[ad_1]
Victorian Prime Minister Daniel Andrews condemned the failures that allowed a mysterious group of 17 New Zealanders to fly into the state on Friday, criticizing the Australian Border Force for delays in providing vital information to passengers and writing to Scott Morrison to express his disappointment. .
Seventeen New Zealanders who traveled to Sydney through the newly formed international travel bubble were able to fly into Melbourne airport on Friday afternoon, despite the state expressly excluding itself from the bubble deal.
The group left the airport quickly after arriving and state authorities had no power to stop them. The location of the group is still unknown, although they are believed to be in the greater Melbourne area.
Andrews said something “has gone wrong in this system, in the sense that we are not supposed to be part of this arrangement.”
“There are many things that the Victorian government can do and there are many things that we are ultimately responsible for, but who can board domestic flights at Kingsford Smith Airport in Sydney is not one of the things that I am responsible for, responsible for or responsible for. I can have any impact on, only others can do that, ”he said.
The prime minister had written to the prime minister expressing the state’s disappointment and publicly criticized the Australian Border Force for delays in supplying New Zealanders with passenger cards.
Without those cards, Victoria had little information about her identity and status.
Alan Tudge, the acting federal immigration minister, called Andrews’s comments a “distraction.” He said the possibility of New Zealanders flying to Sydney and going elsewhere was raised in Australia’s main health protection committee, and Victoria did not express any concerns.
“The concept that people can come to New South Wales and then potentially go to other destinations was explicitly raised at the meeting,” Tudge said. “And no official from any jurisdiction raised concerns.”
Andrews said the arrival posed little health risk, given that New Zealand was Covid-free, and said there was no criticism of the New Zealanders’ actions.
But he criticized the absence of warnings, the decision to allow them to travel from Sydney and the delay in obtaining their passenger records, saying “surely our systems are better than this.”
“Without warning, it’s actually the exact opposite of what we signed up for,” Andrews said. “It has happened now, it cannot be undone.”
Andrews said there should have been a process when they arrived in Sydney to tell New Zealanders that Victoria and Melbourne were not part of the travel bubble.
“I want to be clear on this – I wrote to the Prime Minister this morning and we are disappointed that this happened given that I had written to the Prime Minister on this very subject the day before, saying that at some point we will join that travel bubble from New Zealand / Australia, but it’s not appropriate now, ”he said.
Andrews said the trip was possible because Victoria did not close the border, something the federal government had insisted on.
“That is what the prime minister wants,” he said. “We have done it and now we see 17 people showing up at our door without warning, without any structure and we still can’t get the Australian Border Force cards on who these people are and where they have gone.
“Hopefully we will get it very soon. I wrote this morning to clarify that there are more flights on Sunday from New Zealand and we do not want this to happen again. “
Andrews said he hoped to have the ABF passenger cards by the end of his press conference Saturday morning.
“Some things have gone wrong here … we made it clear that we didn’t want to be a part, we couldn’t be a part of the bubble arrangements at this point,” he said.
The tumult between the federal government and Victoria comes as the state registered only one new case of Covid-19 in the last 24 hours.
Andrews said he did not want to close the border.
“It has remained open,” he said. “I want us to play our role and a case today and now active cases below 150. We are playing our part to get the borders across the country open. We don’t want anything to jeopardize that. “
