The streets around the Wimmera Base Hospital in Horsham have been lined with dozens of prime movers after a sudden change to South Australia's border rules stopped them crossing from Victoria.

South Australia altered its cross-border directions on Friday and required a driver trying to enter from Victoria to produce evidence of a negative COVID test from the previous 72 hours. Previously it had been seven days.

This forced drivers to unhitch their trailers near the border and make the 120-kilometre trip back to Horsham to get tested.

A temporary clinic was established by the Wimmera Healthcare Group to cater to the asymptomatic drivers, separately from their regular testing patients.

Acting CEO of the Wimmera Healthcare Group Mark Knights said they got hundreds of drivers needing a test over the space of a few days. 

"It certainly blocked up the streets around the hospital, we probably had 20 or 30 [rigs] parked in various streets."

That clinic operated until about midday Wednesday, with West Wimmera Health then establishing a testing site on the highway at Nhill, 50km closer to the border, on Wednesday night, staffed by fourteen workers from Ballarat Health Service.

"It quickly became apparent that the trucks lining up at Horsham Hospital obviously was not satisfactory from a number of points of view and ideally there would be something closer to the border," CEO of West Wimmera Health Ritchie Dodds said.

"We'll be obviously assessing that with the Department of Health in the coming days to see what type of usage it gets, how much demand there is for it, and after three or four days another assessment will be made to determine how and if it should continue and in what form, whether a permanent situation might be arrived at or whether things will sort of go back to some normality."

'It's horrendous'

Steve Shearer executive officer of the South Australian Road Transport Association said that the rate these changes are coming in makes work difficult for drivers.

"It used to be: 'Here's a direction and it applies in two days time from one minute past midnight'. Now most of them are coming out and saying: 'I've just signed this direction and it already applies'."

Mr Shearer also says that it is a fatigue management issue.

"You leave somewhere in Victoria and head across to South Australia, or vice versa, you get to the border and find out you can't continue, you've got to go back and get a test … you lose a lot of hours and you can virtually guarantee that you're not going to be able to complete the job and comply with your fatigue management requirements."

On Sunday there was also a direction introduced mandating that from September 24, all essential workers had to have received at least one COVID vaccination to be allowed across.

Mr Shearer said that the majority of transport workers were taking the changes in their stride, but that if even a small minority decided not to get vaccinated, it would have ramifications for the rest of Australia.

"If 15 or 20 per cent leave or can't get vaccinated because they're finding it objectionable or just all too frustrating, this country is going to have a very, very serious problem."

Police talking to truckies

SA Police Commissioner Grant Stevens said that his team met with the trucking industry yesterday.

They discussed what the industry might be able to do to "enhance that level of safety, and mitigate risk”.

Commissioner Stevens said he had also visited the border.

"It’s amazing to see just the small number of ordinary vehicles coming through, it’s virtually all trucks, so it’s more likely that we’re going to see truck drivers being the ones who are testing positive in South Australia having come from interstate," he said.

"My team, and SA Health, have been talking to the freight sector right throughout the course of this pandemic," he said.

"We’ve imposed some restrictions on the freight movement sector that have been very difficult for the sector to manage, so we’ve had to adapt that as well.

"But we can’t get past the fact that we have to allow freight operators to come into South Australia and we have those who are based in SA going into New South Wales or Victoria — that just has to happen."

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