Minimal progress on borders

Despite some positive moves at Friday’s national cabinet meeting, provincialism continues to dominate the thinking of some state leaders. Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk has relented on allowing NSW border communities to access healthcare. And premiers will develop a plan for cross-border agricultural trade in a fortnight — though why it should take so long is unclear. Beyond those concessions, the serious concerns raised this week by business leaders have not been addressed, to the detriment of industry, jobs and recovery. Qantas chief Alan Joyce’s pithy criticism stands: “When you have states with zero cases closing their borders to states with zero cases, there doesn’t seem to be any medical reason or health reason or any logical reason for those to remain closed.”

On the positive side, national cabinet has demanded that the Australian Health Protection Principal Committee create a “clear medical and scientific definition” of what constitutes a COVID hotspot. Such a definition will provide transparency on whether border closures are based on health ­advice. As Scott Morrison said, when restrictions are being placed on people’s movement based on the location of “hotspots”, it is important to have a clear medical and scientific definition of what a hotspot is. The Prime Minister is correct — such decisions cannot be made on an arbitrary basis. In pushing back against arbitrary border closures by the states, Mr Morrison praised NSW for tackling COVID-19 through effective tracking, tracing and outbreak containment while remaining as open as possible. Closed borders, as he noted, do not necessarily eliminate the virus. New Zealand is a prime example.

Reserve Bank governor Philip Lowe again underlined the serious economic predicament the nation is facing when he urged state and territory leaders to lift their public spending across the next two years by $40bn — about 2 per cent of gross domestic product — to fund job-creating stimulus measures and carry a fairer share of the fiscal burden of responding to coronavirus. Unemployment, Dr Lowe and Treasury Secretary Steven Kennedy told the national cabinet meeting, was forecast to stay above 7 per cent for the next two years. That is a good reason for state leaders to pay greater attention to calls by business, tourism and hospitality groups for state borders to reopen as much as possible. Current closures are exacerbating pressure on jobs, with one in four businesses suffering adverse effects from interstate travel restrictions. Young workers and new graduates are among the hardest hit.

Mr Morrison maintained his show of unity with the states on Friday, branding Clive Palmer’s legal challenge to the West Australian border closure “unhelpful”. Until recently, his government supported it. It was South Australian Premier Steven Marshall who punctured the facade of togetherness and voiced what many are thinking when he called out the selfishness of two of his counterparts — West Australian Labor Premier Mark McGowan and Tasmania’s Peter Gutwein, a fellow Liberal, who has announced the island state’s borders will remain closed until at least December 1. South Australians were suffering from being kept apart from their loved ones interstate as other premiers acted for “purely political reasons”, Mr Marshall complained. Western Australia, South Australia and Tasmania all recorded zero COVID cases on Friday, as did Queensland and the ACT. NSW had one new case and Victoria 179 new cases, its lowest number for five weeks. That was encouraging amid the hard slog of the stage-four lockdown. In taxpayers’ long-term interests, authorities cannot keep kicking the can on borders down the road indefinitely. As Mr Morrison said, suppression, not eradication, is his government’s strategy and that of the national cabinet.