Steven Marshall’s plea to fall in line on opening borders

Every state and territory should fall in line behind the commonwealth on reopening the borders, according to Steven Marshall.

‘We are now open to the ACT and will hopefully soon be open to NSW, which really leaves the ­remaining restrictions just with Victoria,’ says Premier Steven Marshall. Picture: Mike Burton

Every state and territory should fall in line behind the commonwealth on reopening the borders, according to Steven Marshall, with the South Australian Premier declaring it “implausible” for current arrangements to continue.

Mr Marshall, backing Scott Morrison’s push for a consistent national approach to borders, said South Australia had shown borders could be reopened without any threat of an explosion in coronavirus cases.

South Australia lifted its border restrictions with the ACT on Wednesday, and had already opened borders to Western Australia, Queensland, Tasmania and the Northern Territory. While health officials continue to have concerns over community transmissions in NSW, the state is set to reopen that border as early as next week.

Mr Marshall said even while a hard border with Victoria remained in place, authorities were more relaxed as cases eased and had let 3000 Victorians enter on emergency business and family grounds on Tuesday, up from just 400 a day one month ago.

“From our perspective, it’s pretty simple — we want to open up our borders as soon as it is safe to do so,” he said.

A pop-up COVID-19 testing station at Victoria Park in Adelaide. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Brenton Edwards

“I have publicly stated 1000 times now that we will not keep those borders closed a day longer than we need to.

“It is implausible for Australia to be locked indefinitely. We need to have a road map out of the current situation.”

Mr Marshall said that while he was not lecturing other state and territory leaders, there was a compelling national-interest argument for a united approach.

He also questioned why there appeared to be such a divergence in views among state chief medical officers as to whether borders could open or not.

“What we have tried to do in SA is take the politics out of this, take the ideology out of this, and work on the expert input from our public health administration,” he said.

“It is surprising how much variation there is between the chief health officers.

“What we would really welcome is all of the chief health officers coming together and coming up with common recommendations to the national cabinet going forward.”

The last reported new COVID-19 case in South Australia was on September 11, when a woman in her 20s, who arrived from overseas and went straight into quarantine, tested positive.

There are no active cases in the state.

Mr Marshall said he was heartened that, with the exception of West Australian Premier Mark McGowan, there was a preparedness among the states to consider the hotspot management system the Prime Minister had put on the national cabinet agenda.

He said there were still ­discussions around the threshold definition of hotspots and that good data flow was needed ­between the states’ health ­administrations to ensure that ­infection trends could be closely monitored.

But he said the continuing ­improvement meant the ­nation needed to come together as soon as possible to take a non-political approach to the border question.

Mr Marshall even flagged a soft opening by South Australia of its Victorian border if numbers in that state continued to track downwards as well as they have been in recent days.

“We are now open to the ACT and will hopefully soon be open to NSW, which really leaves the ­remaining restrictions just with Victoria,” he said.

“As the risk in Victoria reduces, we will adjust our risk-management framework accordingly and if things continue to go well in Victoria the next stage will be 14 days of self-isolation, as it has been for NSW residents.”