Dom Perrottet

BTW I am not Catholic, and have never been baptised or practised any religious faith in my entire life.

Confusion, contradictions and is there a way forward?

Everything about the Reopening NSW Roadmap is confusing. With no further announcements today to clarify and correct this dog's breakfast, where are we left and what’s required from Monday 11th October?

Businesses must take ‘reasonable steps’ to ensure that only vaccinated people can attend their premises. Police have been given guidance that having a sign up in your store saying that customers must be vaccinated is NOT enough as a reasonable step to ensuring compliance. However, it is completely unreasonable for staff to be put in this position and therefore as far as I am concerned, I don’t see that they need to do it.

I think it a perfectly reasonable position for businesses to have a sign up with conditions of entry stating that the onus of complying with the public health orders is on the individual. As has been noted, businesses are already having to suffer a loss of trade by losing potentially over half their customers, meaning they may have to cut back staff. To then require those staff to enforce compliance against an angered section of their community, many of whom through no fault of their own have not been able to be double-dosed, is completely unreasonable and unworkable.

Many businesses are afraid that they may be dobbed in and therefore have made the decision to close until December 1. Crimestoppers are being inundated with complaints and this will likely increase hugely as complaints roll in from people that may feel the need to do what they consider is the right thing and advise of businesses not checking for vaccination status.

There are already long delays between complaints being made to Crimestoppers and these being flagged to police for follow-up. These delays will no doubt extend so it is putting the police in an atrocious situation as well, as they are bearing the brunt from two groups in the community, those that take on the role of enforcing and those that feel unfairly impacted. This is completely unfair to the police and it is clear that they have too much to do already, hence why they will not in any way be proactively enforcing compliance on this. I doubt they will be able to respond effectively to these complaints at all come next week.

There are so many contradictions in all this it is just bizarre. There has been a provision for regional staff whereby they can be allowed to work if they can show a single dose and an appointment for the next. What if the plan was to go to the chemist for the second shot? You don’t normally need an appointment for that?

On top of this, the ‘vaccination status’ technology isn’t ready yet, so people cannot even prepare for this ridiculous system coming on Monday.

For our part as local leaders, from Taree to Tweed and out to Tenterfield we have today requested an urgent meeting with the Premier to go through these concerns and get some sense back. Predictably, we haven’t had a response, but hope springs eternal.

My advice at this stage is, put the onus on the people to self-regulate. As a business, put up a sign around the conditions of entry and be done with it. It is not businesses job to enforce compliance on behalf of the State Government, nor is it reasonable in the circumstances. Whilst you could argue we have been doing this for QR codes around entry to premises, is a completely different matter to expect staff to ask about customers' personal medical history.

This roadmap for Monday is completely unfair and stressful and needs to be rethought.