“Welcome to Checkpoint Coolie,” says one of the gawkers watching police check papers, then vaccination records, on Griffith Street as cars try to cross into Queensland.
The New South Wales-Queensland border has been closed before, but not like this.
Outside a cafe in Rainbow Bay, a stone’s throw from the border, a handful of people eat breakfast on the footpath. Four armed Queensland police officers, two in plainclothes, stand nearby on the corner.
The military arrives next week to help guard the barricades.
The line between Coolangatta and Tweed Heads separates an intertwined community of neighbours, work colleagues and friends. As of Friday, Queensland is only allowing vaccinated people from a narrow list of essential workers, to cross.
There are normally 10,000 commuters who head into the Gold Coast daily but, despite warnings of checkpoint delays, on Friday during peak hour there are never more than a handful of cars waiting. The restrictions appear to be working. Coolangatta is dead.
“It’s completely wiped our entire customer base,” says Maddie Pierce from the Flying Elephant Cafe on Griffith Street. “Coolangatta has lost a lot of the people coming through. It’s a border town.
“You’re getting to the point of losing hope [that restrictions will be lifted] each time there’s an announcement.”
‘I had a real breakdown at the border’
Queensland has unashamedly embraced its status as a hermit kingdom within an isolated Australia – something that has allowed its leaders to highlight the relative freedoms, compared with states that remain in lockdown and where Covid-19 cases are rising.
“I’m making no apologies for keeping Queenslanders safe, and the sooner that NSW gets on top of the issues, the sooner we can go back to some sort of form of normality in our lifestyle,” the premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk, said this week.
On Friday morning, dozens of surfers were in the water at Point Danger, near the border on the Queensland side. At the same time, Tweed Heads and the rest of New South Wales are in a statewide lockdown.
The political popularity of Queensland’s border stance has long been established. But the harsh measures continue to create instances where hardline bureaucracy trumps compassion and common sense.
Paloma Viola, a disability support worker, is moving from Sydney to the Sunshine Coast to be close to two of her children, who live with their father. She had to leave her Sydney rental on 6 August.
Viola left Sydney with her youngest child, who is two, and her two cats. She needs her car for work and so applied for an exemption to drive into Queensland and to go into hotel quarantine.
She waited 20 days with no news. In the meantime, with nowhere to live, Viola loaded the car and drove to Tweed Heads in the hope it would come through.
“It’s been a bit of an ordeal, really,” Viola says. “I have everything planned and booked, and so I had to go through with it. I couldn’t stop it – my move was happening, I couldn’t stop it.
“I had a real breakdown at the border with the police. I explained my situation. They couldn’t help me, they turned me around. I said that: ‘You’re going to let me go with a two-and-a-half-year-old with no money in the bank.’”
This week she was told the exemption request was denied. Even though she wanted to drive direct to hotel quarantine, Queensland would only allow people relocating to the state to arrive by air.
Viola arrived in Queensland on Thursday, on a flight from Coffs Harbour. She found a woman in Macksville to take care of her cats. She’s unsure how she will arrange to have her car sent up.
Queensland Health says there is an exemption that allows people to drive direct to hotel quarantine but that they are “rarely granted” and that the situation “presents an unacceptable risk with the potential of stopping along the way, for example, for fuel”.
Viola says the potential exemption is listed on the Queensland Health website.
“I’ve had to accommodate these politicians making these decisions, they don’t seem to live in the real world,” she says. “Everything is for our safety but in reality people are going through very different and complicated circumstances in their lives and no one is able to help them.”
‘Harvest is looming’
Though border rules have made queues on the Gold Coast redundant, cars lined up at the Border Bridge heading into Goondiwindi often take 45 minutes to get through the checkpoints.
A cattle and grain farmer, Pete Mailler, lives on the NSW side of the border but considers Goondiwindi his local hub. He relies on mechanics, an agronomist and truck drivers from Queensland.
He is also just days away from harvest.
“The advice keeps changing from one day to the next,” Mailler says. “They say there’s a border bubble but there’s no regard for the functionality of that. Last time we could come in and do what we wanted inside the bubble.
“My agronomist needs to be checking grubs and crops three times a week, but he’s not able to come across the border without fear of being put back into quarantine. He’s got a range of clients this side of the river. We can’t send a mechanic over the river because they were worried he’d have to go into quarantine.
“The angst that it’s causing is mind numbing. My real concern is there’s a logistics effort coming up, harvest is looming, we’ve been doing it tough for a fair while and we can’t have this kind of obstruction for what’s going to happen because it’s all time-sensitive work.”
Such has been the confusion and conflicting advice this week that Goondiwindi police have been advising people they should provide incorrect information to obtain an agriculture border pass.
Previously people in the border zone were allowed to cross on an X pass. Now farmers are told these are not valid and they need a Z pass, which is specific for agriculture. But the online border declaration system would only allow people from outside the zone to apply for a Z pass.
Police said they had put in place a “work around” – advising locals to declare they had left the area, when in fact they had not – because IT systems had not yet caught up with changing border rules.
Mailler, who is fully vaccinated, says he understands the need for border restrictions. “But there’s a huge emotional cost in this for some people. We’ve got enough on our plate without people making it even harder.”
‘I’ve been getting nowhere’
On Facebook, some interstate commuters are trying to organise job swaps with people stuck on the wrong side of the border.
Chris Cherry, the mayor of Tweed shire council, has been pushing for a solution to allow her local community, where there are no recorded Covid cases, to continue to function.
She wants Queensland’s definition of essential workers broadened. The rules lock out teachers, for instance. Palm Beach-Currumbin high school in Queensland is missing 30 staff members this week.
Cherry has also called for border checkpoints to be moved to the southern boundary of the Tweed.
“I’ve been getting nowhere,” she says. “I’ve written to both premiers. There doesn’t seem to be a reason not to do it. The rest of New South Wales is not allowed to come here anyway.”
While Queensland has said it is open to moving the checkpoints, the NSW deputy premier, John Barilaro, has outright rejected the idea, saying: “The border cannot move.”
Cherry says she believes that if NSW and Queensland were governed by the same party there would be a solution.
“I feel like we’ve been doing everything right, we’ve been complying. To have that sort of restriction without a case here is very difficult. It’s the hardest thing for people to stomach.
“It is really harming the southern Gold Coast as well. In our supermarkets … there’s quite a few things that are starting to get low on the shelves. The supply trucks aren’t coming in because they don’t want to have to deal with the border restrictions.
“It is an absolute ghost town.”