NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian hopes the permit change she will announce in Albury on Tuesday will be the last switch in travel rules for frustrated border residents while the Victorian frontier is shut.
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Speaking on radio 2AY on Tuesday morning before boarding a plane from Sydney to Albury, Ms Berejiklian was apologetic over the Victorian border closure which she described as the hardest decision she had made during the coronavirus pandemic.
"We're hoping now that pretty much everybody will need just the one permit for the duration of the border closure," Ms Berejiklian said.
"The second that we can actually lift the border we will, we don't want to have that border in place a day or a week longer than we have to."
Ms Berejiklian did not say when she expected the border closure to be lifted entirely, but she defended the shutdown on the basis of a lack of detail about potential spread of COVID-19 in regional areas of Victoria.
"There were instances of community transmission in various regional Victorian townships and we just didn't have a good grasp of how north that was or how close it was to the border," she said.
"That was our concern and it took us some weeks to make sure we got that information, to make sure we were comfortable with the level of information that we were receiving."
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The Premier said she loved Albury and it was a special place for her.
"I'm hoping my presence will demonstrate to the people of Albury that we know you're suffering, we know you're frustrated but please know you're top of mind, please know your premier cares about you, your premier is worried about you and is trying to make things as least disruptive as possible," Ms Berejiklian said.
"If I had my way we wouldn't have even closed the border, but it was just a situation we couldn't have allowed to continue and the alternative scenario would have been many cases of COVID throughout regional NSW and all of NSW for that matter."
Ms Berejiklian was not asked if Wangaratta would be included in the 50-kilometre zone from the Murray River.
However, Wangaratta mayor Dean Rees told The Border Mail that he "absolutely" expected to be part of the new bubble when it is confirmed later on Tuesday.
"We believe we are, they've been talking to us," Cr Rees said of the NSW government.
