There hasn’t been many days lately when Roderic Rees had so many customers coming through his Cairns tourism business he needed more than two hands to count them.

On his best day since far-north Queensland exited lockdown a fortnight ago, Rees saw 25 customers walk through his doors. On most though, he’s gotten used to seeing five or six people.

“We’re running tours at a loss most days, just to give our staff something to do,” Rees, who runs the Cairns Adventure Group, said this week.

“Things are in a pretty dire state, definitely the worst since the pandemic started. We are locked out from more than 90% of our customers with no real end in sight.”

Since interstate travel was decimated by lockdowns across eastern Australia from the end of June, Rees has watched as the work for the 74 staff on his payroll dried up. He has started “making up work” for those who would usually earn a living on tours or maintenance.

“I’ve got guys just doing anything, bits of renovations, that sort of thing. I’ve got a few guys doing gardening up at my place. Just anything I can find for them,” he says.

Following the loss of the jobkeeper supplement, Rees, like most tourism operators, is frustrated at both the Queensland and federal governments for failing to agree on a separate tourism support payment like the those announced in Western Australia this week.

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But beyond calls for assistance, the latest battleground in Australia’s pandemic debate has left business and tourism operators fretting about state leaders in Queensland and Western Australia who remain politically tied to Covid-zero.

This week the prime minister, Scott Morrison, urged premiers to stick to the national four-phase strategy signed off by all state leaders in July, which would see restrictions gradually eased once 70% and 80% vaccination levels were reached.

Morrison warned premiers that abandoning the plan would risk breaking a “deal with the Australian people” while the federal treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, warned states to have “no expectation that commonwealth assistance will continue” at the same level once those targets were met.

The comments came off the back of the insistence from Labor premiers in Western Australia and Queensland that they reserved the right to continue border closures in light of the sustained Delta outbreaks in New South Wales and Victoria, as well as the possible need for lockdowns in the case of rising Covid numbers in their own states.

In Queensland, the premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk, has insisted that until NSW controls its outbreak “the hard border remains”, while the WA premier, Mark McGowan, has staked his political reputation on keeping the virus out of the state entirely. He has designated NSW as an “extreme risk” meaning not even compassionate grounds will be enough for a travel permit, while saying the state wants to continue to try to “crush and kill” the virus.

While that rhetoric has proven to be politically popular among voters – McGowan and Palaszczuk have both been convincingly reelected during the pandemic – those who have borne the brunt of the tough Covid politics are becoming increasingly frustrated by a sense of shifting goalposts.

Mark Olsen, Tourism Tropical North Queensland’s chief executive, told Guardian Australia that hints the premiers would move away from the roadmap felt like having “the rug pulled back out from under us again”.

“The greatest challenge in dealing with Covid is certainty, everyone wants to know how we can regain some of what has been lost, so when national cabinet released a roadmap with clear benchmarks people started putting those numbers up on white boards and saying OK we can start working on our business plans,” he said.

“It created a sense of hope and it gave us a focus: how do we support and encourage people to get vaccinated so we can reach those targets. Now you’re back to a situation where employees are unable to see a future in our industry and employers are unable to predict when and how long their business is going to be viable.”

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This week the Queensland Tourism and Transport Forum released research which it says shows the Cairns regions will shed another 3,150 tourism jobs by Christmas this year, which would shrink the workforce to half its pre-pandemic size.

But it’s not just the sunshine state feeling the pain. This week the Tourism Council of WA called for the government there to introduce mandatory vaccinations for people arriving from other states from 1 December in a bid to encourage the resumption of interstate travel.

The proposal was quickly shot down by McGowan, at least in the short term, saying it would not be introduced “at this point in time”.

“The thing about it is, even when you’re vaccinated you can transmit,” McGowan said.

But Evan Hall, the council’s chief executive, said he believed it was “inevitable” that the policy would be introduced eventually, and said the industry wanted “advanced notice”.

“I think there is a general acceptance in the tourism industry, as well as across WA, that sooner or later we need to move to resume interstate travel,” he said.

“When and how you do that is the issue and I think for WA, when you’re Covid-free you have to make a conscious choice to not be Covid-free so I think that’s what WA is grappling with.”

While McGowan has made much of the state’s economy “thriving” despite the border closures, Hall said many tourism operators were struggling from the financial and emotional strain.

“I think a lot of business are really financially distressed and frankly they’re reporting being emotionally distressed and some of that is the lack of concern about the state their businesses are in,” he said.

“I’ll be frank, part of it’s a lack of concern, not just from the government but from the community. There’s, I think, a lack of empathy for the business owners but also for their employees and the industries that depend on them.”