Regrettably, the shock 6 July announcement of the shutdown of the Victoria-New South Wales border has meant that many individuals, businesses and other organisations in border communities (where there still remain no, or very low numbers of, cases of coronavirus) are now being excessively punished for the mistakes of others elsewhere.

Centres like Wodonga and Albury, Rutherglen and Corowa, and Echuca and Moama, and many others, did not need to be divided into latter-day versions of East and West Berlin.  This reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the COVID spread, and the inextricable closeness and interdependency of these places and our people and economies.

If heavy-handed blocks on movement were actually required, then the hundreds of officers at border checkpoints daily would actually be better deployed policing the isolation of coronavirus-positive individuals.Yet such ironies and contradictions abound. It’s apparently acceptable for some people to go past the so-called ‘ring of steel’ around Melbourne without checking – and even for people from coronavirus hotspots to flock into our regional areas, to do things like inspect properties for sale.

Yet those of us in border communities apparently can’t now be trusted to travel even to the same workplaces over the border that we’ve attended every day for years.  Many local paramedics and other medical specialists trying to provide urgent medical care now can’t even easily move across the border.
The simple reality remains that the border should not have been closed – and it should be re-opened forthwith.

Alongside all the genuinely hard decisions that have been required amid the coronavirus response, these should have been two of the very few lay down miseres.