MISERY AND MAYHEM

I AM one of many who are deeply concerned since Friday’s announcement that Tasmanian borders will be reopened on December 15. Instead of facilitating business operations and tourism I feel it will achieve the opposite. We may be lucky to see in the Sydney Hobart Yacht Race, the new Taste of Tasmania and New Year’s Eve, but that will be it.

Once Covid carriers are able to travel freely throughout the state they will infect frontline workers in tourism, retail, essential services, local businesses and hospitals - all that we have been trying to preserve for the past 18 months.

If the health department is struggling now, wait and see what happens when Covid is unleashed throughout this state. If tourism is already strug gling, how will smaller communities like Queenstown, Smithton, Stanley, Burnie, Devonport, Deloraine, Bridport, Scottsdale, St Helens, Scamander, St Marys, Campbelltown, Oatlands, Coles Bay, Swansea, Orford, Nubeena, Sorell, New Norfolk and all the towns south of Hobart cope and recover from Covid outbreaks?

Where is the consistency?

The Hobart Show was able to go ahead but Queenstown’s Unconformity Festival was cancelled. Arts enterprises, like a new film sponsored by Screen Tasmania, set on the West Coast, would be highly unlikely to go ahead.

So much for the Liberals preservation and creation of jobs, livelihoods and industry and construction of much needed new homes. Not to mention the sacking of hundreds of hospital and medical workers because they refuse to be immunised. It is all so irrational and unbelievable. The only thing that is guaranteed is that absolute misery and mayhem will result from this government’s planned action. The only thing I believe is that this government has succumbed to pressure from our PM and national airline carrier to resume air travel at any cost.

Monica Antel Cambridge