You may have heard some commentary from the eastern states recently about WA and the national plan to transition out of the pandemic.
As I’ve repeatedly said: Western Australia will remove our controlled border with other states in the future, when it is safe to do so, and in line with the health advice and the national plan.
Some people want us to remove our border controls with Sydney when only 70% of adults are vaccinated (which is only 56% of the overall population).
By knowingly letting the virus in, it would mean we’d have hundreds of people die, have to wind back our local freedoms, introduce restrictions and shut down large parts of our economy. I don’t want to do that.
I don’t want to see people dying in nursing homes or aged care villages or disability centres or hospitals.
I don’t want to bring back harsh limits on local businesses.It’s just odd for the commonwealth government to keep arguing for this – to be clear, removing ALL travel restrictions, domestic or international, is not part of the national plan at either 70 or 80%.
When it is safe to do so we will open the borders – when an overwhelming majority of our population has been vaccinated.
We will get there – it might only be a difference of a few months – but in the meantime, it’s worth trying to keep Covid out for as long as we can so we can vaccinate as many people as possible.
Ultimately, these are issues for later. Right now, in August, the focus should be on dealing with the crisis in New South Wales.
The commonwealth government should be more concerned about getting the current situation under control, and trying to spare the rest of the country from the fate that NSW is suffering.
It’s not been well publicised, but Western Australia is lending its resources to help the health response in New South Wales. Our contact tracers are fully focused on the situation over east and we’ve sent across 250,000 N95 masks, plus Western Australian medical staff assisting in regional NSW.
The fact is, Queensland, South Australia, Tasmania, Western Australia and the Northern Territory are all going pretty well at the moment.
We are not living in caves – we have some of the freest, most open, exciting communities in the world – and we want to keep it that way while we get our population vaccinated.
The idea that we would prematurely decide to deliberately import the virus and shut down parts of the mining industry, is complete madness.
Right now, the most important thing we can do is get as many people vaccinated as possible. If you are reading this and haven’t already – please do your part, and book your appointment today.