Coronavirus: Cross connections at border chaos

Traffic ground to a standstill at NSW’s main borders with Queensland and Victoria on Monday, creating commuter chaos, with crossing times stretching out to many hours.

Police set up a new border control point at Stuart Street on the Gold Coast, causing major headaches for commuters. Picture: Steve Holland

Traffic ground to a standstill at NSW’s main borders with Queensland and Victoria on Monday, creating commuter chaos, with crossing times stretching out to many hours.

Motorists reported massive congestion crossing into the sunshine state as Queenslanders who had been in COVID hotspots battled to get home before the border closed at 1am on Tuesday.

The Queensland government introduced a hard border, as police enforced travel for valid permit-holders from NSW, with more than 218,000 permits issued since Saturday.

RACQ reported “extraordinary” delays that peaked at almost­ two hours on Monday with cars banked up from Banora Point for 15km to the border crossing.

Cafe worker Emily Stenlake said her normally 40-minute commute from Cabarita Beach in NSW to Currumbin Waters in Queensland blew out after she “didn’t go above zero kilometres for an hour”, applying for a permit and receiving it during the wait.

“I was on my way to work and I got to the border and because it said it was randomly checking I didn’t expect there to be a queue, and low and behold it took me an hour and 15 minutes,” she said.

The Victorian government had issued 17,879 permits as of Monday night and deployed 700 police to patrol the border, as travellers who had been in Sydney and on the NSW central coast raced to reach Victoria by midnight or face hotel quarantine.

Brisbane truck driver Sonja White said the roads had been “chaos” all the way on her route from Brisbane to Melbourne, via Sydney.

“There are a few Victorians heading south still, the freeway would be busy anyway because it’s the main freeway but even more so because people are escaping,” she said.

Ms White said she had managed to secure a permit to enter Victoria, though the process was clunky and “confusing” only to face massive delays at the border on Monday night.

“It’s an absolute shitfight, it is fricking chaos,” she said. “Seriously, we’re working, we’re not on holiday; we’ve got to get into Melbourne and head off again. This is holding up our drive time.”

Albury-Wodonga residents reported similarly gruelling border crossings on Monday with wait times stretching to hours on the Hume Highway and the Lincoln Causeway.

The crossing at the Moama-Echuca border was reported to have hit two hours for travellers entering Victoria during peak hours.

Stand-up paddleboard hire ­operator Emu Outdoors owner Josh Emonson said the huge ­delays due to a line of cars stretching “kilometres out of sight” from Moama meant he would have to rethink his cross-border business. Mr Emonson said he resorted to “paddling across” the Murray to run his tours on Monday to avoid the delays.

“It’s very interesting. You ­always think that you’re Australian and you’ll be able to go wherever you want, and then they draw a line in the middle,” he said.