COVID-19 Cross Border Permits

Wednesday August 25, 2021

Mr BELL (Mount Gambier) (15:12): My question is to the Premier also. Can the Premier inform the house how a person's vaccination status will affect their application or place in the queue for either returning South Australian residents or those waiting for exemptions?

 

The Hon. S.S. MARSHALL (Dunstan—Premier) (15:13): I thank the member for Mount Gambier for his question. This is something that we are looking at at the national cabinet level at the moment. The only statement we have made in South Australia at the moment is in relation to what we are calling essential workers who are coming in from level 6 jurisdictions, currently New South Wales of course, where we are saying that if somebody is coming in for 14 days of quarantine and they need to work during that 14 days, then they need to have had at least one shot. It hasn't been implemented yet, but we announced yesterday that within a 72-hour period, this is very likely to come in following consultation with the industry.

We know this has already been introduced in one other jurisdiction, Queensland. We think that, given the situation in New South Wales today—919 cases, many of them out in the community—we have no alternative but to basically increase the level of protection we have for our borders. Ultimately, I think it would be unfair to put very heavy restrictions on people who are unvaccinated because not everybody has had the opportunity to be vaccinated at the moment. The sole exception that has been agreed to at the national cabinet level so far has been workers in aged-care settings. We put a public health order in place here in South Australia to make sure that by 17 September all people who are working within an aged-care facility will have had at least one dose of the vaccine.

That is a nationally agreed national cabinet-endorsed position. We put our order in place using the public health order that will come into effect on 17 September. With regard to any other vaccination-required activity, there is nothing which is specifically contemplated at the moment.

I will draw to the attention of the house the situation that is developing in other parts of the world, where vaccination certification is required to participate in certain activities. For example, people can say, 'You're not coming into my nightclub unless you can show proof of vaccination.' We see this, commonplace, in the Northern Hemisphere at the moment, but nothing has been contemplated as part of that national cabinet arrangement or determination. What I will say, though, is here in South Australia we are looking to make it easy for people to identify whether or not they have been vaccinated using the mySA GOV app.

At the moment, when you go off for your vaccination, that vaccination is registered on the Australian Immunisation Register (AIR). It's pretty impractical for people to be carrying around a copy of that with them, so what we are going to do is create an interface which will query the AIR to see if there has been a changed status and, if there is, it will be something that is displayed on people's mySA GOV app. This is the same app that the vast majority of South Australians are now using for their QR code check-in. As part of that, there will also be an ability for them to say, 'I've been vaccinated,' or not. One of the complexities there is somebody who has been determined medically not to have been suitable for vaccination, so we will be working on an arrangement around that so that they are not disadvantaged.

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