Coronavirus: Scott Morrison says state border closures should be removed by Christmas
Scott Morrison sets Christmas as the new deadline for states to remove border closures as he pushes for a national definition of a COVID-19 hotspot.
Scott Morrison has set Christmas as the new deadline for states to remove their border restrictions and open up, saying premiers will have to justify stopping Australians from travelling across the country if they don’t sign on to a national approach.
After speaking with Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews and NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian on Monday night, who committed to reopening their borders as soon as it was safe, the Prime Minister said state governments could not resign Australia “to being a dislocated nation under COVID-19”.
Acting Chief Medical Officer Paul Kelly is helping Mr Morrison develop a definition of a coronavirus hotspot to be put to national cabinet on Friday, which could be used by state governments to determine who they can let in.
The Morrison government hopes federal and state chief health officers will endorse the definition, forcing any premier who disagrees to explain themselves.
“By Christmas, we must work together to ensure we have the protections in place to protect the health and safety of Australians and to open up our economies and ensure the ambitions of our federation are returned to again,” Mr Morrison said in question time.
“What we have to work to do is to let Australians know that, by Christmas, they will be able to come together. By Christmas, they will be able to come together as families and look to a 2021 that doesn’t look like the difficulties that they’ve gone through in 2020.”
The Palaszczuk government’s classification of NSW as a COVID hotspot will see Gold Coast builder Corey Hobbins leave his family at the weekend and set up his caravan in the NSW town of Murwillumbah so he can supervise several new home builds outside the so-called border bubble.
Mr Hobbins said during the first wave of COVID-19, he was able to go straight to job sites in NSW and return home without having to quarantine for two weeks, but he has so far had no response to a 10-day-old application for an exemption to work on construction sites in NSW.
“I’m basically moving down there. I don’t know when I’ll be able to come home. It’s probably going to be until the borders reopen,” he told The Australian.
“We’ve got a contractual obligation to finish these jobs, we’ve got a moral obligations because it’s people’s homes they want to live in.
“We can get materials down there but we don’t have any supervision or oversight or quality assurance, no safety audits. We can’t do any of that because we can’t get down there.”
Married with two young sons and an adult daughter in Melbourne, Mr Hobbins accused Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk of “messing with people’s lives when the risks are just not there”.
“The crazy thing at the moment is it’s actually safer in northern NSW than it is on the Gold Coast,” he said. “There needs to be a little bit more of a consistent approach nationally.
“I get that we’re living in a different world but the cure can’t be worse than the disease. We can’t cripple a nation to say ‘We’ve beaten it straight away’.”
Ms Palaszczuk this week ordered the creation of a new border exemption unit to deal with “distressing” cases of northern NSW patients denied medical care in Queensland but has stood firm on her state’s border closure to NSW.
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