Hansard debates

Mrs McARTHUR (Western Victoria) (16:43): I rise to speak in support of Ms Crozier’s motion condemning the Andrews government’s reckless decision to shut our northern border on New Year’s Eve, causing significant distress and panic to interstate travellers and Victorians. State government control over interstate borders has been a complete disgrace throughout the pandemic. Our founding fathers would be horrified to see what these megalomaniac premiers have done with borders. Australia is an island country with no international land borders. Australians have a right to live, learn, work and travel in any state they wish, and we cannot afford to continue to deny them that right every time COVID cases emerge. Australia’s federation is beginning to look more like an island of petty warlords than anything resembling a unified country, with rogue premiers going off the reservation to pump up their own egos or increase poll numbers before pending elections.

State borders are for interstate sporting competitions, not for controlling the movement of people, let alone preventing people from returning to their homes and being united with their families. In Queensland we had Premier Palaszczuk declaring that ‘in Queensland, we have Queensland hospitals for our people’, as she barred a 14-year-old boy suffering from issues related to his double-lung transplant from entering her state. In Western Australia we had Premier McGowan keeping the border closed for so long it was easy to forget they were even part of the federation. And down in Victoria we had Premier Andrews implementing kneejerk border closures over a handful of cases to the west or north, severely impacting rural border communities and leaving Victorians who were interstate virtually stranded. At one point in November the Premier closed the border with South Australia, despite South Australians being subjected to less severe restrictions than we had.

Rural communities such as those in my electorate have been the biggest victims of these parochial premiers’ power trips. These communities do not operate via a line on a map. They live, work and access education and health care across state lines. The carelessness of these border closures jeopardises their ability to fulfil these needs, aggravated by ridiculous decisions such as that in the November border closure with South Australia that denied educational purposes from being a permitted reason for a permit.

The next significant victims of these border closures are the federal taxpayers, who are expected to pick up the bill for these megalomaniac premiers’ economic carnage. Premier Palaszczuk even had the audacity to recently call on the federal government to extend JobKeeper to support Queensland’s tourism industry, which has been crippled by her border closures. Hardworking taxpayers in western Victoria and elsewhere should not be expected to pick up the bill for the incompetence of public officials more than 1500 kilometres away. State premiers should be forced to bear the consequences of their recklessness and impulsiveness, rather than handball the problem off to Canberra. If the Queensland government wants to have an ongoing wage subsidy, the Queensland government should pay for it and Queensland voters can hold them accountable.

The tourism industry is also a significant victim, having been turned into a sacrificial lamb for political pointscoring, as the CEO of Destination Gold Coast said in May last year. Tourism businesses along the Great Ocean Road and elsewhere depend on Australians travelling from interstate and visiting their towns, but of course these border edicts, such as the Victorian Premier’s on New Year’s Eve, are based on politics, not concern for people’s livelihoods. Daniel Andrews has spent the last nine months running a scare campaign about this virus, telling Victorians they would kill their mother if they visited her on Mother’s Day, or if we did not submit to their authoritarian rule from on high, we would all die.

Meanwhile, massive lengths have been gone to to ensure that tennis players and celebrities can come to Victoria, while we keep Victorians out of their own state and locked out of their own homes. But thank goodness for Premier Berejiklian, who quite rightly says:

When you unnecessarily close state borders you lose jobs, you create hardship, you impact people’s mental health and wellbeing.

Under her leadership, New South Wales has kept operating so that businesses survive, jobs are saved, while Victoria was shut down. According to the Business Council of Australia, the shutdown of domestic travel has put a $17 billion hole in the national economy over the last seven months between March and October. The cost of policing these border closures is also significant, with 31 checkpoints across a 1200-kilometre border with New South Wales. So 700 police were deployed, reportedly causing the closure of regional police stations.

The common theme throughout the pandemic of these extraordinary measures taken by state governments has been a large cost, with no expert health advice provided to the public to justify them. This is why, as Ms Crozier’s motion states, in the interests of transparency the Andrews government must release all expert health advice and any other advice in relation to the decision made on 31 December 2020 to close the border with New South Wales. However, the only advice that exists in relation to these border closures is more likely from political advisers than health experts—to say nothing of the epidemic of amnesia that we have been subjected to in Victoria. I do not know what health expert is going to fix that.

Mr Finn: I don’t recall.

Mrs McARTHUR: ‘I don’t know. I can’t remember. I don’t read emails’—definitely an amnesia epidemic happening here. It is extraordinary.

Members interjecting.

Mrs McARTHUR: ‘I wasn’t there. I don’t know’. Thank you, Mr Finn. These borders should not be used by megalomaniac premiers masquerading as power-hungry emperors. We are all Australians and we are all in this together, and I urge the crossbench—obviously the government are not going to do it, but the crossbench—to support Ms Crozier’s motion, because we desperately need the information that they say exists but will never provide.