed back in somehow whatever the testing commander thinks. And it isn’t even true.

On December 18, by which time many people had already left the state for holidays, DHHS issued a warning against travel to Sydney, but it said nothing about any risk of travel to the rest of NSW.

Since then people could quite reasonably have flown to Ballina or Newcastle or Wollongong. If they couldn’t get a flight back in the seven hours between Jacinta Allan’s announcement and 11.59pm on Thursday, was that their fault?

Then there are many people who for whatever reason were unwilling or unable to hurry home from Sydney as the Premier told them to a few days before Christmas.

As many of them had already discovered, the hotel quarantine option, supposedly introduced for people returning from Sydney, exists more in theory than in reality. You can’t have a space, they’ve been told.

Some of them will have been planning to return via self-imposed quarantine in a part of NSW unaffected by coronavirus. Now that door has been closed too.

Then there are people who are in Queensland who either have flights booked that transited via Sydney — a no-no — or have driven there. Are they expected to drive back via the Northern Territory and South Australia?

If they don’t fancy that, maybe they could take a plane and pay some Pommy backpacker — if there are any of those left in Australia — to drive their car back. Or put it on the train.

For weeks now, there has been a debate going on between those people I know who thought the Victorian government would be extremely reluctant to put us back into lockdown again and those of us who suspected it wouldn’t think twice about it.

The capriciousness with which the NSW border has been closed, in the face of the real-world chaos it would cause in the first week of January shows how easily the hammer can and will be dropped.

But you don’t have to listen to me; as I said, I’m finding it hard to think rationally about the prospect of the return of the daily confrontation with the North Face jacket.

James Campbell is a Herald Sun columnist

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