Coronavirus Restrictions

Ms HILDYARD (Reynell) (14:55): My question is to the Premier. Will South Australian AFL players be able to fly-in fly-out when the AFL season resumes?

The Hon. S.S. MARSHALL (Dunstan—Premier) (14:55): That's a good question and it's one that the Chief Public Health Officer in South Australia, Dr Nicola Spurrier, is working through at the moment. As members would be aware, at the moment in South Australia we have a very strong state border situation. We have said that we are not going to permit people to come into South Australia without two weeks of self-isolation.

This is going to cause a real problem for those visiting teams from New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland and Western Australia. For those reasons, I think that the continuation of the normal home and away season is going to be difficult, because there is not a chance at the moment that the visiting Victorian, New South Wales, Western Australian and Queensland teams would be able to come into South Australia.

The question at the moment is: how do we get the AFL season underway? One option, which is being actively pursued at the moment, is that the Crows and the Power base themselves in South Australia. They do their training in South Australia, and they fly out for their game in another jurisdiction and then fly back. Obviously, they wouldn't be spending a huge amount of time there. We want to minimise the ability for them to contract the disease. Then we work out a sort of modified or agreed position with regard to a form of quarantine when they come back in that would minimise the chance of transmission.

Of course, a lot of this is going to be dictated by when the season starts and also what the level of infection is in other jurisdictions. I have just seen the stats for today from New South Wales. They have now had two days without a single infection in New South Wales—and a massive congratulations to Premier Gladys Berejiklian on the great job that she and her health team in New South Wales are doing.

In other states it is at a higher level. Our first priority is to protect the people of South Australia. This is a nasty disease. When we look at some of the stats from around the world, they are of great concern to us. If you just look at the United Kingdom, for example, we have had in excess of 31,000 people lose their lives from the COVID-19 infection in just the last five or six weeks, so we can't take this disease for granted. Even though South Australia has done particularly well, we have not beaten this disease. This is a very nasty disease. There is no vaccine for this disease, and so the strong borders will stay in place until a time when we believe that the rate of infection in other jurisdictions is at a similar level to ours here in South Australia.