Mark McGowan admits Western Australia will not open its borders until well after Christmas because complacent locals are slow to get vaccinated.
WA is dead last in the Covid vaccine race and the premier insists NSW and Victoria will be off-limits until at least two months after it hits 85-90 per cent.
Mr McGowan, a zero-Covid zealot, said he didn’t want to ‘invite’ the virus into his state and would put it off until it had a ‘very high’ level of vaccination.
He admitted part of the delay was that locals enjoy their virus-free status that allowed them to pretend there was no pandemic – which would end if borders opened.
Pictured: residents of Perth during the state’s June four-day lockdown. West Australia has lagged behind other states in its vaccination rate, which Mr McGowan agreed was partially because of its Covid-free status
‘I’m not going to set an artificial deadline of Christmas,’ the premier told Sunrise on Wednesday morning.
‘We have plans in place but I’m not going to deliberately allow for Covid to come in before such time as we have very high levels [of vaccination].
‘I know some people over in the eastern states are demanding we do it, I don’t really get that, I don’t understand why we would deliberately infect ourselves with Covid before we get to very high levels of vaccine.’
WA has lagged behind other states in its vaccination rate, which Mr McGowan admitted was partially because of its Covid-free status.
As of Tuesday this week, 60.6 per cent of Western Australians aged 16 or over have had one dose and only 42.3 per cent are fully vaccinated.
Police inspect cars at a border checkpoint in West Australia. The premier said he would not give in to demands by people in eastern states to re-open the border and ‘deliberately infect ourselves with Covid’
Mr McGowan said some restrictions would operate in the state once its borders reopened.
‘There would be some level of social restrictions that we’ll need to put in place,’ he said.
‘We’ll beef up our contact tracing teams and obviously we have strong plans around our hospitals so that if there is an outbreak, what we do to cope with that.’
WA is so far behind that it launched a new advertising campaign to drive up vaccination rates.
Mr McGowan said the state’s Covid-free status allowed Perth to prepare to host this weekend’s AFL Grand Final, with 60,000 fans expected to attend at Optus Stadium.
‘It shows the value of being a Covid-free state that kept the virus out, crushed it when it came in… it actually did come in from Sydney, the Delta outbreak, and we crushed that with our lockdowns back in June,’ he claimed.
WA Premier Mark McGowan said the state would need a ‘very high’ level of full vaccination before he would re-open borders to people from Covid-afflicted states such as NSW and Victoria
The premier was referring to a single traveller who arrived from Sydney very early in the NSW outbreak, prompting him to respond with a pre-emptive lockdown.
Last week Mr McGowan threatened to shut the WA border with South Australia if it opened to Victoria and NSW at 80 per cent vaccination.
SA Premier Steven Marshall on Sunday threw his support behind the national plan to reopen interstate borders once 80 per cent of the Australian adult population is fully vaccinated against Covid-19.
However, he backflipped days later to be far more vague about SA’s timeline for scrapping border closures.
Mr McGowan said the state’s Covid-free status had allowed Perth to prepare to host this weekend’s AFL Grand Final, with 60,000 people expected to attend at Optus Stadium
Mr McGowan also claimed lockdowns in WA would be ‘unavoidable’ even when 90 per cent of the population was fully vaccinated.
The claim was based on modelling University of WA professor George Milne that predicted 2,000 new cases of coronavirus a day if the border was to open at that point, requiring a six-week lockdown to control.
In July, National Cabinet agreed to set second dose thresholds of 70 and 80 per cent to end the prospect of lockdowns and to open borders.
However, since the NSW outbreak grew to more than 1,000 cases a day, WA and Queensland have tried to wriggle out of the agreement.
