The last time the Queensland-New South Wales border was closed, 101 years ago, authorities built a barbed-wire fence between Coolangatta and Tweed Heads.
On Thursday, the border was declared “closed” for the first time since the Spanish Flu outbreak of 1919. But there was no barbed wire. There were no roadblocks separating the twin communities. Police patrolled only the main highway routes to the north, and only a few cars were turned around at those checkpoints.
“That’s not a border closure, it’s a detour,” one commuter told ABC Radio Brisbane talkback after being waved through. “Are we fair dinkum or what? That was laughable.”
Police said on Thursday morning their “methodology” for enforcing border closures would change regularly, but that they had initially decided not to install roadblocks and checkpoints on streets linking Coolangatta and Tweed Heads.
“Coolangatta and the Tweed is an interesting dynamic,” the Gold Coast chief superintendent, Mark Wheeler, told reporters.
“We revisited our plans and we looked at the risk. As has been pointed out, we’re looking at big volumes of traffic. The biggest risk (for the spread of the coronavirus) is big volumes of traffic.
“When you look at that community, an interwoven community that’s separated by a line on the ground, we believe we can actually manage that issue with other strategies.
“We’ll certainly have a high visibility police presence. We’ll be doing random interceptions. So if people think they can use that as another access, I can assure them it won’t happen.”
Wheeler said police strategies were “scalable” to allow them to enforce more strict roadblocks in the twin towns as needed.
“My hope is we don’t need to. Think about what it would mean for the inconvenience of the community if we have to do that.”
In practice, police set up diversions on major highways that caused delays between 15 and 45 minutes for motorists heading in to the Gold Coast during morning peak hour.
Roadblocks were also in place at crossings along Queensland’s southern border – at places like Wallangarra and Goondiwindi – but delays in remote areas have been minimal.
Police separated heavy and freight vehicles – which are largely exempt from the closure – from cars before they reached the Queensland border. Trucks were allowed to continue along the Pacific Motorway (M1) and cars and other traffic were diverted onto the Gold Coast Highway, which runs to the east of the airport.
Ben Smee
(@BenSmee)This is how the Queensland border is operating. Interstate cars to checkpoints. Queensland licence plates to the left and waved through pic.twitter.com/l9FHFxZkJL
The police checkpoints were about 300m across the border. Cars with Queensland licence plates are exempt from the border restrictions and were not checked. Interstate vehicles were sent to a siding, where passengers were questioned by police officers and asked their reason for travel. Police at the checkpoints appeared in good spirits, but prepared for the border closure to drag on.
“They are talking about six months,” one officer told a motorist as they came through. “All I know is that I’ve been told to expect to be here next roster cycle.”
One motorist with NSW plates, Adam, pulled up at a petrol station not far past the checkpoint.
“I can sort of understand the need for it, but they said that if we were here on holidays they’d still let us through, just that we’d have to isolate for 14 days. It does seem a lot of effort when you’re still relying on people to do the right thing.
“And yeah it does seem a lot of effort to stop one or two people coming through when we have restaurants already in Queensland infecting 20-odd people.”
Applications for a “border pass” were made available online early yesterday, but too late for many morning commuters. By 9.30am, police appeared to have run low on paper forms they were handing to drivers.
Ben Smee
(@BenSmee)Cop at Queensland border checkpoint.
“We’re about to run out of forms aren’t we?”
Steve Gollschewski, the police state disaster controller, told reporters on Thursday police had wanted the process to be as seamless as possible. He said the aim was to minimise inconvenience to necessary travel or regular commuters, but to stop holidaymakers or other non-essential travellers from spreading the disease.
“This is not a short term thing,” Gollschewski said.
“People need to be prepared for this to happen for quite some time. We expect we will review the levels of compliance as we go forward and we will review how this is operating as we go forward.
“In terms of whether we scale up or scale down, we do have the ability to adjust our posture. If we need to we may well have to increase those measures if people aren’t being compliant.
“This isn’t a draconian measure to exercise power, this is a very strong measure to keep our community healthy and safe. The intent of this is to stop the interstate travellers coming here for holidays.”
