Coronavirus: Sunshine State revels as southerners get the blues

Queenslanders have an unmistakeable air of positivity, a sense that perhaps the dark clouds of COVID-19 have cleared.

Pedestrians throng Brisbane’s CBD on Monday as retailers fling open their doors and customers happily open their wallets. Picture: Glenn Hunt

Queenslanders have always boasted about the superior weather in the Sunshine State. Right now, however, it’s not just the warm winter temperatures and endless blue skies that are the envy of the rest of the nation — there is an unmistakeable air of positivity in the north, a sense that perhaps the dark clouds of COVID-19 have cleared.

Retailers have flung open their doors, and customers are opening their wallets. The state’s sleeping giant, the tourism industry, is taking the first tentative steps back to business, from the Gold Coast all the way up to Cairns.

Weekday traffic in Brisbane is back, city ­office towers are once again showing signs of life.

South of the Tweed, though, things couldn’t be more different: Victoria is a shadow of its once mighty self.

While Brisbane’s Queen Street Mall was humming with humanity on Monday, Melbourne’s most famous city stretch, the Bourke Street Mall, was almost deserted. The shopping grid usually attracts 24,000 visitors each day, but the mall’s foot traffic sensor, which captures pedestrian numbers at the southern end of the retail strip, counted on average just 3598 pedestrians a day since the introduction of the second lockdown last week.

In Sydney, just one thing was missing from the CBD on Monday: people. Pedestrians were hard to find at Barangaroo, food courts at Martin Place were mostly vacant, and broad boulevards stretching from the Pitt Street Mall to Circular Quay were un­impeded by foot traffic.

As COVID-19 cases crept to 20 in the Harbour City on Monday — a three-month high —­ ­anxious white-collar workers pushed back plans to return to the office.

Ernst & Young, one of the largest professional services firms in Australia, said a return to the ­office for the company’s 2700 ­Sydney-based employees was “further away”, given the sudden uptick in the number of locally acquired infections across the city.

Bourke Street in Melbourne looks forlorn on Monday. Picture: Aaron Francis

“Our next stage was to more actively encourage people to come in,” said Andrew Price, managing partner of EY NSW. “But given the way things have gone in Victoria, and to a lesser extent NSW, we’ve paused that process.”

The nation’s two biggest states are also being treated cautiously by South Australia and Western Australia, which have no desire to compromise their successful handling of the COVID-19 crisis by welcoming back visitors from Victoria and NSW before it is safe.

South Australia Premier Steven Marshall said the hard border with Victoria would remain in place for an extended time. “This is not something that is being contemplated to be lifted,” he said.

Addressing the situation unfolding in NSW, Mr Marshall said discovering the link associated with the new infections needed to occur for borders to reopen.

West Australian Health Minister Roger Cook said the state government understood that tightened exemptions for people from NSW and Victoria were inconvenient for some West Australians who wanted to return home but could not.

“We understand these are tough decisions and we don’t take them lightly,” he said.

But back to Queensland. Amid a fresh wave of optimism and a vigour to get back to work, there’s a mood to take advantage of once-in-a-lifetime opportunities for a state that has never been lacking in confidence.

The AFL? Yep, thanks Melbourne, we’ll have that. And while you’re at it, can you throw in the grand final? We know it’s Australia’s premier sporting event, but we’re ready for it.

The NRL? Well, that competition is our birthright anyway. But we’re happy to host most of it for you, NSW.

We’ll take the netball as well, while we’re at it.

And why stop at sport? On Monday, Annastacia Palaszczuk could barely contain herself as she announced a proposal to extend Queensland’s southern border beyond the Tweed. NSW would never let it happen, but the fact the Queensland Premier felt cocky enough to float the idea was a sign of the state of the nation.

Certainly, the returning health of the Queensland tourism market and the state’s broader economy, along with a lowly two active COVID-19 cases, is good reason for the Premier to smile. So too, of course, the timing of the bounce-back, with her government heading to the polls on October 31.

 

Riding a fresh wave of confidence, Ms Palaszczuk even indulged in a brief moment of “I told you so” on Monday when she accused journalists at a press conference of having pressured her to reopen the border to all states sooner than her pledge of July 10, which she stuck to despite regular interstate sniping.

Queensland Tourism Industry Council chief executive Daniel Gschwind said high booking rates, passenger numbers on domestic flights and forward bookings had reinvigorated the travel sector in the past fortnight.

“Almost immediately we saw strong interest in southerners travelling up here,” he said.

The challenge was to maintain the momentum if NSW followed Victoria into a second lockdown, he added.

On the beaches of the Sunshine and Gold coasts on Monday, locals and tourists vied for a spot in the winter sun.

Italian marketing student Sara Rostello, in Queensland for two years on a student visa and working as a waitress, said she had been lucky to choose the Gold Coast as her destination of choice.

Additional reporting: Kieran Gair, Remy Varga, Imogen Reid