Melbourne man stranded in NSW waiting for border permit after father’s funeral
More than two weeks ago, Felix Mallon crossed the New South Wales border to bury his father.
Before he left his home in Footscray, in Melbourne’s west, he sought assurances three times from the Victorian government that the funeral was justification enough to travel to Maitland, in NSW’s Hunter region, and return.
Mallon was assured by health department staffhe would be fine. He applied for a border permit on 23 July with plans to return on a flight on 28 July, three days after the funeral.
But the permit never materialised. Mallon now finds himself trapped in a protracted and confusing bureaucratic nightmare. The delay has meant he is now trying to return from a region in the grips of a Covid-19 outbreak.
“Something that I’d heard a lot is that you get a lot of adrenaline and shock when someone passes,” he said.
“Then, after the funeral, I had no idea how bad it would be. I know I haven’t gone through the grieving thing yet, because I’m still so angry at everything that’s happening.”
On the day of his first planned flight home, Mallon called the department to ask where his permit was.
“The first time she told me that she forgot to hit send on an email, and I had to cancel my flight that night,” he said.
Bizarrely, while grieving and locked out of Victoria, two uniformed Australian defence force personnel were sent to his Footscray home on 6 August to make sure he was quarantining.
The visit was followed by a call.
“He said, ‘Are you at home quarantining? We’ve just visited your premises,’” Mallon said. “I got a bit annoyed and said, ‘Mate, why are you asking me that, I’m waiting for an exemption from you.’”
Mallon, a social worker who works with high-risk kids in Melbourne, has now cancelled two flights waiting for his permit.
He has been asked twice to get tested for Covid-19. Twice he has returned negative results, which are valid for 48 hours.
Mallon sent the results into the Victorian government but heard nothing back within the 48-hour windows.
After his first missed flight, the Victorian government gave him a further assurance that he’d have the permit so long as he went and had negative test results. He again booked a flight home. The permit was not issued.
When he called to ask why, the officer he spoke with said she’d been unable to read a pdf that he’d sent through as evidence.
“I’ve been stung twice, however, wasting about 3.5 hours in testing queues all up,” he said. “I don’t know why they can’t send emails, I don’t know why the military went to my house, and I don’t know why I’m being asked to get Covid tests that never get responded to.”
Mallon is not alone in struggling to deal with the Victorian permits system.
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On Monday Guardian Australia reported on the case of Victorians Carla Styles and Stuart Annand, who had been granted a permit to transit through NSW for 24 hours on their journey home from Queensland to Victoria.
Their car broke down and they missed the 24-hour window, leaving them stranded, sleeping in their car in a paddock.
The couple have now had a new application for a border permit rejected because their “proposed travel date has passed”.
“Interestingly, we had never actually specified a particular date for travel, only that we were caught mid-journey,” Styles said.