Business owners in Queensland are ropeable that football players and their families are allowed to travel across borders when no one else is.
I have a friend who has been trying for weeks to bring their partner to Tasmania. They’ve been stymied by red tape, every step of the way. Despite their name on a Tasmanian lease and a letter from a Tasmanian employer, bureaucrats insist on “more evidence that this is a genuine case”.
So you can imagine their fury when AFL footballers and their entourages were hand-waved into Tasmania, last weekend.
Other Tasmanians were less than impressed, too, for different reasons. People with standing bookings at a major Launceston venue were informed, via email, that their accommodation had been acquired instead for an “AFL quarantine hub”. No alternative accommodation was offered.
In Queensland, similar double-standards apply. Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk resolutely refused, last year, to allow a pregnant woman in Ballina, NSW to travel across the border to a hospital just one hour away in Queensland. Queensland hospitals, the premier smirked, “are for our people.”
So the woman was forced to travel seven hours away, to Sydney, for emergency surgery. One of her unborn twins subsequently died.
But, as in Tasmania, football players have faced no such problems. Nor have their families.
Fashion designer and small business owner Fleur Richardson says the Queensland government’s double standards on border exemptions are “infuriating” after the families of NRL players were let into the state.
Like the Ballina woman, Richardson is forbidden from crossing the border — despite owning a small business in Queensland.
Ms Richardson has been forced to manage her business remotely from the New South Wales side of the border because she is unable to get an exemption to cross into Queensland.
“It’s infuriating and it’s a double standard and it just makes me dislike the sport even more just based on that,” she told Sky News host Andrew Bolt. “When you see 20,000 people within the Tweed Shire impacted by this – both sides as well – and it’s everyday people wanting to just earn an honest living and they can’t get through to their jobs or their businesses to keep operating and then this complete breach … it just doesn’t make sense and it smacks of double standards.”
The Australian
But Plucka is apparently determined to play to the peanut gallery of Banana Benders who selfishly demand that everyone else be locked up and shut up, to protect their own hides.
Now, she’s resorting to trotting out the oldest and most odious political ploy in the book: “But think of the children!”
Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk has been slammed by the federal Treasurer for spouting concerns about Covid-19 in children that the Treasurer says contradict the medical advice and exhibit a “denial of reality”.
Ms Palaszczuk on Wednesday withdrew her support for the national reopening plan once the vaccination targets are reached, declaring opening Queensland’s borders would be too risky for unvaccinated children.
“You open up this state and you let the virus in here and every child under 12 is vulnerable, every single child,” she told the Queensland parliament[…]
But Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said Ms Palaszczuk was deluded, as medical advice clearly indicated the national reopening plan was safe for Australia’s children […] “It’s a desperate denial of the reality and is not based on the medical advice.”
The Australian
No exaggeration or hysteria is a reach too far for a premier addicted to the absolute power gifted to them by unelected public health bureaucrats.
Annastacia Palaszczuk has warned more than 2000 people will die each month if she follows instructions to open borders when vaccine coverage reaches 70 per cent.
The Australian
Remember the dire predictions of havoc and death, prior to Britain’s “Freedom Day”? They didn’t happen either.
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