The Nationals leader and Member for Murray Plains, Peter Walsh, has held wide-ranging talks with recently appointed cross border commissioner Brett Davis in a bid to rationalise issues which have been paralysing operations from emergency services to tradies.
Mr Walsh says state borders should not be limitations because communities the length of the Murray are interdependent and should not be hamstrung by laws which don’t recognise the many problems they are creating.
He says Mr Davis was “incredibly receptive” and increasingly aware of the challenges he and his team face in sorting out “a very confusing history”.
And he has a high-level meeting in the next few weeks at Albury with the police high commands from both sides of the Murray to discuss the way forward.
“I cannot emphasise how critical some of these challenges are, in cases of which I am aware lives have been at risk,” Mr Walsh explains.
“A case not long ago saw a drug addled thief steal a car on the Victorian side of the border, cross the river and stage a home invasion on a NSW farm,” he says.
“Victorian police were just minutes away but had no authority in NSW, and the terrified family was forced to confront their attacker with the help of a neighbour and then wait more than an hour for police to reach them from Deniliquin.
“This ended safely, more through good fortune than good management. But if the Victorian police were empowered to act it could have been defused within minutes.”
Mr Walsh concedes that case is at the extreme end of the scale, but while NSW legally controls the whole Murray, in many places all the necessary infrastructure, from healthcare to first responders, tends to be on one side of the river – and from the SA border you have to travel all the way up stream to Albury-Wodonga before you find the first major population hub where all the key facilities aren’t in Victoria.
He says when there are serious accidents on the river, or drownings, they are all the responsibility of NSW but in that stretch of the border nearly everything needed to manage the incidents is Victorian.
“The chaos trickles down through the system. Tradies have to get double accreditation, real estate agents need two licences, and so it goes on,” Mr Walsh adds.
“Those things might seem small potatoes, but they all add more layers of bureaucracy, more charges for small business and more confusion of who can do what, and where, and when,” he says.
“Just look at the farce we all lived through during Covid when all the little twin towns up and down the Murray were torn apart because there was not a commonsense and rational approach to community scenarios that don’t fit into citycentric decisions made in Melbourne or Sydney.
“I will be catching up with Brett after his meeting and hope to be able to report that we have some serious progress on the drawing board in the very near future.”
CAPTION:
The Nationals leader and Member for Murray Plains, Peter Walsh, in his office with new cross border commissioner Brett Davis, who will be having high-level talks with senior police both sides of the river about maximising resources and simplifying bureaucratic red tape.