At their first meeting for 2021, councillors resolved to write to National Cabinet, urging a national approach.

"It was quite daunting to see everyone drive out of town," Cr Andrew Kennedy said of the New Year's Eve exodus.

"They'd been told if you don't get home, you're going to have to pay for 14 days' quarantine, which is just ridiculous.

"For three-and-a-half, four hours, people were queued up trying to get out of town. A lot of them were intoxicated, and it was dangerous.

"The police ... were telling them to pull over, go home and rest."

Cr Kennedy said all businesses had suffered economically since.

"The local pizza parlour, he's down 80 per cent on what his turnover was the year before," he said.

"What they don't realise, the Victorian government, is probably 80 per cent of those that work in those pubs and clubs [in Mulwala] live in Yarrawonga.

"It's hurting Victorians."

Cr Paul Miegel said the "frustration and hardship" experienced by border communities "as a result of those who have little or no regard" for them needed to be better put to governments.

"Our community has never had a case of community-acquired COVID-19 transmission, yet we have experienced three sets of border restrictions," he said.

"This is a community whose residents, just because they live on the border, have been arbitrarily punished for a crime they did not commit, and they have been held to an economic ransom that they cannot afford."

Cr Miegel's address, comparing the groundswell of support for federation that started in Corowa to the current division, received applause from his council colleagues.

"It is now a community which has been torn apart by the leaders of those very same states," Cr Miegel said.

"State leaders have sacrificed the economies and the mental health of this and every border community to compensate for issues in their own capital cities.

"I urge all our state leaders to come together ... to arrive at and agree to a consistent, national co-ordinated approach to this pandemic.

IN OTHER NEWS:

"Sir John Quick [said] ... national unity should be no longer dependent on the battledore and shuttlecock of colonial Parliamentary parties.

"If I were to paraphrase the former Prime Minster of Australia, the Honourable Paul Keating, when he spoke here in Corowa 100 years after Sir John Quick ... a great majority of Australians understand, as the families of federation understood, that we work much better when we work as one nation."