Category Archives: New South Wales

Japanese encephalitis declared disease of national significance – as it happened

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Rex Patrick to reveal political intentions tomorrow after Nick Xenophon announces run for Senate; Japanese encephalitis declared disease of national significance; Liberals select candidate for Bennelong; fifth arrest this week over climate crisis protest; Morrison says having Putin at G20 ‘a step too far’; at least 35 Covid deaths recorded. This blog is now closed

Here’s the latest on that rain to come, which is already hitting Sydney.

Australia is risking its economic security in a future crisis by being too dependent on foreign-flagged commercial ships, a former navy chief, Tim Barrett, has warned.

When push comes to shove, the place where the ship is registered is king. They can tell their ships where to go, what to do and what to carry. We don’t have an ability to do that except for the handful we have left.

To be entirely dependent on others is very concerning.

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Australia news live update: NSW government seeks to suspend MP facing charges; nation records 26 Covid deaths

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NSW government seeks to suspend Gareth Ward; Craig Foster lashes treatment of asylum seekers in National Press Club address; new research suggests long-lasting Covid immune response from vaccine-induced T-cells; at least 26 Covid deaths recorded; Atagi expected to green light fourth booster shots for some Australians. Follow all the day’s news live

David Koch:

Have you spoken to the “mean girls” – Kristina Keneally, Penny Wong – in the last week or so since Kimberly Kitching’s death about the allegations of bullying?

I think that term is really unfortunate.

She used it, it is not just us.

There is a lot of people speaking on other people’s behalf at the moment. I think that in politics, there are a range of people who are involved in party politics who play it pretty hard. One of those was Kimberly Kitching. She was somebody who engaged in politics and was passionate about her belief and from time to time that could produce some conflict. But it needs to be done in a way that is respectful, in a way that is understanding, and attempts to reach consensus.

It is rather bizarre ... I am always available and indeed I lobby regularly to be on the Sunrise program. I am always happy to discuss things with the media, but I won’t be taking lectures from a prime minister who visited Lismore and had strict streets shut off so victims of floods could not get near him.

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Climate change spat splits Lismore council in flood aftermath

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Motion thanking community should not be ‘political’ and reference to climate change was ‘piss poor’, councillor says

The Lismore council was gripped by in-fighting on Tuesday night over whether it should make references to “climate change” following the flood disaster and an eleventh-hour decision to pause its work on flood mitigation, despite warnings the “optics” of doing so were “not good”.

The disaster-ravaged town is still in the early stages of recovering from an unprecedented 14.37-metre flood, which wiped out thousands of homes and businesses and brought Lismore to its knees.

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Woman threatened by stranger with photos of her and Ben Roberts-Smith having sex, court told

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Woman who had affair with former SAS soldier tells defamation trial she was ‘simultaneously in love and afraid of him’

A woman who had an affair with Ben Roberts-Smith has told a court she was confronted by a stranger who showed her photos of her having sex with Roberts-Smith in a hotel room, and threatened to make them public if she didn’t confess the affair to the veteran’s wife.

The woman, anonymised before the court as Person 17, gave evidence about the torrid end of her affair with Roberts-Smith to the federal court Wednesday morning, saying she was “scared” he would “seek payback”.

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NSW Liberal MP criticised after speaking at anti-vaccination rally

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Tanya Davies says her government needs to end vaccine mandates, sparking criticism from Labor

The New South Wales Liberal MP Tanya Davies has hit out at her government over its Covid vaccination mandates for the public sector, claiming she has been working with the premier, Dominic Perrottet, to end them and get people back into jobs.

Speaking at an anti-vaccination rally outside parliament on Tuesday, the former minister said she was “dismayed” when her government introduced the measure and called for a return to “freedom”.

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SA hospitals under ‘extraordinary strain’; Perrottet asks MP to resign after charges – as it happened

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NSW MP Gareth Ward denies historic sexual abuse allegations; South Australian hospital system ‘under extraordinary strain’ new premier says, as at least 23 Covid deaths recorded nationally; Anthony Albanese proposes award in late Victorian senator Kimberley Kitching’s honour. This blog is now closed

Peter Malinauskas has promised to keep his shirt on from now on, after a photo of his muscled torso made quite a stir in the world of Australian politics.

ABC radio host Patricia Karvelas:

During the campaign, you were photographed shirtless in swimming shorts, and it caused a bit of a stir. I have to ask you ... the Australian’s Greg Sheridan said jokingly on [ABC] Insiders that you’re “far too good looking”. Which I thought was quite a statement. What have you made of the reaction to that picture?

Do you have any idea how much grief I’ve copped around the place as a result of that?

Have they told you just to buff to be premier?

They’ve piled it on, let me tell you. I haven’t stopped copping it, and I deserve every bit of it.

We were announcing a big investment at our major aquatics centre here in South Australia and a whole bunch of us jumped in for a swim in our boardies with our kids there. And, yeah, it got a bit more attention than I anticipated, fair to say.

So you’re going to keep your shirt on from now on?

Damn straight!

I think we’re about to see a federal election where a cost of living is a front and centre issue. And I think Australians get the price of petrol, but they can’t control the price of groceries.

The way we address cost of living as a nation is to start having an incomes policy focus on how we improve working in small businesses to improve the productivity of their labour, so they can earn a higher income. And that’s why education, training and skills is so important.

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Australia news live update: mourners farewell Kimberley Kitching; Peter Malinauskas sworn in as SA premier; six Covid deaths recorded

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Labor senator Kimberley Kitching’s funeral held in Melbourne; Peter Malinauskas sworn in as new SA premier; Morrison and Palaszczuk announce infrastructure funding package; Lismore flood victims to dump debris at protest; at least six Covid deaths recorded. Follow all the day’s news

For almost four years Suzanna Sheed has started each parliamentary sitting week by moving the same motion.

The independent MP for Shepparton, a rural electorate of almost 50,000 people in northern Victoria, asks for a non-government business program to be reinstated in the state’s lower house.

They’re having a real impact on people right now, so we’ve been conscious of that. But what we do as a government is we don’t have knee-jerk reactions, we think through carefully how we can best provide the sort of support that we believe the federal government can deliver.

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Flood-affected Lismore residents with nowhere to go return to homes deemed uninhabitable

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Exclusive: Multiple families who evacuated during the NSW floods left with no choice but to move back home in recent days

Residents in Lismore have been left with no choice but to move back into their houses that have been deemed uninhabitable, with some sleeping on swags in mouldy rooms without electricity, as they are unable to find safe accommodation three weeks after floods devastated the town.

In South Lismore – a low-lying part of the town that bore the brunt of historic flooding this year and an area well known for attracting residents seeking affordable housing – Guardian Australia spoke with multiple residents who had evacuated town following the floods but had returned to their homes in recent days.

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Josh Frydenberg open to intervening in insurance market as climate change pushes up premiums

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Treasurer says he’s conscious premiums too high for many people in disaster-prone areas, but says more work needed on a proposal to extend reinsurance scheme

Josh Frydenberg has flagged he is “open” to further market interventions making insurance more affordable, but says more preparatory work will need to be done before the Morrison government would extend its $10bn cyclone reinsurance pool in northern Australia to cover more natural disasters.

In an interview with Guardian Australia ahead of the budget on 29 March, the treasurer said he was conscious that a changing climate rendered insurance problematic in some parts of Australia.

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Against the foil of the Morrison government, Dominic Perrottet’s flood response has been pragmatic

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The NSW government knows the more it is held up against the Coalition in Canberra, the better it looks despite its own shortcomings

It’s hard to imagine many inside the New South Wales government were particularly upset with veteran Nationals backbencher Geoff Provest when he aimed both barrels at the prime minister over his response to the state’s flood disaster this week.

Hardly the state government’s most prominent attack dog, Provest did not miss in his assessment of Scott Morrison after his north coast electorate of Tweed was inexplicably excluded from extra disaster funding announced by the prime minister last week.

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Farmers welcome provision of extra flood relief funding in NSW – as it happened

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Inquest into death of Warlpiri man Kumanjayi Walker to start in September; call for inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women; advice for asthma sufferers during flood clean-up; at least 26 Covid deaths recorded. This blog is now closed

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg is on the telly now (hope he’s saving some juicy bits for his speech later). He’s talking about this idea of returning to some sort of pre-Covid fiscal world. He says:

As you know, we recalibrated our budget strategy when the pandemic first hit and we needed to do that to ensure there was sufficient economic support with programs like jobkeeper, the cash flow boosts, the $750 payments to pensioners, carer, and those on income support. That helped stabilise the economy by opening up the purse strings. Now that the recovery is well underway and the unemployment rate is down to a 14-year low of 4%, it is time to move to the next phase of the budget strategy and that means stabilising debt and then reducing debt as a proportion of the overall economy, and ending those crisis-level, emergency economic support programs.

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Motor homes for flood-affected Lismore residents empty while more temporary housing yet to arrive

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Exclusive: Linen and water sources have not been organised for the homes, leaving locals waiting in evacuation centres

Motor homes intended for Lismore residents whose houses were inundated in this month’s floods are lying empty because linen and water sources have not been organised, while housing “pods” promised by the New South Wales government are yet to materialise.

The measures were announced as part of a temporary housing package last week, but three weeks on from the flood, thousands of locals are still living in evacuation centres due to the lacklustre speed of official support.

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‘Just not the right time’: Victoria urged to keep mask rules for key workers

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Epidemiologists say calls by business to relax mask rules as case numbers escalate is ‘down the rabbit hole thinking’

Victorian business leaders pushing to scrap mask mandates for hospitality and retail workers are “clearly not following the trend” in rising cases, according to epidemiologists who say now is not the time to relax rules.

The state’s premier, Daniel Andrews, on Thursday rejected a push from the Australian Hotels Association, the Australian ­Retailers Association and the Victorian Chamber of Commerce and Industry who told the Herald Sun they wanted national consistency on mask mandates and warned workers could leave the sectors for other jobs.

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Australia live news updates: call for inquiry into NSW flood response; at least 22 Covid deaths recorded

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AFLW final postponed after Covid outbreak; NSW Labor calls for inquiry into flood response; Ukraine embassy calls for Australian sanctions against two Russian oligarchs; at least 22 Covid deaths recorded. Follow all the day’s news live

From senior economics reporter Ben Butler and foreign affairs and defence correspondent Daniel Hurst:

Ukraine’s embassy in Canberra has joined calls for the Australian government to sanction two Russian oligarchs who have assets here, Oleg Deripaska and Viktor Vekselberg.

The government of Ukraine is grateful to the government of Australia for its proactive and extensive sanctions policy against Russia, which is the biggest among the Indo-Pacific countries ...

We hope that those Russian oligarchs will be included in the next round of sanctions.

Vekselberg has already been sanctioned by the British and US governments. It’s curious that the Australian government has not yet followed suit given its claims of being in lockstep with the US and UK.

Vekselberg’s interest in Falcon pre-dates Origin’s farm-in agreement agreed in 2015, so Origin was entered into the joint venture with eyes wide open.

We certainly have had very limited capability to conduct experimental fires under extreme conditions. Nobody in their right mind is going to give us the go ahead to light a fire on a Black Saturday-type day ...

This lab means we’ll be able to study particular aspects of fire behaviour under the extreme conditions that are more likely to occur under climate change.

By using the data collected by the pyrotron, our prediction tools become more accurate. And that means better decision making about where firefighters can safely go, what firefighting strategies to use, and also improved emergency warnings for communities.

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‘Targeted discrimination’: NSW government rejects Mark Latham’s trans bill

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Proposals included a ban on transgender school students from confidentially coming out and restrictions on sports and toilets

The New South Wales government has confirmed it will not support One Nation MP Mark Latham’s controversial bill to ban discussion of gender diversity in classrooms, saying it could cause “targeted discrimination” against trans students.

First put forward in 2020, Latham’s “Parental Rights” bill sought to prohibit teachers from discussing “the ideology of gender fluidity to children in schools” and prevent schools from supporting transgender students without parental consent.

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‘Streets were flowing’: Broken Hill reeling after record rainfall and deadly flash flooding

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Man killed while trying to help friends as sudden downpour damaged roads and footpaths

Broken Hill, in far western New South Wales, has been left reeling after record rainfall led to a drowning death and damaged roads and footpaths.

The State Emergency Service was called to several flood rescues after up to 140mm of rain fell on parts of the city on Tuesday afternoon.

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Seventh Japanese encephalitis case in NSW; nation records 17 Covid deaths – as it happened

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PM highlights China’s ‘chilling silence’ on Russian invasion as Labor says China has ‘responsibility’ to call out Putin’s actions; NSW Health confirms seventh case of Japanese encephalitis; man in court over Sydney boarding house fire; Coalition to spend $243m on four mining projects; a man has died in Broken Hill after driving his ute into flood waters; nation records at least 17 Covid deaths. This blog is now closed

NSW Health has added the results from 10,000 additional positive rapid antigen tests to its official numbers after a data error meant they were left out.

The results were registered between Sunday 13 March and Monday 14 March, with NSW Health warning the numbers will “inflate the cases being reported today for the 24 hours to 4pm yesterday (Tuesday)”.

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Covid cases rise sharply in NSW to more than 30,000 with data glitch only partly to blame

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Victoria also recorded its highest daily coronavirus case total in five weeks as the more-infectious Omicron subvariant spreads

Covid-19 cases have spiked dramatically in New South Wales, with 30,402 new infections recorded, but authorities say it’s at least partly due to a data glitch.

NSW Health says about 10,000 positive rapid antigen tests registered between Sunday and Monday are included in figures released on Wednesday due to a data processing problem.

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Man charged with murder after three die in Sydney boarding house fire

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A 45-year-old man has been charged with three counts of murder after the fire in the inner west suburb of Newtown on Tuesday

A man has been charged with three counts of murder following a fire in a boarding house in Newtown in New South Wales on Tuesday.

The 45-year-old man, who police say was a former resident of the boarding house, was also charged with one count of destroying or damaging property by fire or explosive.

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Fresh court challenge filed in Liberal party’s NSW preselection stoush

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Infighting over preselecting candidates for the federal election previously led to a special committee briefly taking over the NSW branch

The Liberal party’s infighting over preselecting federal candidates is heading back to the supreme court after a member of the NSW state executive began fresh legal action on Tuesday, challenging the federal party’s intervention to save two ministers and a sitting MP.

A member of the NSW state executive, Matthew Camenzuli, has filed in the NSW supreme court a challenge to the endorsement of the sitting MPs, which was achieved last week by a brief takeover of the troubled NSW branch by a special committee appointed by the federal party.

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