A FEW days after returning to his family in Murray Bridge after a weeks-long battle to get into South Australia, musician Chooka Parker is happy to be home at last.
“It’s amazing to be back,” he said. “I didn’t think that it was even going to be a possibility.”
Chooka received an exemption to enter SA just hours after his story was published in last Saturday’s Sunraysia Daily.
But, although his ordeal is over, the former reality TV star is now looking to use his voice to advocate for others he’d met in the same sticky situation.
“It’s great that I’m across now, but what about everybody else?” he said.
“I don’t think that just footy players and celebs should be getting a pass – everybody needs to have a chance to get across.
“If I didn’t go to the media nothing might have happened, because for other people, they’re still in this situation.
“I don’t really think it is good enough, to be honest. There needs to be a better system in place to help people get back to their families and their lives.”
According to SA Health, more than 7000 people are waiting for exemptions to travel into SA, with about 200 applications being processed each day.
Many of those people are biding their time in border towns such as Wentworth – as close to the SA border as they can get – waiting for permission to hit the road and go home.
In the few days Chooka spent in Wentworth waiting for his exemption to come through, he said “it seemed like everyone I was running into was in the exact same situation”.
Among those people were Kangaroo Island couple Marilyn and Russell Hicks, who spent the past five-and-a-half weeks isolating in their motorhome in Wentworth waiting to get back across the border.
They had planned to spend three months travelling in the bush, but got more than they bargained for when SA slammed its border shut – with them on the wrong side.
On Thursday, the couple were finally cleared to return home, a month and a half after submitting their exemption application to SA Health.
An emotional Marilyn told Sunraysia Daily she was “ecstatic” to be able to go home.
“I just can’t believe it,” she said.
“I’ve been shaking … it’s wonderful.”
But like Chooka, the couple said the long time in limbo was “very stressful” and called on the SA Government to relent on its hard-line border rules.
“My wife and I have done nothing wrong but have been penalised and rejected by our government groups who don’t understand the situation many motorhome and caravan travellers are in,” Russell said.
“We have had both jabs and been isolated for over five weeks. We are both in our late 70s … and we have not been near any places with COVID since we left home on June 4.
“We could be home within six hours. We only have to stop once on the way home to put fuel in and we can stay in the bus on the ferry, and we can land straight in our house, where we’ll isolate, no problem.”
According to SA Health, the agency is “working hard to respond as quickly and compassionately as possible to the high volume of requests for travel exemptions”, with measures such as supervised home quarantine aiming to increase the number of South Australians able to return.
“The high volume of requests for travel exemptions into South Australia has resulted in some delays in the response time for applications,” SA Health said.
They’re delays Russell and Marilyn argue are unreasonable. But after spending more than a month up against SA’s travel permit system, they counted themselves lucky they were able to submit a request at all, with very limited help on offer for people who found the online system hard to negotiate.
“They assume that everyone’s really savvy about internet and doing forms on the internet, which is really scary,” Marilyn said.
“Just filling in the form was stressful … and because we were in lockdown, no one could help – everything is closed, like the library.
“You sort of feel like you’re deserted.”
Chooka, who was advocating support for people like the Hicks, is taking the fight to the SA Government, which he said needed to do more to support those left by the wayside during the pandemic.
“There just needs to be a protocol in place to be able to help people get across,” he said.
“I understand that COVID is a problem, but there’s other problems that need attention as well, like homelessness and joblessness.
“It’s kind of like taking care of one kid and letting the other two wander off and get kidnapped and run over. You’ve got to keep an eye on everything and make sure that everything’s taken care of.”
