South Australia returns to border bubble from Friday

SOUTH Australia will re-establish a 40km border bubble with Victoria as of Friday, allowing in Victorian border residents.

South Australian Premier Steven Marshall announced on Tuesday restrictions would return to what they were before harsher measures last week shut out Victorians from South Australia unless they were deemed essential travellers or met certain exemptions.

Now they will be able to cross the border once more for shopping, medical services, employment and education.

“The buffer zone that previously existed with Victoria will be reinstated as of Thursday night midnight,” Mr Marshall said.

“As of Friday, school students will be able to return to school in South Australia, businesses will be able to resume exactly and precisely as they were.”

“There’s one caveat on this — that is that we don’t have further community transition in that western part of Victoria between now and midnight Thursday night.”

Border residents will need to be tested for coronavirus every seven days to be able to cross into South Australia.

Murrayville’s Synon Peers welcomed the change but was annoyed at the backflip just days after the intial border closure turned his business “upside down”.

Mr Peers, the owner-manager of Peers Motors, since last week had been unable to go to his workshop in the South Australian town of Pinnaroo.

Not only that, he and his staff had worked hard to re-open a workshop in Murrayville to service Victorian customers.

“It’s pretty ridiculous, of course it’s frustrating, in my case we’ve turned everything upside down to get another workshop up and running (in Murrayville) and get things tidied up and get a bit of stock, all that sort of stuff,” Mr Peers said.

“We already had a workshop in Murrayville but we just got it going again — we came in and tidied up, it hadn’t been used for a long time so there was quite a bit of work to do.

“That’s all right, it’s not a bad thing, it’s ready to go for next time.”

Murrayville residents had already been scrambling to deal with the hard border closure, including setting up their own fuel tanks in the town.

South Australia is also considering dropping COVID-19 border restrictions for people coming from NSW and the ACT within the next two weeks.

Mr Marshall said officials were looking carefully at the border issue and the need for people to quarantine for two weeks if they enter SA from those jurisdictions.