NSW border farmers trapped yet no Covid-19 cases within cooee

Covid-19 hasn’t come within 400km of Monique Cush cotton farm, on the NSW side of the border with Queensland, but restrictions mean she can’t send her children to school.

Monique and Tom Cush with their daughter Andrea on their cotton farm on the Queensland-NSW border. Picture: Melissa Carrigan

Monique Cush is fed up with rules that make no sense.

Covid-19 hasn’t come within 400km of her cotton farm, on the NSW side of the border with Queensland, but restrictions on border communities mean she can’t send her children to school.

She can’t hire new workers for the harvest. She can’t ­travel to her local shops without being pulled over by police to check her mandatory border permit.

“I’d like to understand how isolated farming families living on the border, with no contact with anyone outside the border zone, pose any risk,” she says. “Allow our border zone children to get on with their lives. Let us go to our local shops. Reinstate an exemption that could see our lives have some sort of normality.”

Currently, permitted reasons for crossing the border are limited. NSW border zone residents can only travel into Queensland for an essential purpose after ­obtaining a border pass from the Queensland government. Queensland border residents travelling may also only enter NSW for essential reasons.

“These are probably the tightest border controls we’ve put in place,” Queensland Premier ­Annastacia Palaszczuk said, announcing the latest round of ­restrictions for NSW residents wanting to head north. “That extra police presence will ensure that we will do everything we can to keep Queenslanders safe.”

Ms Cush doesn’t think she’s a threat to anyone. She runs her farm, Avymore, between the NSW town of Boomi and the Queensland town of Goondiwindi, with her husband Tom.

Their four kids, aged between one and seven, go to school, kindergarten and daycare in Goondiwindi, but are being home-schooled while the rest of their peers go to class. “They keep asking me why their friends are at school but they have to stay home,” she says.

In addition, the restrictions will damage her business. “Our farm, for the first time in three years, has had full dams and can plant a full crop since the drought broke,” she says. “With harvest coming up, all farmers need more staff, which are usually backpackers which are non-existent because there’s no travel.

“You’d hope to attract people from your local town, but that’s so difficult if you don’t even know if they’ll be able to cross the border.”

For school bus driver Georgie Driver, the rules are even more ­ludicrous. Since the NSW regional lockdown came into play, Ms Driver, who usually takes children across the border, has been driving with no students on board.

“For me to get paid I still have to drive the bus, but I can’t pick the kids up because you can’t go across the border,” she says. “I’m not even allowed to cross the border, so I just do my own route and still get paid.”