YOUR PICKLE, QLD PREMIER
A SOLUTION must be found to fix the mess that has motorists mired in a checkpoint nightmare at the border, which is rapidly starting to resemble the Berlin Wall.
Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk might be “very happy with the checks happening at the border’’ – as she declared on TV yesterday – but no one else experiencing it is, and we suspect she has not put herself through the ordeal of sitting for hours in a long queue to find out what the fuss is all about.
If it continues until December, as is feared, it will have caused huge stress and damage to Tweed and Gold Coast families and business on the borderline.
The border is “open’’ in name only. The Premier has to ignore pressure from other areas to shut everything down. The Tweed, Gold Coast and rest of Queensland need a relaxation rather than tougher restrictions, for the sake of lives and the economy.
Australia flattened the so-called curve with COVID-19. The feared “second wave’’ in the south is a concern, but Victoria and NSW should win that battle by ring-fencing affected areas. Everyone from the Prime Minister and Commonwealth chief medical officer down has said the virus cannot be eradicated until a vaccine is available, so we have to learn to live with it. That is happening – yet frustrated police are left enforcing unrealistic and unreasonable border checks. At the least, Ms Palaszczuk and her NSW counterpart have to sort a better local pass quickly so residents can be waved through checkpoints — it is already being worked on with new giant expiry date passes for windscreens.
Ways must be found to direct drivers into appropriate lanes well before border crossings, so locals can pass through immediately without the long wait. Pushing all traffic into choke points is madness. That is where the idea of shifting checkpoint blockades south out of the centre of Tweed-Coolangatta is key.
Those who want Queensland back in isolation are blind to the dreadful impact that would have. If Canberra decides the nation cannot continue funding JobKeeper as is, which is likely, and the border were closed, conditions in our city would become very bleak very quickly. Tourism would die and tens of thousands more jobs would be lost. The Premier’s bright forays into breakfast television mask a dire situation here. She says there is “no other way’’ to handle the border checks. Find a way, Premier. That is what you and your army of public servants are paid to do.