I guess you don't live on the border. The police have apparently stopped checking vehicles, and had their pictures taken with the 'last' one through.
I never needed a permit, as I'm a border resident. But I hated the way the checkpoints added hugely, and unpredictably, to travel times. Killed local businesses. And divided a city that is normally only nominally in two states. The option existed for the border closures to be done in such a way that the city wouldn't be divided, and that would have have minimal impact on the people who live there, but neither the Victorian nor NSW authorities chose that route. In both cases they chose the maximum impact, and in the case of the Victorians, added immensely to the inconvenience by forcing all traffic down to single lanes, on the same road that the NSW police had used three. The traffic jam was over the border, so I guess it wasn't their problem.