IT has been another week dominated by the impacts of unjust and unnecessary border restrictions.
This time the South Australian Government has shown a new level of brutality as it refused to back down on its ban on border communities from midnight Thursday, which have caused immeasurable harm on both sides of the border.
The SA Police Commissioner, SA Chief Health Officer and the SA Government are all singing from the same hymn book – they can’t control what people in border communities on the Victorian side of the border do, so they pose an unreasonable risk to South Australia.
This isn’t based on any fact, of course.
The facts are case numbers in Victoria have been falling consistently for more than a week – including in regional Victoria and border local government areas.
People in border communities have been getting COVID-19 tests weekly since late June and there has not been a single positive result in that time.
People in border communities are well aware of the risks and want to protect themselves and their towns, so they are doing everything in their power to ensure they do the right things and keep the virus out.
They aren’t frivolously going to Melbourne hot spots for weekend getaways.
They just want to be able to cross into South Australia so their kids can still go to school, so they can get their farm machinery serviced, to go to work or any other range of day-to-day activities they have been safely been doing throughout the pandemic without posing a risk to themselves or their respective states.
The icing on the cake came when the SA Government announced it was allowing 300 international students to fly into the state, quarantine for 14 days in hotels, and then head back to university.
International students were crucial to the state’s economy, we were told, and they posed less risk than students from Victoria – including those from the Mildura electorate.
But surely a student from Mildura — which isn’t and has never been a coronavirus hot spot — is no risk and could safely undergo the same quarantine measures in order to return to SA and their university courses.
South Australia has always held special place for us in the north-west of Victoria. Many of us have lived, studied or worked there; have family or friends still there.
But that relationship is being sorely tested by a government that is prepared to sacrifice its own countrymen and women in favour of the almighty dollar.
They say “we’re all in this together”, but clearly that has never been further from the truth.
Ali Cupper is the Member for Mildura
