It’s time Qld opened her borders

WHILE some businesses may be shaking off the coronavirus doona, many are still suffocating under its weight and this remains especially so for tourism.

Jennifer Swaine.

WHILE some businesses may be shaking off the coronavirus doona, many are still suffocating under its weight and this remains especially so for tourism.

I understand the reasoning and importance for closing our borders early on as we battled to lock down the virus and prevent this unseen enemy’s gnarly tentacles from taking hold.

And, given that we were fighting a battle very few of us had ever previously experienced, we have done an incredible job in “flattening the curve”. But it is time to get back to business – for all our sakes. And it is time to open the borders.

However, I am a bit confused about the enforcement of the border restrictions.

Earlier this week, I was talking to someone who excitedly told me they were spending the weekend in northern NSW. You do not need a permit to go there … but you do need one to come back.

To say I was surprised would be an understatement. I asked how they did this and whether they needed to quarantine on their return from their weekend escapade and they explained that they obtained their permit online and “no, they didn’t need to quarantine on return”.

Are you serious? How can that be? Or am I missing something? So, Queenslanders can go south for a weekend and return home, with no quarantining involved, but we can’t have visitors from interstate come here and support our tourism sector who desperately need the visitors?

Although we must continue to be vigilant in all that we do, the immediate threat appears to have passed and if people are able to get around the border restrictions and cross into Queensland (providing they meet the permit requirements like being a Queensland resident), what is the point of keeping the border restrictions in place?

September is fast approaching and so, too, is the end date of JobKeeper, which means the sooner these businesses can start to stand on their own two feet again, the better. But it’s not something that will happen overnight. We need our borders to open now so they have time to rebuild much of what has been lost. And every day we delay it is another day closer to insolvency for many of these businesses that rely on interstate tourism for survival.

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