There have been announcements today by the Victorian Premier, Daniel Andrews and the New South Wales Premier, Gladys Berejiklian that the Victoria/NSW border will be shut from 11:59pm Tuesday night. Nobody from Melbourne will be able to cross the border from today, while that will extend to all Victorians from tomorrow night.

This will affect members and their employees in border cities and towns (i.e. Albury/Wodonga) where people live on different sides of the border to where they work, or where building and construction sites and other work -related activities require border crossing through your work day. For the moment, you will be restrained from doing that as of 11:59pm Tuesday.  However, over the next two to three days a system will be established that involves permits for those that need to travel across the 55 border Victoria/NSW crossings.

Service NSW will have an online portal to apply for exemption over the coming days.

You will need to register and apply for that permit, and then if approved follow the instructions to provide evidence of it when crossing the border. We will provide information and links once they are available to us, as to where to apply and the eligibility and criteria that’s required to qualify for the exemption. It appears the criteria will not be onerous but there may be a day or two time lag between closure and the exemption system being ready.      

Once that system is established, to pass any of those 55 crossing you will need to show a printout of that permit.

It can be expected that there will be travel delays to cross borders, so please factor that into travel times.

We will send further information when we have it.