Susie O’Brien: Closing Vic/QLD border is a politically motivated over-reaction

After a year of turmoil, you would think our leaders would’ve learnt by now that closing state borders is a gross over-reaction.

Aaah, Queensland. Beautiful one day, closed the next.

Cancel culture has just reached a whole new level.

The entire country is in paralysis, states are closing their borders and the economy is headed for a massive hit.

Why? Because Queensland has 10 new cases of the coronavirus. Ten. Not 1000, or 100. Just 10.

Only four of them were locally acquired, but that hasn’t stopped our nation of tin-pot dictator premiers from shutting up shop and closing borders.

The so-called highly infectious UK strain of the virus doesn’t appear to be all that infectious after all.

On Monday our border to greater Brisbane was snapped shut in light of Brisbane’s three-day lockdown, with the area designated a red zone by Victoria’s chief health officer Brett Sutton.

As of 6pm, people from five Queensland regions, including Brisbane, were not be able to travel here. And the tens of thousands of people from Victoria planning to head to greater Brisbane this week will not be allowed in.

Anyone from Victoria who needs to come home must quarantine for 14 days.

Only four of Qld’s latest cases were locally acquired.

At play is a domino effect of overreaction that will cost our country dearly. Victoria has joined South Australia, Western Australia and Tasmania in closing borders, throwing the holiday plans of more than three million people into total disarray.

It’s not an “inconvenience”, as one premier called it, it’s a catastrophe. The struggling tourism sector in Queensland was just about to start cranking up, and now it’s ground to a halt again. It’s not a problem confined to the state’s southeast corner; many of those travelling further north were going through Brisbane.

Once again, NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian is the standout, refusing to close the NSW border and taking what she calls a “cautious” position.

She’s asked people not to go to Brisbane, but has always said a border closure was the last resort, not the first. I wish she was running Victoria — she’d do a better job than our Premier Daniel Andrews and his stand-ins.

Unlike other states, the NSW response is being targeted to where it’s needed — at this point it’s around Byron Bay, where infected people from Queensland have travelled.

Closing state borders ahead of the Easter break, which leads into school holidays, for Victorians is a shortsighted, politically motivated over-reaction.

State premiers, who are all riding high in the polls, will do anything keep to protect their political patches and keep states COVID free — despite the financial and social cost of managing a few cases.

Calling snap border closures that are not warranted keeps voters compliant, subservient and on a war footing. It’s also a big blow for AFL fans about to enjoy Round 3 and has needlessly upset the fixture and games.

NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian is taking what she calls a “cautious” position.

There is no justification for Australia — a united nation with a federal government — to be divided like this yet again. There are currently just a handful of cases around the country, all of which are easily managed with targeted restrictions, not blanket closures.

Victoria has one case in hotel quarantine and no locally acquired cases for 31 days. One person who’s recently been in Queensland is still awaiting test results.

I was one of these 16,000, returning from a two-day trip to Brisbane on Saturday. Although nowhere near any of the “red zones”, I had to get tested and isolate until the result came through.

Even this was time-consuming and poorly handled, with people at Box Hill waiting more than four hours. On Sunday, with dozens and dozens still needed to be tested, the testing site closed at 5pm. I received my test result within 24 hours, getting a text at 6am from the pathology lab. They’re working overtime, so why aren’t the testers?

Private pathology clinics offering a much more efficient drive-through service are still not promoted as prominently on government websites, leaving most people queuing up for hours on their feet at the major public sites.

Not only are the waiting times for queues not accurate, but I was surprised to see people using pens and paper forms.

The situation has also been badly handled in Queensland, where the 26-year-old at the centre of the latest outbreak was accused of holding a party for 25 people when he was home with his housemates.

We are more than a year into the coronavirus crisis and I would like to think we’d learnt to manage outbreaks better than this.