Boy, it's like you got to drag this lot kicking and screaming to the alter of common sense.

Scott Morrison yesterday said that South Australia and New South Wales was on the cusp of inviting us, New Zealanders, to be able to travel to those states with no quarantine.

Here comes the stinger, the arrangement initially will only be one way. The prospect, he said, of Australians being able to travel to New Zealand is further away.

Simple question. Why? Answer. Our government and its obsession with conservatism and fear.

We see the same in Singapore. We have been able to travel there quarantine free for weeks now. Sadly only 130 actually have, based on the simple issue that when you come back, you're stuck in quarantine. Same applies to vast swathes of the world, you can land in Europe and America and jump straight in your rental car.

Here's the madness, if you want to mount an argument that having spent a month in Italy, we, as a country, don’t want to take the risk, fair enough. But if you’ve been to the Cook Islands, Fiji, South Australia, New South Wales, or most of Australia outside Victoria, given the Covid level which is better, or certainly no worse, than ours, what on Earth is the problem?

As we've said Covid has changed, deaths are down, treatment has been changed as we have learned more, but the structures running the borders have not shifted since day one.

The concept of a bubble has come and gone, and has been dangled enticingly. Remember for a while there, it seemed possible that by July or August the Pacific Islands and Australia might be available quarantine free. Here we are in October and we are no closer.

There is talk. But talk isn't a ticket, and it's not a trip. And as each day passes it gets more absurd. Countries and regions with no Covid, or no Covid worse than us, are opening and travelling. What literally is the issue with us jumping on a plane tomorrow to Sydney, spending three days for a meeting or a break, and coming back and carrying on like we have been to Queenstown?

What happened in Sydney that didn’t happen anywhere else in New Zealand? What happens over the Tasman that doesn't happen here? Their numbers are minimal, in some cases better than ours, what on Earth is the problem, apart from attitude?

I feel sorry for Morrison. He's not only had to deal with recalcitrant Premiers who share a similar love of fear like our lot.

But now he looks across the Tasman, the trade, the business, and the tourism. He's offering us a sense of freedom, a small snippet of new normality, but in reality, we are prisoners to our own government.

And they keep saying, for reasons I can't fathom, you can't go because it's too dangerous. Even now they say it, when it's plainly evidently for all to see that it isn't.