MOST NSW-Victorian border residents haven’t forgotten the pain and anguish caused by the border closures during the COVID-19 pandemic.
While everyday life has largely returned to pre-pandemic normalcy, Victoria’s cross-border commissioner Luke Wilson has noticed lingering effects during his border travels, and the same can be said for Swan Hill, Kerang and Koondrook-Barham.
“It was a very trying period, and while that is gone, I’ve certainly noticed, particularly in some of the smaller communities, there is still sort of an impact of that at almost an individual level,” Mr Wilson said.
“The communities got fractured by the introduction of the restrictions, and there is still a bit of a leftover legacy of that.
“It is not only in small communities, but it is more notable in small communities.”
Mr Wilson has been in the region this month catching up with shires, businesses and sporting clubs to listen to their concerns about cross-border issues in the search for solutions, in particular focusing on confusing grant funding criteria.
“We just want to get that sort of intel, and then what we have been doing is going back into Melbourne with the various agencies that do grants just to give them some advice on how to improve the information that they put out so that people don’t give up when they needn’t have,” Mr Wilson said.
The commissioner’s role is to work with border residents, businesses and community organisations to help identify border issues and advocate change.
Mr Wilson has had no real powers overs restrictions during the pandemic, but was able to advise the government on what he thought was best to handle the situation based on his knowledge of border communities.
“My job as an advocate was to try and get as much advice into (the health department) as we could about what’s happening, what works, what doesn’t, what the impact is and then get adjustments,” Mr Wilson said.
“Then some of the other advice was then helping other parts of government deal with some of their responses, such as some of the grants that were available and helping to shape that around the border.”
Something Mr Wilson was able to influence during the pandemic was the use of local government areas in determining the area that constituted the ‘border bubble’, instead of using distances or postcodes, such as was initially seen in NSW.
“No matter what you use, there is a line somewhere,” Mr Wilson said.
“But what we did manage to do is get that to be a bigger area and that just helped at least soften the blow, but it was still confusing and messy.”
While he doesn’t have regrets, Mr Wilson admits there were things that could have been handled differently with the border restrictions.
“I think with each of the three states that I was mostly dealing with, the way the exemptions were processed could have been a bit better.
“But, in the end, that’s the call that was made.”
However, despite the chaos that came with the border restrictions, Mr Wilson believes now is a prime time for border communities, with border issues now more prominent in the minds of policy makers.
“It’s an unfortunate way to achieve that but that’s where we are at,” Mr Wilson said.
“Agencies, typically based in Melbourne, have at least a better understanding of the border, and they are more open to the idea of, “Oh yeah, I’d better think about how whatever I am doing impacts on the border’.
“When they are doing design, whether it’s a service, a rule, a policy, whatever, we can get them to think through that and ask the question and help them know how to ask the question and what to look for, we think we have got an opportunity now to take hold of that,” he said.
Mr Wilson encourages anyone with cross-border issues to get in contact with his office.
