Category Archives: New South Wales

NSW weather live: Warragamba Dam set to spill over as Sydneysiders urged to stay home amid flooding, heavy rain

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More than 400mm falls on parts of mid north coast as flash floods hit state

Bureau of Meteorology senior climatologist Agata Imielska also announced some rainfall records had been broken in the last day.

She said for the mid north coast and Hunter region, rainfall has broken previous May records by as much as 200mm.

To give you context of the rainfall, we have seen 405mm recorded at Kendall. So that’s a record heaviest rainfall that we’ve seen. Also, 371mm at Red Oak.

And it’s not just the total rainfall amount, it’s also how quickly and intensely that rainfall has actually fallen. So we had 160mm fall in just three hours at Kindie Bridge that resulted in also a record river height at that particular location.”

Sydney’s Warragamba Dam is set to spill over this afternoon and combine with river flows to potentially cause flooding across western Sydney.

The Bureau of Meteorology national flood services manager, Justin Robinson, delivered the warning at a press conference in Sydney just now. I’ll share the updates from that over a few posts here.

It’s a very dynamic and evolving flood situation and we could see some very deep and rapid responding rivers with very high levels.

Warragamba dam is right at spilling point. Good luck to those downstream in Western Sydney. Here's the capacity of the dam over the past month: pic.twitter.com/yn3vtOny2u

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‘You can’t escape the smell’: mouse plague grows to biblical proportions across eastern Australia

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Locals who have endured months of mice and rats getting into their houses, stores and cars are praying heavy rain will help wipe them out
Warning: graphic images may disturb some readers

Drought, fire, the Covid-19 pestilence and an all-consuming plague of mice. Rural New South Wales has faced just about every biblical challenge nature has to offer in the last few years, but now it is praying for another – an almighty flood to drown the mice in their burrows and cleanse the blighted land of the rodents. Or some very heavy rain, at least.

It seems everyone in the rural towns of north-west NSW and southern Queensland has their own mouse war story. In posts online, they detail waking up to mouse droppings on their pillows or watching the ground move at night as hundreds of thousands of rodents flee from torchlight beams.

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Australia news live: federal clinics open vaccine bookings to ease pressure on GPs; ‘dangerous’ rainfall continues along NSW coast

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More than 100 federally funded clinics will take bookings for Covid-19 jabs from Friday and will begin administering them from Monday. Follow latest updates

This is Elias Visontay bringing you this morning’s main stories: some Covid vaccine developments, a growing political feud, and misogyny culture in the spotlight across the globe.

The AstraZeneca vaccine is “safe and effective”, Europe’s medicines regulator has said, but it will continue to study possible links between the shot and a rare blood clotting disorder. Australian doctors have complained about vaccine supply issues but, from Monday, an additional 6.14 million Australians will be eligible to receive the jab – here’s how to to find out if you’re one of them, and how to book. Australia’s economic performance is also under scrutiny, as the worst performer on a list of the world’s 50 largest economies for “green recovery” spending to kickstart economic growth after the pandemic.

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Mood killer killed off: NSW punters allowed to resume ‘vertical drinking’ in pubs and clubs

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People have stood at bars once again – but there remains a fine line between standing and dancing, which is still banned

New South Wales residents are now allowed to stand with their drinks in bars, following the latest easing of Covid-19 restrictions.

“This is what life is all about,” the New South Wales treasurer, Dominic Perrottet, said while holding a Guinness on Wednesday.

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Australia news live: Crown ends all political donations; pressure builds on Morrison to listen to women

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After 100,000 women marched for justice on Monday, the federal government faces scrutiny over whether it’s listening. Follow all today’s latest news and updates, live

Mike Bowers has been busy this morning.

Scott Morrison’s address to the joint party room spoke about the March4Justice issues, as well as the wider concerns about harassment and abuse at work, included a comparison to the Kokoda Trail.

He said, according to Sky News’ Andrew Clennell,

He actually compared it to walking the Kokoda Trail, is what I’ve been told out of the party room and said we are on a narrow path, we have to look after each other and focus on what matters.”

You wonder how you’ve got over the first hill and the next one’s even bigger.

That’s what it’s like in the pandemic,” he said, citing the next hill as being weaning the economy off government support.

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Australia politics live: organisers of March4Justice rally reject PM’s offer of closed door meeting

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More than 100,000 women are expected to march in Canberra, Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane to demand action in response to allegations of workplace abuse. Follow latest updates

Michael McCormack Michael McCormacked his way through an interaction with Janine Hendry this morning, when she asked him for action - and for change.

He ‘can’t give that assurance’.

#March4Justiceau organiser @janine_hendry bumped into Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack in the Parliament corridors ... here's how it ended. @10NewsFirst #auspol pic.twitter.com/fnkr3nam0h

Janine Hendry, a founder and organiser of the March4Justice, explained to the ABC this morning about why organisers turned down Scott Morrison’s offer of a private meeting with a small number of march delegates:

I think it is really quite disrespectful to the women whose voices need to be heard to have a meeting with our prime minister behind closed doors.

I have invited the prime minister, as I have all other sitting members of parliament, to come and march with us, to come and listen to our voices. I don’t think it is really a big ask – we have come to Canberra.

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Outage locks customers out of Service NSW Covid check-in app

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Users told their pin was incorrect when they tried to log in to the state’s official contact-tracing app

New South Wales residents were left unable to check in to restaurants and other venues on Thursday afternoon using the state’s official Covid check-in app, Service NSW, after it went offline.

The outage lasted about four hours and affected the official Service NSW app, although Service NSW said its coronavirus webform check-in was not impacted.

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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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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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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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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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Australia news live: accused cabinet minister set to address rape allegation; international borders closed until June

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Minister expected to declare his innocence and is not planning on stepping down. Follow latest updates

• Full report: cabinet minister to make statement addressing historical rape allegation against him
• Australia’s Covid vaccine tracker: when will you get your jab?

Labor’s assistant shadow treasurer, Andrew Leigh, has been on Sydney radio contrasting the government’s attitude towards companies that got jobkeeper and welfare recipients it pursued in its unlawful and botched robodebt scheme.

At Leigh’s request, auditor-general Grant Hehir is investigating the administration of the $100bn job subsidy scheme, and yesterday Leigh asked for the probe to be extended to touch on stevedore Qube, which got $30m in jobkeeper.

But the bulk of Australian firms haven’t handed it back, and they haven’t received the pressure to do so because the Treasurer hasn’t come out and been clear about how the JobKeeper scheme operated...

In terms of the government, we gave Josh Frydenberg extraordinary latitude to tweak JobKeeper where it wasn’t working as intended. But he hasn’t used that at all to prevent money flowing to shareholders and executives. He’s been as silent on this as the government was noisy about RoboDebt, clawing money out of the hands of social security recipients in an illegal approach.

Attention at the Albanese press conference has now turned to the historic rape allegation levelled against a (currently unnamed) cabinet minister in the Liberal government.

Albanese has been asked if he thinks the minister should stand down:

Quite clearly, this woman told multiple people, including people in public life, but also her friends that she wanted an investigation of this. It is very clear [the government] are pretending that this will go away, it will not ...

It is very clear that, in my mind, that this will require further leadership and action ... and I await the statement by the minister involved, the presumption of innocence is a critical part of our legal system but now that the existing legal processes have been unable to proceed, certainly in terms of NSW police, I think people will be looking for further responses beyond any statement that might be made today by the minister.

I was very disappointed by Scott Morrison’s statement yesterday where he said that he hadn’t read the documentation that was forwarded to him by the woman who was at the centre of the allegation who then took her own life by her friends.

He then also said, essentially, that he had spoken to the minister and that he believed the minister. That stands in stark contrast to what Scott Morrison said in May of 2019. About the need to believe people. Who come forward.

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‘It’s a funeral march’: French artist JR’s powerful eulogy for Australia’s Murray-Darling

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Exclusive: The street artist’s latest work saw 60 people parade through Lake Cawndilla in NSW, holding aloft enormous portraits of local farmers and leaders as they fight to save Australia’s vital river system

The mood around Lake Cawndilla in western New South Wales on Saturday is funereal but defiant, as a procession of around 60 locals parade through scrub and sand around its banks.

They carry between them a series of 30m-long cloth figures: three local citrus farmers and prominent Baakandji artist William Badger Bates.

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‘Get the trees back’: NSW minister wanted ‘clearance zone’ around highways after bushfires

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Andrew Constance confirms he demanded the now-sacked transport department head to fell trees 40 metres either side of highways but was refused

The New South Wales transport minister, Andrew Constance, demanded the now-sacked head of his department create an 80-metre “clearance zone” around highways after the 2020 bushfires, an order Labor says could have resulted in countless trees being felled if followed.

During the state’s budget estimates hearings on Thursday, Constance confirmed he had issued the directive to the former department head, Rodd Staples, following last summer’s bushfire crisis.

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When Daft Punk went to Wee Waa: the strangest album launch of all time

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The tiny Australian town was surprised but got into the spirit, selling daft pork sausages and random access rissoles while celebrating a dusty agricultural show it will never forget

In April 2013 word got out that Daft Punk planned to launch their album Random Access Memories from a regional Australian town barely anyone had heard of.

Dubbed the “cotton capital” of Australia, the small town (population 2,000) with the evocative name of Wee Waa in the Narrabri shire of New South Wales was not much known as a dance music hub. The news, which began with murmurs about Sony label reps scoping the area for locations, seemed just bizarre enough to be true. Daft Punk, after all, were never great adherents of the traditional album rollout – and, with the revered French duo announcing their split this week, it’s worth taking ourselves back to their strangest one.

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Australia news live: Covid vaccine rollout begins; more questions over rape allegations

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Phase 1a of the vaccine program starts today; questions about the government’s response to Brittany Higgins’ rape allegations dominate parliament. Follow all the latest news and updates, live
• Melbourne doctors under review for promoting discredited Covid treatment
• Australia’s first Covid vaccinations rollout out
• Follow the global liveblog

It’s another for the ‘always look at the bright side’ file.

From AAP:

The Morrison government has released the findings of an investigation that the environment minister, Sussan Ley, ordered into her own department over the export of rare and endangered Australian parrots to Germany.

The investigation was prompted by a 2018 investigation by Guardian Australia’s Lisa Cox and Berlin bureau chief Philip Oltermann.

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Australia’s travel bubble with New Zealand to resume as Victoria records no new Covid cases

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Quarantine-free travel for New Zealanders entering Australia will restart from Sunday

Australia’s coronavirus travel bubble with New Zealand will recommence on Sunday, the Department of Health has announced.

In a statement issued on Saturday afternoon, the department said “green zone” flights from New Zealand could resume at 12.01am on Sunday, subject to some conditions.

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What Australia has learned from a year of Covid hotel quarantine

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The strict 14-day hotel quarantine system has been key to keeping the nation’s coronavirus cases low, but major leaks and controversies have forced constant rethinks

Australia’s strict 14-day hotel quarantine system, and simultaneous stifling of its citizens’ ability to travel freely overseas, are widely acknowledged as a major factor in the nation’s successful containment of Covid-19, low death rate and ability to resume a semblance of pre-pandemic life.

However the nation’s quarantine regime has been progressively tightened in response to instances of the virus leaking out of hotels since the mandatory order was introduced for international arrivals from all countries in March last year.

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Australian Proud Boys sought combat-trained supporters to ‘arrest’ police at Covid lockdown protests

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Messages on anti-lockdown social media groups reveal role of the far-right group in Covid-related protests

The far-right Proud Boys in Australia sought people trained in combat to help confront police during anti-lockdown protests in Melbourne last year.

Amid repeated warnings from security agencies in Australia and overseas about the way far-right groups have used the Covid-19 pandemic to recruit, Guardian Australia can reveal that senior members of the neo-fascist Proud Boys group were involved in protests during Melbourne’s second-wave lockdown last year.

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Productivity Commission says new Australian water deal must recognise climate change

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Federal and state governments are being urged to respond to the effects of the climate crisis and to Indigenous rights to water

States and the federal government should forge a new compact on water policy that explicitly recognises climate change, and which sets “triggers” for rapid policy responses, the Productivity Commission has said.

Releasing its draft report on national water reform, the commission has called for a substantial overhaul of the 17-year-old National Water Initiative, a bedrock document that commits the states and federal government to working together on water policy as well as outlining a work program for the future.

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