Local Government Areas (LGAs) that have recently come out of lockdown, including Lismore, Kyogle and Richmond Valley Council (RVC) have now been brought back into the border bubble zone with the Queensland border.
‘Queensland Health will reinstate the non-restricted border zone rules to all northern New South Wales (NSW) local government areas (LGAs) from 1am Wednesday 13 October,’ said in a recent press release.
Danielle Mulholland, Mayor of Kyogle Council told The Echo that ‘I think being out of lockdown has been good’.
‘It is really important because of the synergies with South East Queensland for health, education and families,’ she pointed out.
Tweed Mayor and spokesperson for the Cross Border Taskforce, Chris Cherry told The Echo that ‘It is great that we are all on one footing now. We obviously need to work on the reasons for crossing as the restrictions are still having a very big impact on families and community’.
Vaccine delay disadvantage
However, Mayor Mulholland pointed out that many of the challenges facing the regions was because of the vaccine rollout. She said that the delay in the delivery of vaccines to the regions has left people and businesses frustrated because they have not been able to achieve double vaccination in the same time frames as Sydeny.
‘Every case of covid we’ve had has been brought in from the outside,’ she said.
‘We need to be tighter controls in place for COVID affected regions. Even when they [other regions] hit 80 per cent vaccination rate – we need to hit that vaccination rate before we open up to areas like Sydney again – we protect our region.’
Mayor Mullholland said that the potential ‘pressure on our medical facilities, to the detriment of our own residents, could potentially be huge’ if COVID was allowed to spread from infected areas to regions while the region struggled to achieve 80 per cent double vaccination due to the lack of vaccines until recently.
For a list of permitted reasons, visit the Queensland Health website.
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