CLOUD OF BORDER CLOSURES STILL HOLDING US BACK
Removing the prospect of states shutting the doors will return confidence to our battered national psyche and enhance our COVID recovery
AFTER a year of all being in this together, it’s time we are all actually together.
And that means a ban on border closures.
I dread to tempt fate, but it does seem we have COVID under control. Yes, there have been small-scale scares since Melbourne mastered its mass outbreak, but now we’re in a position where cases are consistently negligible, vaccines are being (slowly) rolled out and the federal government is literally paying us to travel interstate.
Concerts like Byron Bay Bluesfest and Blues on Broadbeach are back on … and yet other major events are still being cancelled, including all 2021 School Sport Australia National Championships.
The reason? The looming danger of border closures.
As School Sport Australia announced: “The complex implications caused by the possibility of sudden border closures while teams were out of their home state, weighed heavily on the Board’s decision.
“Several Education Departments are not yet prepared to endorse interstate travel for students and staff.
“This is making it challenging to confirm existing Championship hostings and impossible to secure new dates to reschedule the 27 events on the School Sport Australia calendar for later in the year.”
Those poor kids. You don’t get many chances to compete at that level, and now they’ve lost two years.
And this is just one example of the one obstacle that could undo all of the progress we have made.
Mayor Tom Tate himself implored Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk not to be “trigger happy” when it comes to closing Queensland, because too much is at stake now.
While Cr Tate said he was “jubilant” at the federal announcement to subsidise half-price airfares to struggling tourist towns, he said the Queensland border had to remain open if the initiative was to work.
“Keep it open … give us certainty and confidence,” he said.
“The will of Australians is that there should be no borders in between us. I know she’s (Ms Palaszczuk) being advised by the Chief Medical Officer but, what do they say? Don’t be trigger-happy.”
He’s dead right. If we want people to book holidays in our city and support our tourism industry, we have to ensure our door is unlocked.
The constant open/closed status of our states seems to me just another argument to do away with states altogether. Throughout the pandemic, public health could have been just as well managed by identifying and isolating hot spots, rather than a quarter of the country at a time.
Of course I’m absolutely grateful to live in one of the safest cities in the world, but some of our state’s responses have erred on the side of overkill. While other states such as WA seem to see isolation as an opportunity for political point-scoring.
We’re at a point now where we know how this pandemic works and we have some fiercely effective weapons to fight against it.
The last thing I would want to do is to risk public safety, but we’re at a point now where we really need to weigh the consequences of our actions.
Are we more likely to be negatively affected by the COVID infection itself, or by the continued estrangement from friends and family, by our inability to plan for the future, and the consequent financial damage that inertia brings?
This is not a new argument, many said from the start that lockdowns and border closures cause more harm than good. That seemed a dangerous gamble to take in early 2020, but now the pandemic playing field has changed.
Life is returning to normal … except the expectation that this country can remain open and united.
We must face the fact that the threat to public health is no longer our most imminent danger.
If we want to not just survive but thrive, we need to guarantee open borders now.