Queensland blasts NSW on international borders

Queensland has accused NSW of ignoring health advice in its move to reopen to international travel from November 1.

Chief health officer Jeannette Young says an arrangement to deliver vaccinations at Bunnings stores is proving successful. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Dan Peled

Queensland’s Deputy Premier Steven Miles has accused NSW of abandoning the national plan out of the Covid crisis and ignoring health advice.

Announcing another day with no new cases in Queensland and more than 19,000 vaccinations delivered, Mr Miles said the state was on track to reach the 70 per cent fully vaccinated target in coming weeks.

As of Sunday, 72.07 per cent of eligible people had received their first dose, and 56 per cent were fully vaccinated.

Mr Miles said it was harder to say when Queensland might hit 80 per cent but he insisted it would stick to the national plan and ease restrictions accordingly.

“We will continue to take the health advice and that’s what NSW has just stopped doing,” Mr Miles said. “They’ve just abandoned the national plan and they’ve just stopped listening to the health advice.”

The comments followed the NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet’s announcement on Friday that the state would open up to fully vaccinated international travellers from November 1 without the need to quarantine.

Although warmly welcomed by the travel industry, his surprise announcement was quickly “clarified” by Scott Morrison, who said such freedoms would apply only to returning Australian travellers, permanent residents and their closest relatives.

Shortly afterwards, Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk released a statement saying Queensland was yet to be briefed on details surrounding the NSW quarantine decision.

Mr Miles said Queensland already had much fewer restrictions than the southern states but would have “ more to say” about things like borders as the vaccination rate rose. “As we always have, we’ll give as much notice as we possibly can,” he said.

“Until now the focus on our borders has been a big one and sometimes you can’t win either way. When you give people notice, they say ‘Why can’t we do it straight away?’,” he said.

Chief health officer Jeannette Young said an arrangement to deliver vaccinations at Bunnings stores at the weekend was proving successful, with 4111 vaccinations delivered. Of those, 2800 were first doses which she described as “excellent”.

Dr Young said every effort would continue to be made to give everyone the opportunity to be vaccinated, but hinted they would not wait forever. “We’ve just got to think very innovatively about where to put these places. Just having mass vaccination clinics is not good enough, we’ve got to put pop-up clinics where people are.

“We’re very grateful to Bunnings for coming forward, and that’s what we’ll continue to do over the next couple of weeks but after that people really will have to have made the decision about getting vaccinated.”

Dr Young said she wanted to see the daily vaccination rate rise to 50,000 to help push Queensland above the 80 per cent threshold. “We’re genuinely in the home stretch. We’re over 70 per cent first dose and I’m very confident we’ll get to that 70 per cent second dose but we’ve really got to push it … well beyond that 80 per cent.”

There were 28 active Covid cases in Queensland, compared with 5121 in NSW and 23,376 in Victoria.