Queensland has refused to buckle on inter-state travel despite NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian telling Sky News on Sunday keeping the borders closed threatened tourism and supply chains and that “the sooner the borders opened the better.”

Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk said the state border would only open when it was safe according to medical advice as “we want to welcome as many people to the Sunshine State as possible.”

“What we know is there is still community transmission in Victoria and in NSW,” Palaszczuk told ABC News.
The Queensland-NSW border has been closed since March. Gold Coast police eased restrictions on Friday at one checkpoint in the Gold Coast Hinterland to make cross-border travel easier for commuters, families taking children to school, and farmers who claimed their businesses were suffering.

As the state “border wars” escalate amid the easing of coronavirus restrictions at the weekend, new research has emerged showing how Queenslanders feel about their health during the pandemic.

It found Queenslanders are more concerned than people in NSW and Victoria about harm to their own health but are also more optimistic that they will avoid contracting the virus during the next four weeks. On a scale of 1-100, where 100 was the most likely, people from NSW reported a likelihood of 23 that they would suffer from COVID-19 compared to Queenslanders, who reported a fear rate of 19.

The Griffith University national survey has been tracking people’s social distancing and other behaviours to prevent the spread of coronavirus in real time to help governments and other organisations make decisions on how best to respond to what people are doing, and not doing, regarding COVID-19.

A lead researcher on the study, Griffith University behavioural scientist and social media professor Sharyn Rundle-Thiele said people were facing very real and difficult choices about how to behave during the pandemic.

Queenslanders ranked reopening state borders a lower priority than residents from either NSW or Victoria, Rundle-Thiele said.

She said people from all states consistently responded that their most preferred restrictions to be relaxed first were return to work for non-essential workers who could not work from home, followed by all school children returning to school, and parks, beaches and community spaces all reopening and without restriction.

People from all states who were surveyed were also consistent that they social distanced to protect their health or the health of those they lived with and other Australians, rather than as a result of police directions or government fines.

“It’s really clear that people are taking these measures for social reasons, either for ourselves or our families, and the government policies and even penalties are pretty much the last reasons why people are performing the behaviours,” she said.

“We partly saw that before lockdown kicked in. People were starting to shut down businesses and isolate way before government told us to stay home.”

Rundle-Thiele said the study found people in older age brackets were performing actions to enhance protection better than younger people.

This article is supported by the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas