Border blue as Gladys Berejiklian slams ‘inconsistency’

Gladys Berejiklian has sharply criticised her Victorian counterpart for refusing to reopen the border with NSW, after Daniel Andrews allowed more than 1000 elite tennis players to fly into Melbourne.

A Hume Freeway check point on the Victorian side of the border near Wodonga. Picture: Simon Dallinger

Gladys Berejiklian has sharply criticised her Victorian counterpart for refusing to reopen the border with NSW, after Daniel Andrews allowed more than 1000 elite tennis players and their support staff to fly into Melbourne from around the world for next month’s Australian Open.

In a critique of the Victorian Premier’s leadership, Ms Berejiklian said the decision to push ahead with the international grand slam event despite the risk of a COVID-19 outbreak highlighted “inconsistencies” in Mr Andrews’s approach to border restrictions. “I can’t understand why the border was closed in the first place and why the attitude of certain governments is what it is,” she said on Sunday.

“There isn’t anywhere in Australia that’s currently being designated a hotspot. So why shouldn’t people be able to return home?”

Tensions between Ms Berejiklian and Mr Andrews appeared to finally boil over on Sunday, with the NSW Premier saying Victoria should have reopened to NSW “quite a while back”.

The growing stoush comes as federal Health Minister Greg Hunt urged the country’s warring premiers to reconsider the need for hard border closures, announcing there were “no remaining coronavirus hotspots” in Australia.

“It’s important to understand that our real challenge, our real threat, is international — not domestic,” he said.

As NSW reported six locally acquired cases of COVID-19 on Sunday, close to 1200 foreign tennis players and their support staff, including four people who tested positive to COVID-19, were settling down in Melbourne hotels ahead of the Australian Open.

Mr Andrews is expected to lift some travel restrictions on people in NSW this week, with any ongoing ban likely to be confined to a cluster of local government areas in western Sydney.

However, Victoria Energy and Environment Minister Lily D’Ambrosio indicated on Sunday that the state’s benchmark for reopening to NSW was still “zero locally transmitted cases”.

“Every day that goes by where there are zero locally transmitted cases in other states, it is a day we get closer ... to ease restrictions (on) people coming back into Victoria,” she said.

Ms Berejiklian compared her decision to shut the border to Victoria when it was approaching 200 cases a day with Victoria’s decision to close the border when NSW had only a handful. “I think everybody would agree that closing a border of such significance is a really big deal,” she said. “I stress that we waited until Victoria had in excess of, I think, 180 cases a day after we announced the border closure.”

Asked whether Mr Andrews had contacted her about the easing of border closures between the states, Ms Berejiklian said: “He’s not been in touch with me at all, but I also say that should have occurred quite a while back because we don’t have a hotspot in NSW.”

Health officials on Sunday revealed a staff member who worked three shifts in the cardiology and radiology wards at Concord Hospital in Sydney’s inner west had tested positive to COVID-19.

Chief Health Officer Kerry Chant said the person worked while potentially infectious on January 12, 13 and 14. Seven of the person’s close workplace contacts have tested negative.

The six new locally acquired cases are “close contacts” of a western Sydney case reported on Saturday, who is believed to be linked to the Berala BWS cluster in the city’s west.

The new cases are all from the same family, with the man’s spouse, the couple’s four children and a sixth “very close contact” all testing positive to COVID-19.

“Just to put things into perspective, the Crossroads outbreak took up to four months to quash,” Ms Berejiklian said. “We’re only a month after the initial outbreak we had just before Christmas. We’re doing really well.”

Dr Chant urged residents to get tested because of concerns the virus could still be circulating in the community undetected, as the state recorded 12,764 tests to 8pm Saturday.