Shutting the gate to no avail

Aside from offending our sense of national unity and purpose, the practical benefits of closing state borders are illusory. Enforcing the move with RBT-style checks is a waste of limited resources. Nowhere is this clearer than where Coolangatta at the southern end of the Queensland Gold Coast and Tweed Heads in northern NSW overlap. From 12.01am on Thursday, Queensland Police should have better things to do than guard duty, ready to hit interlopers with fines of up to $13,345. Exemptions will be allowed for those travelling to and from work or for medical treatment, for freight and on compassionate grounds. It remains to be seen how a promised permit system for the tens of thousands of motorists who cross the state line each day, often several times a day, will work. On Tuesday, Queensland’s State Disaster Co-ordinator, Steve Gollschewski, said authorities were “trying to find something really simple to be able to identify those cars that can come through so that people can get through really quickly”. Managing the labyrinth of residential and commercial streets that straddle that border will be an interesting challenge.

In regional and remote areas where horizons are wide and police stretched to the limit in the backblocks of the Northern Territory, Queensland, South Australia and Western Australia, border patrols are likely to be perfunctory. In closing borders, state leaders are sending messages to the public to stay home, especially in the school holidays. They also want incoming travellers to undertake 14 days of quarantine. Such issues matter if COVID-19 is to be curtailed. But they could be achieved without the heavy-handed dramatics of border closure. So much for us all being “in this together”, as Scott Morrison says. We are one country, not a half-dozen or more. The move has been well received in Tasmania, where it is seen as viable because the state is an island. But in a single, united nation, preventing people from returning to their home states to visit loved ones, especially during a crisis, is beyond the pale. And in mainland areas where daily lives are lived across state borders, drawing lines on a map to bar entry is senseless. Closed borders may have hastened the closure of national football competitions, but these had no alternative but to shut down anyway.

States need to focus on serious, practical matters. Health officials must do more to ensure supermarkets and small stores insist on customers keeping their hands to themselves. Tapping fresh produce to test its ripeness — which large numbers of shoppers are still doing — needs more than polite signs and boxes of plastic gloves that many are ignoring.

Better late than never, Health Minister Greg Hunt has begun reassuring the public about ventilators. Painful and bitter experience in Italy, where 600 people are dying daily and thousands are gasping for breath, shows how vital the machines will be for older and more vulnerable Australians. Given the economy’s idle capacity, companies should be gearing up to make our own where possible. Mr Hunt is moving to double the number of intensive care unit ventilators. That move and upping supplies of effective masks, test kits and hand sanitiser are messages Australians need. Good leadership is not about dividing the continent into quasi-fiefdoms. Shutting the gate wastes time and resources.