Category Archives: Australia news

Australia news live: Dan Andrews moved to trauma ward; Qantas chief highlights risk of long-term border closure

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Gladys Berejiklian receives the AstraZeneca jab; Qantas chief Alan Joyce warns tourists and students could abandon Australia. Follow latest updates

Cairns hospital called a code yellow on Tuesday due to an influx of patients, including a number of Covid-19 payments from Papua New Guinea.

More from AAP:

More than 260 people presented at the emergency department on Tuesday, with road crash victims adding to increased pressure on services.

“A sustained high number of presentations to the ED, alongside a spike in trauma admissions and several patients needing isolation for Covid-19 had led to the hospital declaring a Code Yellow,” the hospital said in a statement on Wednesday.

News that the Hong Kong legislator Ted Hui is settling in Australia after being granted a travel exemption by the Australian government is unlikely to go down well in Beijing.

When Guardian Australia contacted the Chinese embassy in Canberra for comment on the matter, an official pointed us to remarks made by the foreign ministry spokesperson in Beijing last week. The foreign ministry spokesperson, Wang Wenbin, told reporters Monday last week:

China’s position on Hong Kong-related issues is consistent and clear. Hong Kong is China’s Hong Kong, and every bit of Hong Kong affairs belongs to China’s internal affairs, in which no other country has the right to interfere.

The Chinese side urges the Australian side to stop meddling in Hong Kong’s affairs and China’s internal affairs in any way. Otherwise the China-Australia relations will only sustain further damage.

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Yallourn, one of Australia’s last brown coal power stations, to close early in favour of giant battery

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Power station produces 13% of Victoria’s and 3% of national emissions and employs 500 people

One of Australia’s dirtiest coal-fired power stations, Yallourn in Victoria’s Latrobe valley, will close four years earlier than scheduled and be replaced, in part, by a grid-scale battery.

EnergyAustralia announced on Wednesday it would shut the 1970s-built, 1,480-megawatt brown coal plant in mid-2028.

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Australia in Colour: recolourised film ushers into existence a new kind of fiction

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As the new series of SBS’s film revitalisation project airs, Guardian Australia’s film critic considers the consequences of this trend in film-making

Paolo Cherchi Usai – the Italian curator and former head of the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia (NFSA) – once put forward an elegant definition of moving image preservation, calling it “the science of gradual loss and the art of coming to terms with its consequences”. Those melancholic words present the dispossession of our celluloid and digital pasts as inevitable, and efforts to maintain them a will-o’-the-wisp exercise: impossible to achieve, like reaching the gold at the end of the rainbow.

But loss is far from the first thing that comes to mind after watching the second season of SBS’s four-part documentary series Australia in Colour. Separated into different themes, the first episode is devoted to family, exploring issues such as changing gender roles, the stolen generations and the arrival of contraceptive pills; the second, about sport, investigates national heroes and drinking culture.

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Kylie Moore-Gilbert says Australian government should have gone public with her case earlier

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British-Australian academic also talks about impact of solitary confinement, saying it was like a ‘prolonged anxiety attack’

Kylie Moore-Gilbert believes she never would have been sentenced to 10 years jail on spying charges in Iran if the Australian government had gone public with her case earlier to pressure Tehran.

The British-Australian academic – who was released after a little more than two years in a complex prisoner swap involving four countries – said the Australian government’s strategy of “quiet diplomacy”, deliberately shielding her case from the media, while pursuing negotiations with Iran’s government, was flawed.

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Freedom of information: Coalition’s refusal to reveal national cabinet discussions challenged

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Australian Conservation Foundation to file test case to access documents on approvals fast-tracked by federal environment minister

The Morrison government’s claim that national cabinet deliberations are exempt from freedom of information laws will be challenged in the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, setting up a test over the new body’s immunity from scrutiny.

The Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) will file a case with the tribunal as it seeks to access information on at least 15 environmental approvals “fast-tracked” by the federal environment minister, Sussan Ley, a task so far stymied by the government’s insistence the documents fall under traditional cabinet rules.

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Australia news live: NSW reaches 50 days without a local Covid-19 case; virus detected in Adelaide wastewater

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SA Health says positive Covid-19 wastewater results may be linked to hotel quarantine, but further investigations are under way. Follow the latest updates

Queensland premier Annastacia Palaszczuk has defended the pace of the vaccine rollout saying it can only be rolled out as fast as it’s being supplied by the federal government, reports AAP.

Queensland gave 6,300 people their first doses of the Pfizer jab last week, against a target of 3,000, but there’s been media criticism of the state’s slow rollout compared with other states.

All of this is being done in consultation with the Commonwealth, so please don’t disrespect the process...

We want to get it right, we want it to be rolled out smoothly, and of course we are making sure that the people have the adequate training to do this.

We are adapting very quickly to the numbers that we’re getting, but the Commonwealth are adjusting these numbers on a regular basis how much we’ll get.

And in some cases, as in the figures I was given like last week, we’re getting triple what we expected and they have to last us for a few weeks because they can’t necessarily guarantee (how much) we’re going to get each week.

Wentworth Liberal MP Dave Sharma’s idea for International Women’s Day seems to have backfired this morning after he handed out what I believe are pink carnations to women.

Sharma tweeted this out this morning:

Happy International Women’s Day.

Let’s make it a day when we strive to improve the respect, dignity and equality for every woman, everywhere.#internationalwomensday2021 #IWD2021 pic.twitter.com/pbpqfGdzp7

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Going anywhere: Australian mystery holidays are back from the 1990s

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Novelty trips to unknown destinations have become a surprise hit for airlines and travel agents, as all travel remains uncertain

There’s a lot to consider when booking a holiday these days. Will state borders stay open? What restrictions are in place? Is it safe? Is it worth the risk?

The uncertainty has many Australians staying close to home; it’s been a huge summer for regional road trips. But others are seizing new opportunities, strapping themselves into planes and hurtling into the great unknown.

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Linda Reynolds extends sick leave amid ongoing controversy over Brittany Higgins

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The defence minister, who has apologised for calling Higgins a ‘lying cow’, is being treated for a pre-existing medical condition

Defence minister Linda Reynolds has extended her sick leave and is not expected to return to work this week.

Reynolds took a period of medical leave on 24 February, amid sustained pressure over her handling of the alleged rape of her former staffer, Brittany Higgins, in the minister’s office.

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How we stay together: ‘It’s within those storms that you aim for the sun’

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From fairytale beginning to unimaginable tragedy, Valentino and Carly Giannoni have been through a lot in two decades together

Names: Valentino and Carly Giannoni
Years together: 20
Occupations: Self-employed

Carly and Valentino Giannoni’s relationship had a picture book start. In 2000, Carly, a twenty-something Australian, went backpacking around Europe. While she was in Italy, she wanted to visit Cinque Terre, the picturesque fishing villages on the Italian Riveria, overlooking the Mediterranean. She found herself in the pretty hamlet of Vernazza and rented a room from Luciano, a local who would turn out to be a fairy godfather of sorts.

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‘A lot of uncertainty’: imams fighting Covid misinformation in Australia’s Muslim community

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A fatwa pronounces both the Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines as halal for Muslims

Whenever imam Alaa Elzokm comes across conspiracy theories – whether in person or online – he bridles at their poor sourcing.

“It[’s] always from people who say ‘people say this, people say that’, but never from an actual expert,” he says.

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Kathleen Folbigg: how genetics could lead to a pardon for ‘Australia’s worst female serial killer’

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She has always maintained her four children died of natural causes. Now 90 scientists argue she may be right

Leading scientific experts are petitioning for the pardon of the woman dubbed Australia’s worst female serial killer, arguing that all four of her children had rare genetic conditions that could explain their deaths.

Kathleen Folbigg is in jail for killing her children as infants between 1990 and 1999.

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Barnaby Joyce says some of Christian Porter’s colleagues want his ‘head on a plate’

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Nationals MP says attorney general should seek independent inquiry into rape allegations

Nationals MP Barnaby Joyce has made a plea for an independent inquiry into rape allegations against Christian Porter, saying many people, including some Liberal MPs, want his “head on a plate”.

Porter, the attorney general, is on mental health leave this week and has strongly denied raping a woman when they were both teenagers in 1988.

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Sarah Hanson-Young on the reckoning of parliament – Australian politics podcast

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After a turbulent two weeks in parliament, Katharine Murphy talks to Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young about her experiences in fighting toxic cultures in the workplace. They discuss the ways women in the spotlight can be supported, and whether the domino-like effect will continue

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Australia news live: Scott Morrison speaking after national cabinet meeting

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Sex discrimination commissioner to lead review of parliament culture; Italy blocks 250,000 doses of Covid vaccine under the EU’s export authorisation scheme. Follow latest updates

Morrison has moved on from Covid-19, and is being asked about other matters, including Linda Reynolds’ comments about Brittany Higgins.

Minister Reynolds has offered an apology, as she should. And as I said yesterday. And I didn’t find that acceptable, the comments that were made within her office at that time. They weren’t public statements, of course. These were comments made not in a public space... That doesn’t excuse them. And it was relating... she was not talking about the allegations of sexual assault.

Linda Reynolds is returning. She’s currently on leave and will return to her duties when her leave is finished. She maintains my confidence.

Morrison is also asked about the education sector, and whether that was a consideration when discussing international arrival caps and quarantine facilities. In short, no change, but if universities want to reach agreements with government, they’re willing to chat.

No, there’s no change on that front. It would be good if we could get to that point, but at this stage we’re not at that point. The opening of the international borders, we don’t think is wise at this time, and for the period that we’ve suggested, and that’s totally consistent with the medical advice. And we’ve always been happy to work with the international education sector if they want to put in place supplementary self-funded quarantine arrangements and flight arrangements. That has always been there for the international education industry, the large universities and others to go down that path. They haven’t chosen to go down that path. Our focus has remained on the responsibilities we have as a commonwealth.

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‘Not a suitable candidate’: climate groups urge OECD not to appoint Mathias Cormann as next head

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A letter signed by 29 experts and activist groups says Cormann’s climate record should rule him out of secretary-general’s job

International climate change groups and influential advisers on the global shift from fossil fuels have written to the OECD expressing “grave concerns” over Australian politician Mathias Cormann’s bid to be its next secretary-general.

Former Australian finance minister Cormann’s record in a government that “persistently failed to take effective action” to cut emissions while blocking international action meant he was “not a suitable candidate”, the letter says.

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Dr Seuss’s legacy of kindness has only been bolstered by his estate’s decision

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We make changes to children’s books all the time. It’s important to ask: does the cultural value of this book outweigh the potential harm?

Children’s literature sits at an awkward crossroads, where it is expected to be art, education and moral instruction. Children’s books are designed to teach our kids to read, to teach them about the world, about themselves and their bodies, about how to be kind, about society’s morals and values.

This is true of all children’s literature, but it is particularly true of books by Theodor Seuss Geisel (Dr Seuss), which do all these things deliberately and explicitly. Which is why I’m not at all surprised that Seuss’s estate has decided to cease publication of six titles due to their racist portrayal of people of colour. To do otherwise would be disrespectful to Seuss’s legacy of kindness and empathy.

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Scientists call for Kathleen Folbigg’s release, saying children likely died of natural causes

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A group of eminent scientists has cast doubt on the guilt of Kathleen Folbigg, jailed in 2003 for killing four of her children

Prominent scientists are calling for the release of convicted New South Wales child killer Kathleen Folbigg, saying there’s strong evidence she is innocent.

Folbigg was jailed in 2003 for murdering her children Patrick, Sarah and Laura, and for the manslaughter of her son Caleb.

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Facebook and Twitter say Australia wants to give regulator too much power in bid to combat online bullying

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The social media giants raise concerns about the eSafety commissioner’s investigative powers and lack of oversight

Facebook and Twitter have raised concern controversial new legislation aimed at curbing bullying and governing online activity will give Australia’s eSafety commissioner too much power over speech online with little oversight.

The online safety bill, introduced into parliament last week, is aimed at giving a broad range of powers to the eSafety commissioner to target bullying and harassment online, extending existing powers protecting children from online bullying to adults, as well as powers over abhorrent violent and terrorist material and adult content online and on social media in Australia.

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