Pressure mounts on McGowan’s hard border

Prime Minister Scott Morrison insisted it is not his intention to apply pressure on Mr McGowan during a press conference on Monday.

Mr Morrison announced fully vaccinated travellers will be allowed back into the country from February 21.

“The two issues are unrelated. We’ll make the decision about the international border,” he told reporters on Monday.

“The decisions that the states take, they’ll be consistent with the assessments that they’re making.

“That deals with their caps at their airports, as well as their quarantine arrangements as they are in place.”

It comes just days after Mr Morrison sensationally backed in WA’s hard border despite spending the previous two years criticising it.

Mr McGowan is yet to address the issue but will hold a press conference later on Monday.

When Mr McGowan announced the WA hard border would not come down on February 5 as planned, many people criticised him for keeping families apart while businesses were left in limb0.

But others were equally vocal in backing his decision out of fear of the Omicron variant surging in the eastern states.

No reopening date has been set for WA, but some have called for a March date to get ahead of the virus before winter kicks in.

Last week, Mr Morrison publicly backed the Premier’s decision to delay reopening the state border, saying Mr McGowan had made the right call.

“Yeah, I think he did. I mean, Omicron, as we learnt over the summer, is a completely different virus,” the Prime Minister told 6PR radio.

“I mean, the things we were doing before don’t work the same way under the Omicron virus, and as a result, you’ve got to reset and you’ve got to rethink the things you were doing.

“In the eastern states … we have changed how close contact rules work because that impacts then on the workforce and how many people you have working in health and aged care and in food distribution centres driving trucks.

“That’s what we were doing over the summer and that had some pretty significant impacts.

“I think that’s the big lesson from the eastern states for the west when they inevitably move … into this Omicron phase – that the lessons from the east coast would be applied.”

Some people have suggested Mr Morrison’s comments were a political move with a federal election looming some time before the end of May.

WA recorded 26 new local cases and 10 travel-related infections overnight.

Of the new local cases, 24 are linked to close contacts, while the other two remain a mystery.

They are all in quarantine now, but some were infectious in the community and contact tracers are working to determine potential public exposure sites.

It brings the state’s total number of active cases to 265, including 12 in hotel quarantine, 254 in self-quarantine and one in hospital but not in intensive care.

Mr McGowan was briefly forced into self-isolation on Sunday after visiting a Covid-19 exposure site.

A state government spokesperson said Mr McGowan later received a negative test result, which meant he was free to leave isolation.

“The Premier became aware last night that he had been at an exposure site in Rockingham and was required to get tested,” the spokesperson said on Monday.

“He attended the Rockingham Covid clinic last night. He has returned a negative test result and is therefore out of isolation.”

Originally published as Pressure mounting for WA to end hard border as international decision revealed