Coronavirus: Christmas islanders fear visiting worker contamination

A dispute is escalating on Christmas Island over mainland workers potentially contaminating the outpost with COVID-19.

Christmas Island. Picture: AAP

A dispute is escalating on the tiny Indian Ocean outpost of Christmas Island over fears a near-constant influx of mainland workers will bring the first case of coronavirus to the Australian territory.

The island’s biggest supermarket has closed its doors, citing concerns it cannot protect its staff, and the shire has demanded to know how many visiting workers are on the island and for what reasons.

The special powers given to police across Australia as a result of the coronavirus crisis have become a talking point for some on Christmas Island, where shire president Gordon Thomson claims the head of the Australian Federal Police came to his house and demanded the WhatsApp contacts out of his phone.

AFP officer Kylie Lawson is the newly appointed Territory Controller for the island for the duration of the pandemic and updates residents with daily bulletins about precautions being taken. The island had no confirmed cases of COVID-19 but there was alarm on April 3 when an American tourist who had been on the island for a month was hospitalised “as a precautionary measure”.

Mr Thomson issued a Whats­App message to residents about this, in part urging them to follow the Prime Minister’s instructions to stay home that weekend. He said he declined to go to the police station to see Ms Lawson about what he had written so she came to his house with a health official to demand a retraction and his WhatsApp contacts. He did not invite them inside and they spoke through a flyscreen door.

“She wanted them emailed to her,” he said.

Mr Thomson has since sent yet more messages to residents on WhatsApp, including a shire proposal to tighten the approvals process for visiting workers.

Despite Mr Thomson and Ms Lawson’s apparent clash over his use of WhatsApp, he proposes that she alone should decide who comes to the island for work.

Currently those decisions are made by Ms Lawson and the island administrator Natasha Griggs, a former Liberal MP.

“We want to shut the gate on the virus to protect Christmas Islanders,” Mr Thomson said.

“We will comply with reasonable directions — we have given the Territory Controller our shire bus to transport visiting workers because she asked us to — but we would like some transparency about how many people are here and how many of them are exempt from 14 days of self-isolation.”

An AFP spokesman said it was critical for essential services such as health, power, fuel, water, waste­water, policing and national security that workers from mainland Australia continue to be able to go to Christmas Island. Some essential workers were quarantined for 14 days on arrival, according to the AFP.

Ms Griggs told The Weekend Australian that very strict protection measures were in place on Christmas Island.