Lockdown Rules should apply to suburbs and not LGA's
Petitioner:
Mrs Sally Layson
| Member:
McKay, Jodi
| No. of Signatories:
1,606
| Date closed:
05/10/2021
To the Speaker and Members of the Legislative Assembly,
Proportionality and reasonableness must underpin any restrictions placed upon the residents of NSW in response to a pandemic.
To contain the spread of the Delta variant of Covid-19, the Minister for Health and Medical Research makes Public Health Orders under the Public Health Act 2010. Schedule 1 of the Current Health Order specifies ‘areas of concern’ imposed with harsher lockdown rules than other ‘stay at home areas.’ These ‘areas of concern’ are currently applied to Local Government Areas (LGA) which are deemed hotspot areas. Within an LGA are many suburbs with vastly different Covid-19 cases, transmission and vaccination rates. To deem a whole LGA as a hotspot area, rather than targeting specific suburbs is neither proportionate or justifiable based upon their cases, transmission, and vaccination rates.
The Sydney Morning Herald on 13 September 2021 highlighted that health authorities are “concerned about rising numbers among vulnerable communities in inner city suburbs such as Redfern, Glebe and Waterloo, which are not classified as areas of concern.”
Rather than enforce a blanket restriction on the whole LGA, the Minister should isolate those suburbs of concern and then regularly review which suburbs should be considered hotspots using reasonable, consistent and proportional measures.
We, the undersigned, respectfully request that the NSW Parliament change the categorisation of areas of concern to apply to hotspot suburbs rather than entire local government areas.
