Truckies plead for COVID testing at Vic/SA border

While COVID-19 border testing has ramped up in other parts of the country, it is the opposite along the border between South Australia and Victoria.

With testing requirements for freight drivers entering SA changing again this week, trucking companies say it is “getting harder and harder to get drivers tested”.

Joel Haberfield, who works in operations at Boyle’s Livestock Transport in Warrnambool, says the “biggest hassle” is ensuring drivers have access to testing sites.

“We do a lot of weekend work and out-of-office-hours work,” he said.

“This industry and the agricultural industry doesn’t work on a nine-to-five basis.

Mr Haberfield said authorities needed to reinstate testing along the border.

“You’ve got Bordertown Road, which is the Adelaide-Melbourne road, and the Princes Highway at Glenburnie just outside Mount Gambier,” he said.

“We believe, as a company, they probably should have 24-hour testing there.”

Mr Haberfield said testing at the border checkpoints would help ease the pressure on drivers.

“[If] you start pulling up B-doubles and road trains in [town] areas, you start to ask for trouble,” he said. 

“Driver welfare comes into it, pulling up in places where we probably shouldn’t be pulling up.

Different states, different testing

For livestock freight driver Zac Williams it has been much easier to get testing in New South Wales compared to Victoria or South Australia.

“New South Wales, I believe, has had one of the easiest access to testing because they’ve got them set up as their major roadhouses and some are 24 hours,” he said.

Mr Williams said it was a difficult situation with SA Health stopping testing facilities at border checkpoints, while SA Police has tightened testing requirements in recent weeks.

“We’ve either got to go to a clinic in Warrnambool, which is not accessible via truck [and] we’ve got to go in there in our own time,” he said.

“Or there is a testing site at Mount Gambier, but it’s out of your way a little bit.”

When Mr Williams has tried to get tested at the Mount Gambier Showgrounds, he said he had to “battle the public” who were also getting tested.

“It’s just the accessibility — being in a B-double, trying to get access somewhere to get tested [is difficult],” he said.

Mr Williams said testing at the border checkpoints had made transmitting “a lot easier”.

“When you’re not going past anywhere where there is easy access for truck, it means you lose a lot of work time.”

Drivers ‘very anxious’

Mr Haberfield said it was difficult to keep across the requirements for all the separate states, especially as drivers were crossing several state boundaries within a short period of time.

“We were having to go through emails every two or three hours, when it was changing, just to keep up with it,” he said.

Mr Haberfield said the pressure on the drivers was intense.

“There’s a lot of stress on drivers,” he said.

“They get very anxious about trying to be tested.

“We understand that there’s an important role for the transport industry to play in regards to getting drivers tested – we’re happy to do the right thing –  but we believe that there are probably easier ways to do it.”

SA Health says it is continuing to work with the SA Road Transport Association to reduce the impacts of cross-border requirements on the sector. 

In a statement, it said: “SA Health routinely looks into ongoing measures to help increase testing and support people to comply with direction requirements, including alternative testing sites”.