No time to relax just yet

PM border call ignored

HOUSE parties and large family get-togethers will be off the cards for at least a month and there will be no relaxation to border restrictions under a national “hot spot” system.

Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk had doubled down on escalating border wars, declaring she won’t budge on Queensland’s restrictions no matter what the federal government says.

Ms Palaszczuk said she had seen no detail and no evidence of how a hotspot system proposed by Scott Morrison would work.

“Queenslanders will continue to have our borders closed to keep Queenslanders safe,” she said. “I’m not going to be moved on this. The Federal Government can throw whoever they want at that.”

The Prime Minister said he did not dispute the Premiers’ powers on border controls, but there needed to be a focus on the “road back” to normal life.

“The road back for our economy to ensure that we can see the jobs continue to come back to our economy, whether it is in New South Wales, Queensland, Western Australia, Tasmania or anywhere else,” he said. “We cannot retreat, we must always go forward when battling this virus.”

It is understood the Australian Health Protection Principal Committee is continuing discussions on a national COVID hotspot definition and one will go ahead with or without the states’ agreement.

Queensland recorded just one more case on Monday – someone already connected to the prison cluster – to bring total active cases to 27.

But Deputy Premier Steven Miles said it would take some time before tougher restrictions limiting 10 visitors to homes across Brisbane, Logan, Toowoomba, Ipswich and the Gold Coast could be relaxed.

“That’s the kind of the thing we would normally review after one to two incubation periods (of two weeks) of no known infectious person in the community, so that’s still a number of weeks away,” he said.

The tough stance came even as the government acknowledged there had been some problems with the granting of medical exemptions to people from NSW to come to Brisbane for emergency or urgent care. It announced that a new unit to help doctors and patients transfer across state lines would be running by the week’s end.

It followed a Tweed Heads boy missing a potentially lifesaving check-up at the Prince Charles Hospital following a recent double lung transplant and a Ballina woman who lost a twin baby after being transferred to Sydney instead of Brisbane.

Mr Miles said most medical exemptions had been granted but acknowledged a “small proportion” of problematic cases and that was “too many”.

“We’ve said we want to do better,” he said.

Meanwhile, Mr Miles wouldn’t be drawn on what rules might be further tightened in the case of “sustained community transmission”.

He said the government would tighten restrictions if there was “sustained community transmission”, but did not nominate what rules would be introduced.

Experts say restrictions will depend on the context of the cases, particularly if unknown community transmission increases.