Category Archives: New South Wales

Coronavirus Australia live update: Victoria records seven new cases as Queensland opens borders to NSW from 1 November

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The government will announce tax and deregulation measures on Friday, as declining Covid-19 cases offer hope for economic revival. Follow all today’s news

Labor’s Julie Collins has responded to the aged care royal commission’s Covid response report:

I am sure the public will have very little confidence that this government, or the minister, is up to implementing these recommendations by 1 December because what we have seen is that when it came to the royal commission’s interim report, very unusual of a royal commission to actually issue an interim report, the very first recommendation – the first one was to fix the home care wait list.

Here we are 12 months later, [and there are] still [more than] 100,000 older Australians waiting for home care.

Linda Burney was on ABC Queensland radio talking about the people the jobseeker changes were going to affect the most.

It’s your mum, your grandmother, or their friends.

The reduction in the jobseeker allowance is going to disproportionately affect older women, particularly women who are over 60.

And it’s very hard for those women to find a job because you face age discrimination. All those – all those issues, of course, that we are familiar with older people trying to get a job.

Related: 'It's degrading': Australians on the poverty line brace for pain after jobseeker cuts

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NSW government wins battle to freeze pay of public servants for 12 months during pandemic

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The Industrial Relations Commission has supported the government’s plan to prioritise job creation, the NSW treasurer says

Unions will consider legal and industrial action after what they say was a “diabolical and disgraceful” decision by the New South Wales Industrial Relations Commission to award a 0.3% pay rise to public sector workers.

The commission made its decision on Thursday after the NSW government had pushed for a controversial 12-month freeze on public sector wages.

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Coronavirus Australia live update: Victoria reports four deaths and 13 new Covid cases as NSW records four

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NSW records no new locally acquired cases for fifth day as pressure mounts over border closures and budget speculation intensifies. Follow all today’s updates

In aviation news, the regional airline Rex has announced it will start flights between capital cities in 2021, as a competitor to Qantas and Virgin.

Rex has signed letters of intent to lease six Boeing 737 planes, which will fly between Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne, AAP reports.

Hi all, it is Naaman Zhou here. Thanks as always to Amy Remeikis for her blog captaining today.

Pokies profits dropped sharply during the first wave of the pandemic, but are still in the billions, according to new figures released today and reported by AAP.

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Coronavirus Australia live update: Victoria hotel quarantine inquiry finds private security decision influenced by police preference

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Melbourne’s stage four restrictions ease as Victoria records three deaths and five new Covid cases and NSW reports zero. Follow live

A man who had been deported to New Zealand, and who was in isolation at a government-run quarantine hotel, is under investigation by the police after he tied bed sheets together to escape the facility from a fourth floor window.

All travellers returning to the country – only New Zealanders and their families, plus others with special exemptions are allowed to pass through its borders – must spend two weeks in mandatory isolation, during which they are tested twice for Covid-19.

I am going to leave you in the very capable hands of Naaman Zhou for the rest of the afternoon shift.

There have been quite a few messages today – I am slowly working my way through them – but if you have anything else to say, or I missed you, you can contact me here and here.

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The music of the virus: sadness, relief and communal consolation

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We have a sense of what it means to live in disturbing times, to live under threat. We should not forget the many people who have known this all their lives

  • This is part of a series of essays by Australian writers responding to the challenges of 2020

One fine untroubled morning in 2019 I was out walking in Potts Point, on my way to see my eldest brother. He lived in a room here when I was 21 and he was 26. In those days, Potts Point was unconventional and impoverished, home to people who minded their own business, which was largely conducted at night.

His room was narrow, with a bed and a wardrobe housing a few shirts on wire hangers. A window opened on to a wall. There was a bathroom on the same floor. I could stay there when he was away; I could borrow a shirt. When he wasn’t away I stayed in a friend’s apartment on New South Head Road and walked to Potts Point to visit him. At the time, I was writing a thesis on the fiction of Samuel Beckett. As I wrote I grew more and more uneasy about the loss of this thesis, and I began to carry my work with me in a small suitcase for safekeeping. With my suitcase and my plain man’s shirt I wasn’t of much interest to the people on the street. I kept writing. The suitcase became heavier and heavier, for it now contained books and all my drafts. I carried it to my brother’s concerts. We began to share this burden, as we walked about the city. Once he stopped and put it down, flexing his fingers. “You do realise I make my living with my hands,” he said, before he picked it up again.

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‘We should not pretend everybody is suffering equally’: Covid hits Australia’s poor the hardest

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Disadvantaged areas already ravaged by the virus will be devastated when government subsidies are cut

If the slogan of 2020 is “We’re all in this together”, perhaps it should come with an asterisk: *except for those with less, who are hurting more.

Covid-19 hasn’t torn through Australia as it has the United States, Brazil, India and much of Europe, but the economic impact has exposed gaping inequities in almost every facet of our lives.

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Australia weather: cold front brings springtime snow and damaging winds to south-east

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Temperatures plummet as snowfall reported in parts of NSW, Victoria and the ACT

Springtime snow has fallen in parts of south-eastern Australia and a severe weather warning is in place as a cold front moves across New South Wales.

Damaging winds hit Sydney on Friday night, with winds of 115km/h recorded at Camden in the city’s south-west, while gusts reached 106km/h in the city.

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Coronavirus live updates Australia: Daniel Andrews to face Victoria hotel quarantine inquiry – latest news

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Victorian premier is the last witness who can shed light on the decision to use private security guards, as border restrictions ease around Australia. Follow live

Peter Dutton then followed up that comment, with this one:

Honestly when we had people who couldn’t go to their dad’s funeral and the same time the Premier was approving people from Hollywood to come in and lay by the pool for two weeks, why wouldn’t we call it out?

It was just unfair and it was unjust. It has now changed.

Peter Dutton was on the Nine Network this morning, talking the Queensland border closures:

I just think we want to work very closely together and we’ve been able to do that, and as the Deputy Commissioner pointed out, the ADF and Queensland Police have had a very longstanding relationship and a necessary one and the ADF personnel are going to provide support at the additional hotels that will be stood up to bring more Australians back from overseas. So that will be a very worthy task for them to be involved in. And already they’ve been involved in providing support to the Queensland Police at hotels where people are quarantining. So I think it was obvious yesterday that Dr Steven Miles, who really just picks a fight every day on this issue, I think back-tracked pretty quickly when he realised what he said was actually factually incorrect. And I think the Premier’s pulled him back into line.

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Coronavirus live updates Australia: NSW eases restrictions as Victoria records 12 new Covid cases and two deaths

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Victorian health minister Jenny Mikakos has told the hotel inquiry she had no role in the hiring of private security, while NSW Covid restrictions eased at schools and weddings. Follow live

And that includes a breakdown of the current cases and clusters:

In Victoria at the current time:

Victoria Health has put out its official update:

Victoria has recorded 12 new cases of coronavirus since yesterday, with the total number of cases now at 20,105.

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Corruption inquiry retrieves ex-NSW MP’s hard drive two years after staffer told ‘it gets lost in the post’

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Rebecca Cartwright tells anti-corruption watchdog she stored Daryl Maguire’s work computer in her parliament house office from 2018

A NSW government staffer didn’t reveal she was storing former Liberal MP Daryl Maguire’s parliamentary computer hard drive because it may have contained information that could implicate him, an inquiry has heard.

The government whip’s secretary, Rebecca Cartwright, on Wednesday told the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption (Icac) that she has been storing the hard drive in her parliament house office since 2018.

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NSW Nationals MP Leslie Williams to defect to Liberals over ‘politically reckless’ koala saga

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Port Macquarie MP’s move comes after Nationals MP John Barilaro threatened to implode the Coalition if concessions were not made over koala policy

The New South Wales Nationals MP Leslie Williams has quit the party as the fallout from the koala policy saga rolls on.

In a statement, the Port Macquarie MP revealed she has applied to join the NSW division of the Liberal party.

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Coronavirus Australia live update: Victoria reports 45 new Covid-19 cases and five more deaths

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Queensland to reopen border to ACT residents from 25 September as national cabinet split over flight caps. Follow live

Victoria police have fined 76 people over the past 24 hours, including eight for not wearing a face mask.

Examples include three men “located in a carpark with no legitimate reasons for being there” and one man and one woman who drove from Tarneit to St Kilda East “to buy fried chicken”.

Queensland will re-open its border to people from the ACT from 25 September, the health minister Steven Miles has just announced.

Queensland has announced no new cases today.

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Berejiklian warns Nationals against further public posturing over koala protection policy

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NSW premier implores John Barilaro to stick to agreement after he refused to rule out further threats to dismantle the Coalition

The New South Wales premier, Gladys Berejiklian, has made it clear she will not tolerate any further public posturing by the Nationals over koala habitat protections or new threats by the junior partner to leave the Coalition.

Berejiklian on Thursday also implored her Liberal colleagues to move on and refocus on their jobs following last week’s near split in the government, brought on by the Nationals leader, John Barilaro, threatening to move to the crossbenches with his MPs.

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Victoria records eight deaths and 42 new coronavirus cases, with 10 in NSW – as it happened

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South Australia opens up to ACT and Brett Sutton gives evidence at Victoria’s hotel quarantine inquiry. Follow all today’s developments

That’s it for our live coverage of coronavirus news and other developments in Australia. Thanks to Amy Remeikis for the earlier coverage. She’ll be back in the morning.

You can follow our global coverage here and there is a lot to follow. Outside Australia, the second wave is well and truly surging.

Australia’s cricket coach Justin Langer says he could “see the blood draining out of their faces” when his players were told about the quarantine periods in store for them in the coming months.

AAP reports the team was given the rundown ahead of tonight’s ODI series decider against England in Manchester.

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Covid Australia live update: Victoria records eight deaths and 42 new coronavirus cases, with 10 in NSW – latest news

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South Australia opens up to ACT and Brett Sutton gives evidence at Victoria’s hotel quarantine inquiry. Follow all today’s developments

The Australian National University has announced a restructure that will involve the loss of 465 positions.

Some 230 staff have already accepted voluntary separations, with a further 20 to come, but the ANU announced on Wednesday that there will need to be a further reduction of 215 positions.

All these cuts to Australia’s universities are going to have ongoing impacts for years

BREAKING: ANU has announced 230 staff have taken voluntary redundancies, another 20 are expected to follow in the coming weeks. ANU says Another 215 positions need to go as well. That is almost 500 jobs that will be lost at ANU due to #COVID19 #auspol @conorduffynews @abccanberra

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John Edwards inquest: clerk at gun registry scrolled past domestic violence allegations

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NSW Firearms Registry officer didn’t read into allegations on police profile during an assessment for gun training permit, court told

A NSW Firearms Registry clerk who told investigators John Edwards’ police profile hadn’t “rung alarm bells” for her has been forced to admit she didn’t properly look at the profile.

An inquest was told on Tuesday the pensioner was granted a gun licence about a year before he murdered his estranged children, Jack and Jennifer Edwards, with a legally owned pistol in July 2018.

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Aged care homes with multiple Covid cases named on list published by federal government

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Health department had earlier requested list not be released, saying it could hamper care and put staff off going to work

The Australian government has begun releasing a weekly snapshot of Covid-19 deaths and infections in aged care homes, despite earlier attempting to keep secret the identity of providers with fewer than five cases.

The health department secretary, Brendan Murphy, had previously asked the Senate’s Covid-19 committee not to publish a full list of providers with outbreaks, claiming publication of the data could distract from care and discourage staff from attending work.

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Coronavirus Australia live update: Daniel Andrews holds Covid press conference as Victoria reports 35 new cases and NSW four

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Victoria to turn roads and footpaths into dining spaces to help hospitality industry as Queensland border row deepens. Follow all today’s news

When will regional Victoria learn more about its restrictions being eased?

Daniel Andrews:

We will be here tomorrow and hopefully there will be no mystery cases in the data I report tomorrow and hopefully we can have more to say.

No doubt, there will be criticism that we haven’t been given any notice but this is nature of these things.

Professor Brett Sutton is then asked about some of the restrictions being eased today (very small easings).

They are baby steps. We all recognise that it is not an absolute sea change in terms of what is opening up.

That is what we’re trying to manage here. We are managing expectations and we’re being clear that outdoor activities are the low-risk activities.

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As time becomes kaleidoscopic, I find it unbearable to think too far into my children’s future | Delia Falconer

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‘Stop the world’ the musical hero said whenever things went wrong. I’ve been feeling this way for a few years now

  • This is part of a series of essays by Australian writers responding to the challenges of 2020

The sense of time-slip begins during the summer megafires. Walking my children home from school in Sydney under a red sun I have the nagging feeling, beneath my anxiety, that I’ve seen this close orange light before. Then I remember. My father made our family nativity set out of pumpkin-coloured cardboard, topped with a skylight of red acrylic. The sideboard lamp cast the same uncanny glow on to baby Jesus and his shadowless entourage.

Three months later, in early March, my partner and I are driving the twins down the south coast through green dairy country to isolate from the coronavirus. “Does the sky seem particularly blue to you?” he asks as we look up the valley. “I’m having a ‘severe clear’ moment.” A dark joke between us: pilots used the term to describe a sky of perfect visibility on the morning of 9/11. With most planes cancelled, there are no bright contrails in the usually busy flight path above the escarpment. The air is alert and tender. It occurs to me that we haven’t seen a sky like this since our own childhoods, near the beginning of the Great Acceleration, when the indicators of human activity on the “planetary dashboard” began their upward surge.

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John Fahey: former NSW premier and federal finance minister dies age 75

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Liberal premier played key role in bid for Sydney Olympics and also helped thwart attack on Prince Charles

John Fahey, the former premier of New South Wales and federal finance minister, has died aged 75.

In a statement on Saturday morning, the NSW premier, Gladys Berejiklian, paid tribute to Fahey and offered his family the option of a state funeral for the former premier.

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