Wednesday, 4 August 2021

COVID-19

Mr RIORDAN (Polwarth) (19:20): (5968) My adjournment tonight is for the Minister for Health, and the action I seek is for the minister to immediately increase support for rural hospitals and health services by enabling them to provide daily COVID testing. It is absolutely outrageous that in this current time in Victoria, where we are constantly wanting the community to go out and get tested for COVID and to keep that safety barrier alive and well in Victoria, there are whole swathes of rural and regional Victoria that have health services that are not funded to provide daily COVID testing.

Now, in the grand seat of Polwarth the transport industry is one of the largest industries. It is the third-largest industry in the seat of Polwarth, and yet truck drivers based in Colac, based in Camperdown, based in Terang and based along the Hamilton Highway and other areas are forced to go to Warrnambool, Ballarat and Geelong for COVID tests, particularly now when the requirement is for testing every three days. This is not only completely unfair, it is unsatisfactory. But most importantly this leads to a huge extra risk for drivers, because interstate truck drivers, as we know, spend a lot of time on the road. When they come home to family and friends for a bit of rest, a bit of R and R and important recharging of their batteries, we are now forcing them to get back into a vehicle to drive a 2- to 3-hour round trip to get a COVID test to be compliant with new government regulations. This is completely unsatisfactory and most unfair because transport drivers in Melbourne and transport drivers in our larger cities all have access to regular daily COVID testing.

But this brings us of course to a larger dilemma that this government has failed to take account of, and that is the requirement of our country and rural communities to have free and fair and easy access across the borders. As we move into harvest season in coming months, we are going to see a huge regular daily or weekly migration of the workforce from country Victoria through into New South Wales. This system needs to be improved for the safety of agricultural workers and for the safety of the transport industry so that these people can have reasonable expectations of fair and ready access to important COVID testing so that they can in fact go about their work and continue. The economic hardship we have seen inflicted on our cross-border communities—where businesses have been split in half, where families have been split in half, where businesses have lost huge turnover due to the lack of people being able to engage across border communities—cannot be allowed to extend right throughout our region, affecting the transport and agricultural sectors.