NSW and ACT police will continue with their joint cross-border enforcement program "for the forseeable future", with plans in place to keep running operations to ensure people restrict their movements on both sides of the border.
Superintendent John Klepczarek, in charge of the NSW Monaro police district which encompasses the South Coast, Cooma and Queanbeyan areas, said the cooperation between the two jurisdictions since the tougher public health orders had been put in place had been excellent, with an operation on Yass Road on Monday and more planned.
"This will keep going for the foreseeable future; if anything, this collective public health issue has brought us closer as agencies; we're up against a common enemy which is the virus," Supt Klepcazrek said.
"This border bubble arrangement is a complicated one so we're making sure that our operational orders are aligned; with these border checks, we are setting up an RBT [random breath testing station] and effectively working one side of the road and ACT [police] are working the other."
He said that traffic movement through Queanbeyan had quietened considerably since the ACT's Friday lockdown announcement and generally people were being considerate and obeying the stay-at-home order.
He said that his general instruction at a traffic stop was to check ACT driver details and if the response sounded a "bit dodgy", to make further checks.
"At the moment there's very limited ACT people driving around [the Monaro area]; it's not like it was on Friday when there was a very large volume of people heading to the coast," he said.
"The [ACT] numbers here are quite small now. We're asking for proof of where they live, what they're in NSW for, and checking they've got masks."
After the Friday surge on the Kings Highway, reports he had received from his officers on the South Coast was that the presence of ACT-registered vehicles there had fallen dramatically since the stay-at-home NSW health order was issued for regional NSW on Saturday afternoon.
"I suspect quite a few of those [ACT] people headed back home," he said.
The number of infringement notices handed out had been low "but we have had a few issues down the snow way [at Jindabyne and Cooma]".
"As far as I'm concerned, and that's the message from my commissioner, is that the education phase of this is over for NSW residents," he said.
"What we're finding is that people are contacting police seeking for us to give them approval to do various things. The bottom line is: keep your travel movement down to the absolutely essential."
He said police had patrolled through most of the local recreational areas within Queanbeyan on Monday and there was a high degree of public compliance.
"This is a health issue, this is a community issue; we would love not to give one ticket out," he said.
"But people are putting us [police] in that position. People know the rules so when they try to invent a reason to go out, that's when we'll have a problem."
