DRIVERS have been allowed to pass through the border of Greater Bendigo and the Mitchell Shire without any police checks.
Mitchell Shire residents moved into stage three restrictions from 11.59pm on Wednesday.
Under the restrictions, residents are only allowed to leave their homes to shop for essentials, for medical care and care giving, daily exercise, or study and work if they can't do so from home.
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Victoria Police said they would use booze buses and mobile police facilities to monitor the border between locked down and non-locked down areas.
But there were no checkpoints at the Greater Bendigo and Mitchell Shire border on the Northern Highway about 7.30am on Thursday.
Dozens of cars were allowed to pass through without being checked.
The border is in between Heathcote and Tooborac.
A Victoria Police spokesperson said people could expect to see a visible police presence across the state.
"We will not be providing a running commentary on where police will be located and their daily enforcement activities," they said. "However the community can be assured that police will be out and about in significant numbers across the state."
Meanwhile, police set up a checkpoint area on the Calder Freeway.
Drivers were being stopped and checked near the Gisborne South exit.
Greater Bendigo, Mount Alexander, and the Macedon Ranges all adjoin council areas in which people are required to stay home.
Why Mitchell Shire?
Meanwhile a Melbourne demographer has explained the link between Mitchell Shire's southern towns and the northern parts of 'Metropolitan Melbourne.
Glenn Capuano, from the company .id - the population experts said people might be surprised why Mitchell, with its relatively small population, had been included in the latest round of coronavirus restrictions.
Specialists at .id - the population experts, have expertise in demographics, economics, housing and population forecasting.
"Straddling the Great Dividing Range, its southern outskirts include the towns of Wallan and Beveridge, just 35-40km north of Melbourne and just beyond the edge of the urban area," Mr Capuano said in a blog.
"These are high growth areas where young families move to seek affordable housing within commuting distance of the city.
"This area at the 2001 Census had a population of just over 5,000; by 2016 it had grown to 13,000, and the current estimate is over 16,000."
Between 2011-16, 65 per cent of Mitchell Shire's 2710 net movements from other parts of Australia came from neighbouring shires, Hume and Whittlesea.
The population of the Wallan-Beveridge area was relatively young, with many families, and was more culturally diverse.
In contrast, the northern parts of Mitchell Shire, including Seymour and Broadford, are 75km-100km from Melbourne and have much older, stable to declining populations.
Mr Capuano said Mitchell Shire was included in the lockdown because, at the time, it had a higher number of coronavirus cases than any local government area in regional Victoria, but much lower than most areas of Melbourne.
"But the lockdowns have uniformly been applied at the local government level - perhaps that's easier to understand and enforce than postcode or suburb level restrictions - so all of Mitchell Shire gets included in this case," he said.
Mr Capuano said Mitchell Shire was included, while Moorabool, Greater Geelong, Baw Baw Shire and Murrindindi were left out, on good demographic reasons.
"Migration within our larger cities tends to go in corridors," he said.
" Families who have grown up in a part of the city, when the children leave home and it's time to settle down, more often than not migrate outwards to buy the new house in the more affordable area on the urban fringe, of the corridor in which they grew up.
"So in Melbourne's south-east, there is movement from Monash out to Casey and Cardinia.
"In the west, from Maribyrnong and Hobsons Bay to Wyndham and Melton, and in the north, it's from Hume and Whittlesea to the new frontier of southern Mitchell Shire."
He said a lot of the movement into Mitchell Shire was of young people, leaving their family home.
"What this means is that a large proportion of residents in that growth part of Mitchell Shire will have close family in Hume and Whittlesea," Mr Capuano said.
"Both those areas have been hotspots in the most recent wave of the pandemic - the City of Hume, in particular, has had the largest number of Covid-19 cases in Victoria for some time.
"And it has been confirmed that family gatherings are the source of a lot of the new virus transmission."
Mr Capuano said including the Wallan-Beveridge area in lockdown made sense from this point of view, due to the likely family connections with these hotspot areas.
"Unfortunately, the rest of Mitchell gets brought along for the ride, due to the use of the LGA boundary, though it doesn't have those connections."
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