Coronavirus: Checkpoints set up on state borders for random inspections
Police manned checkpoints on the NT and SA borders as tough new restrictions on cross-state travel took effect.
Police manned checkpoints on the Northern Territory and South Australian borders on Tuesday as tough new restrictions on cross-state travel took effect in a bid to control the spread of the coronavirus.
Police met travellers arriving at Adelaide airport at 4pm as the restrictions took effect, taking names and demanding details on where the arrivals would be staying and self-isolating for 14 days as required by new rules.
They warned they would be prepared to conduct random checks on people they knew were self-isolating.
As the borders closed in South Australia, the Northern Territory and Western Australia, Queensland authorities were scrambling late on Tuesday to devise a permit system to enable thousands of people to cross the border daily for work as the state moved to a lockdown at midnight on Wednesday to stem the spread of coronavirus.
Police will activate RBT-like checkpoints on roads along the Queensland border to enforce the border shutdown, with police and other government officers set to meet arriving passengers at airports to demand they self-isolate for 14 days.
The border between the Gold Coast and northern NSW — one of Australia’s busiest interstate thoroughfares, with tens of thousands of people crossing every day — is proving the most complex challenge for authorities in restricting and identifying “all but essential movements’’.
Following the closure of its borders on Tuesday, Western Australia is moving to severely curtail movement within the state in new measures announced by the McGowan government just hours after it closed its interstate borders.
WA Police Commissioner Chris Dawson said accommodation ran out at the border town of Eucla to house people in need of quarantining. He said those who missed Tuesday’s deadline might be directed to designated quarantine areas in the goldfields town of Norseman or some other location for 14 days of self-isolation.
“We will be allocating certain areas if people present and do require quarantine,” he said.
In the NT, number plate recognition cameras will be placed on unsealed tracks and agents placed at airports and marine terminals to ensure that everyone who arrives can safely isolate themselves for two weeks without needing to go out and buy so much as a coffee.
From 4pm, police camped at isolated outposts on the Stuart, Barkly and Victoria highways — the arterial routes connecting the Territory to SA, Queensland and WA respectively — and were due to begin conducting rudimentary health checks and scrutinising visitors’ four-page “border arrival” forms.
Police Commissioner Jamie Chalker said compliance with the self-isolation rules was a life-and-death matter, and breaching them could incur a fine of up to $62,800.
“We do not want grandparents and great-grandparents being exposed to this,” he said.
Queues stretched for kilometres on the SA-WA border as hundreds of holidaymakers sought to exit before state governments closed them on Tuesday.
WA Premier Mark McGowan gave a blunt message to interstate tourists — “Please don’t come” — weeks after WA’s tourism authority paid millions to attract them.
Mr McGowan has flagged that all non-essential movements within the state are next to be heavily curtailed. Clear guidelines will be released soon to restrict movement of citizens between nine regions in WA, including to and from the most populated region of Perth and the Peel region to the south. Four Kimberley shires requested a “Kimberley zone” be erected to exclude all non-essential visitors to Broome, Derby, Halls Creek and Wyndham or to remote communities.
Vehicle numbers at the SA checkpoint on Tuesday were almost three times higher than normal, with major delays in checking carloads of travellers.
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