An impolite open letter from the people of South Australia to Gladys Berejiklian

South Australians are not of a mind to be lectured from NSW by a government that can’t even find a candidate for the Eden-Monaro by-election without tearing itself apart Picture: Richard Dobson

When it comes to the proper management of pandemics, NSW telling SA and WA what to do is like the class dunce lecturing the head prefects.

The state that brought you the Ruby Princess, the Newmarch House aged care home and zero tolerance policing for the heinous crime of sunbathing wins special marks for audacity with its sermonising about the western states’ reluctance to re-open their borders.

The people of SA know that the lockdown can’t go on forever — and they don’t want it to, with many businesses and workers who have lost hours or lost their jobs entirely now urging the state government to lift restrictions.

But in SA — which has had just one new and quickly-resolved infection in the last four weeks — there is huge trepidation about the swift reopening of our eastern borders on account of continuing new cases in Victoria and the highly questionable management of the pandemic in NSW.

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SA set out to contain the coronavirus but appears instead to have eliminated it. Chief medical officer Nicola Spurrier has cautiously stated that it now appears the only way new cases could emerge in SA is through visitors from overseas or interstate — from states like Victoria, which recorded 12 new cases on Friday.

The other factor driving the cautious sentiment in SA is that the state’s great efforts in flattening the curve would have looked much greater if not for the fact that more than one-third of SA’s 439 Covid-19 cases came from passengers aboard the Ruby Princess and other cruise ships who disembarked in Sydney and headed west. The entire Barossa Valley cluster that closed two dozen schools and the entire wine region for more than a month was started by a bunch of Swiss and American tourists swanning their way through our cellar doors, with two infected tourists even breaking the law by skipping quarantine.

Against this backdrop, SA Premier Steven Marshall is not being a stick-in-the-mud on the border question. He is encapsulating state sentiment.

Unlike his Labor counterpart Mark McGowan in WA, who is turning on a very entertaining clinic in trash-talking as he sledges Gladys Berejiklian over the Ruby Princess shambles, as a fellow Liberal Mr Marshall has avoided taking potshots at his NSW equivalent. But privately, Marshall like every other South Australian was furious about the role played by that infernal cruise ship in driving up SA’s infection rate.

As things stand, SA would happily open its borders with WA and the Northern Territory this minute. Indeed it was put half-jokingly to the Premier this week that a new state called Greater Western Australia could be formed with a hard border running down the eastern boundary to keep the riffraff out.

Many a true word is spoken in jest. While SA will eventually come around on the eastern border question, for now we are not of a mind to be lectured from NSW by a government that can’t even find a candidate for the Eden-Monaro by-election without tearing itself apart.