Former Australian Medical Association (AMA) president Kerryn Phelps made her feelings clear about the "nonsensical" mask debate on last night's episode of ABC's Q&A.

She was appearing on the panel with other medical practitioners, including respiratory physician Dr Lucy Morgan and clinical nurse Abbey Fistrovic and was initially asked whether or not she felt there should be criminal charges for people breaking quarantine.

Phelps deflected the legal question but made a call for all Australians to wear masks in public.

"The thing that we can do, which is such a simple thing, is to have everyone in the community in masks," the former AMA chief said.

"We need to anticipate that there will be a next wave in New South Wales.

"At the moment, the numbers are relatively low but there's nothing to say they will remain low."

Host Hamish McDonald inquired as to whether she thought masks should be "compulsory".

"We need to head towards them being compulsory," Dr Phelps said.

"We know with aerosol transmission now, airborne transmission, wearing a mask is some of the best protection that you can have — you protect yourself, you protect others.

"There's been a nonsensical debate for months now, which has been so frustrating because it has not been evidence-based about wearing masks.

"It is one of the single-most responsible things that we can do as members of the community to protect each other."

When asked a question about whether Australian families will be able to gather interstate at Christmas, she said that NSW would be well served if it shut its air border with Victoria.

"I'm concerned that there are still planes coming in from Melbourne to Sydney without any checking and with people just being asked to self-isolate in Sydney when they arrive," she said, to a question about whether Australian families will be able to gather interstate at Christmas.

"We don't know how many people are actually doing the self-isolating when they arrive.

"There are 17 planes coming from Sydney to Melbourne tomorrow [Tuesday] — that's not a closed border.

"We know there are thousands of active cases in Victoria, there could be up to 10 times as many people who are infected who don't know it and we're just letting people get on planes without having a test before they get on the plane, arriving in Sydney and dispersing into the community.

"NSW is on a precipice and unless we take it seriously and actually have an effective closed border, we are going to see leakage of these cases from Victoria over to New South Wales."