Perin Davey (NSW, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Thank you, Senator O'Neill, for giving me a very good opening to what I wanted to discuss today, because I also wanted to talk about the situation in western New South Wales. But it's not all negative in western New South Wales. Where there are incidences of COVID, it is being very successfully maintained. It is unfortunate that COVID made it out to our regions, but it is being successfully maintained, and I want to give credit to the communities that are working very hard in difficult circumstances. And what Senator O'Neill says is true—that border closures are having unintended consequences and putting extra pressure on health services in our regional and remote communities. The fact that Broken Hill residents struggle to get to South Australia because of border closures means they are turning their attention, if they need health services, to Dubbo, which is already facing problems.

I also want to bring your attention to the case of Mungindi. Mungindi is a town on the Queensland/New South Wales border. Unlike most border communities, Mungindi has the same name regardless of which side of the border you are on. It's not like Albury-Wodonga; it's not like Echuca Moama. It is just Mungindi. The people of Mungindi live in Mungindi. They're very proud of being from Mungindi. But at the moment the people of Mungindi can't go down the road to the local shops to buy a bottle of milk or a loaf of bread without doing a 14-day quarantine. Worse still, the people of Mungindi can't go to their local health clinic, because there is a border in the way—a border that is a river, but a border nonetheless. And the Queensland government has decided that for this lockdown there is to be no border bubble. So, the town of Mungindi has no border bubble. It has no protection, no ability to go about life as normal. The residents south of the border are in lockdown while neighbours only a few hundred metres away—literally across a bridge—are living in relative freedom.

This is made all the harder because Mungindi is a fairly isolated community. From Mungindi you can't just drive down the road for 45 minutes and get to the next town. In fact, if my memory serves me correctly I think the closest town on the Queensland side is St George, which has a fabulous hospital. My daughter was born there—thank you, Queensland Health. That is the closest town, of any significance, to the Queensland side. But if you were on the New South Wales side, the closest town would be Moree. That's over an hour's drive away. So, you want to hope you don't have an accident in Mungindi anytime soon, while these dreadful and draconian border closures are in place.

We faced our first border closures last year, and we learnt—well, I thought we learnt—from that experience, because in the early days of border closures there was grave confusion in border communities at both ends of New South Wales. But we learnt. We developed border bubbles at both ends. We developed a permit system that allowed agricultural workers to cross. We allowed freight drivers to cross. But it seems that every time we go into a new lockdown we face a new set of rules. Our border communities have no certainty whatsoever. Every single time, they don't know whether they'll be able to go to the shops. They don't know whether they'll be able to see their local doctor.