Last week there was an announcement that the “border zone” would be moved from 2.5km to 50km either side of the NSW-Victoria border. While this is welcome news, we are still (as at 31 August 2020) waiting for further detail. In particular, people who live or work near the 50km radius are understandably anxious, while they wait to hear whether they will be eligible to cross the border for work, education and health.

Fifty kilometres is obviously an arbitrary number. Why not 45 or 51km? If we still used imperial measurements, would we have gotten 50 miles (just over 80km)? And how is it measured? If it is simply Euclidean (straight line, or as the crow flies) distance from the border, then, for example, half of Shepparton is just included. Yet by road, it is 70km to the border. What’s really important here is how far people actually do travel. The vast majority of Shepparton residents could be expected to work locally – it’s unlikely they need to travel to Barooga or Tocumwal for work, education or health. Myrtleford is similarly on the edge of the 50km as the crow flies, but 70km to Albury. In their case, Wangaratta is the closest city, but it’s likely that some people from Myrtleford actually do need to cross the river to Albury.

So this is what I explore here. How many people in key cities actually do work across the border?

These numbers are taken from the 2016 census Place of Work and Place of Residence data (sourced from the Census of Population and Housing, 2016, Australian Bureau of Statistics. Copyright Commonwealth of Australia, 2018, see abs.gov.au/copyright. ABS data licensed under Creative Commons, see abs.gov.au/ccby). As these numbers are 4 years old, it’s likely the numbers are underestimates.

So taking the example of Myrtleford, the vast majority live and work in Myrtleford. And while very few people live across the border and need to go to Myrtleford for work, there are close to 50 residents of Myrtleford who work in Albury. Below are maps of where people live and work in relation to Myrtleford, Beechworth, Wangaratta, Chiltern, Benalla and Shepparton.

So what does this all mean? It’s not as simple as saying “50km from the border”. The gravity theory works here – people will travel longer distances to larger centres, so people from Shepparton have little reason to need to cross the border (because Shepparton is, itself, a larger centre), while residents of Myrtleford are more likely to make the trek to Albury, their closest large city.

Chiltern (originally left out of the “border zone”) clearly has much stronger ties to Albury-Wodonga than it does to Wangaratta, with 300 residents working in Albury (and a further 476 in Wodonga) compared to only 80 working in Wangaratta.

On balance, this analysis shows that while 50km might be about right as far as determining who crosses the border on a daily basis, care needs to be taken with communities around that 50km distance. Beechworth and Chiltern should be within the “border zone”. Shepparton and Benalla should be outside (with perhaps exemptions for the handful that actually do work cross-border). Myrtleford needs to considered for inclusion in the “border zone” due to its reliance on Albury-Wodonga, and while Wangaratta residents probably don’t rely on Albury for health and education services, there are clearly enough people who travel between Albury and Wangaratta, and Corowa and Wangaratta for work that their needs to be a mechanism to allow these people to continue working.

What we need more than anything right now is some clarity on who can cross the border and for what reasons.