Monitors on Queensland’s Lady Elliot Island have only seen a handful of albino hatchlings but never an adult
Jessica Buckman is used to finding stragglers when she heads out to check recently hatched green turtle nests on Queensland’s Lady Elliot Island.
But the tiny pink creature she found in the neck of one nest on Monday was far from a usual find – a rare albino hatchling that was having a little trouble digging itself out.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...Jeremy Samuel says the incident ‘was a very, very heavy weight on her. I’m incredibly sad for her on so many levels’
Jeremy Samuel says he met the woman who has alleged she was raped by a cabinet minister in January 1988 during that same year.
“I was her friend,” Samuel told Guardian Australia on Monday. “I just want to say that my friend was an incredibly smart, witty, talented and capable person.”
Continue reading...It’s the third crocodile attack in the state this month, after two swimmers in Cairns and Weipa survived encounters
A second crocodile has been killed and will be examined for human remains after a 69-year-old fisher went missing in north Queensland.
The reptile, measuring about 3 metres, was caught and euthanised by Department of Environment and Science officers near Hinchinbrook Island on Sunday night.
Continue reading...Department of Environment and Science says damage to boat indicates crocodile’s involvement ‘highly likely’
Human remains have been found during a search for a missing fisherman on a tropical Queensland island, as the hunt for a killer crocodile continues.
Related: King croc of Port Douglas dies after crab pot encounter
Continue reading...NSW and Victoria report no new local Covid cases as hotel quarantine worker in Melbourne diagnosed with UK variant. Follow all the latest news and updates, live
On the vaccine distribution in Australia, Paul Kelly says it is still on track for the first injections to be happening before the end of February, but will not put an exact timeline on it.
The aim will be to get 20 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine before the end of this year, in weekly deliveries. Kelly said the AstraZeneca and Novovax vaccines will also be used if and when they are approved by the TGA:
We don’t want a lot of vaccines sitting out in warehouses, so we will be looking to roll out particularly for those priority populations that people will know about now, as soon as we can. But then will be going back to the same population, those people, to give them a second dose. That is really important.
We will await the TGA advice in relation to AstraZeneca but some of the information that has been coming up in the last few weeks is that it may actually be a longer interval for that second dose.”
Australia’s chief medical officer, Prof Paul Kelly, is also moving to reassure people about the effectiveness of the AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine.
He said it was still in the process of being approved by the Therapeutics Goods Administration, and talked down claims it was less effective in treating the South African variant of the virus.
I just want to make a very clear statement about people taking small amounts of information quickly, without looking at it carefully. And making conclusions. At the moment, I can absolutely say, and this may change in future, and we will be nimble in the way we look at that information, and putting that into our planning, but at the moment, there’s no evidence anywhere in the world AstraZeneca effectiveness against severe infection is affected by any of these variants of concern.
And that is the fact. What we have at the moment is a small group of people in a study not yet peer-reviewed or published in South Africa where there was an effect on the mild or moderate disease in relation to that variant of concern in that country. But there were no severe infections in any of the people that received the vaccine in regards to any of those types of the virus.”
Continue reading...Police say a Holden Statesman ‘aggressively’ following a stolen Hyundai i35 hit a motorcycle head-on, leaving the rider dead
The death of a motorcyclist in Townsville has prompted police warnings about the dangers of continued vigilante action in the city.
Police said a grey Holden Statesman was “aggressively” following a stolen silver Hyundai i35 at speed late on Friday night in Thuringowa Central, in the city’s south-west.
Continue reading...Restrictions imposed in Perth, Peel and south-west, with schools suspended and residents only allowed to leave home for essential reasons
• Follow the global coronavirus liveblog
• Western Australia hotspots
• NSW hotspots
Western Australia has imposed a five-day lockdown in metropolitan Perth, the Peel region and the state’s south-west region amid fears a hotel quarantine worker who has tested positive to Covid-19 has contracted the highly contagious UK variant.
South Australia and Victoria shut its borders to the affected areas late on Sunday evening, and in other states and territories, WA residents were told to immediately go into self-isolation, potentially creating chaos in Canberra where MPs had flown in for the resumption of parliament this week.
Continue reading...WA premier Mark McGowan says travellers from Queensland and Victoria will no longer have to quarantine upon arrival
Crowds at this year’s Australian Open will be capped at half the pre-Covid average, after Victoria’s top health official signed off on allowing up to 30,000 spectators to attend the start of the tournament next month.
On Saturday, Victoria’s sports minister, Martin Pakula, confirmed the government had agreed to a plan that would allow daily crowd capacity of 30,000 for the first eight days of the tournament, reducing to 25,000 per day from the start of the tournament quarter-finals.
Continue reading...Albanese pins election hopes on major reshuffle; Australia extends travel bubble suspension with NZ; Another 350 jobs to go at Virgin Australia. Follow the latest updates live
• NSW hotspots; State-by-state restrictions and rules explained
• Qld to reopen border to all of NSW on 1 February
• Follow the global coronavirus liveblog
Guardian Australia contacted CSL to ask for more information about why the manufacturing company did not send a representative to appear before the Senate Covid-19 Committee.
While CSL told the Committee it was too busy to appear, other major companies, including Pfizer and AstraZeneca, have appeared. Pfizer appeared despite currently trying to meet a tight deadline of delivering its vaccine for roll-out in Australia by the end of the month.
It is totally disrespectful for CSL, the recipient of $1.7 billion in taxpayer funded vaccine related contracts, to refuse to appear before today’s Senate COVID Committee. If they won’t respect the Senate’s request, they should expect a ‘subpoena’. #auspol https://t.co/ZS3gMO8VoE
CSL appreciates invitation to attend the Senate Select Committee Hearing on COVID-19. Due to our commitment to urgently deliver 50 million doses of a safe and effective COVID-19 vaccine we are unable to resource our participation at this time.
In response to the global pandemic, CSL employees allocated to the COVID-19 vaccine program are fully focussed and working around the clock to ensure vaccines are available for use in Australia as soon as possible. We will be in a better position to consider a similar invitation later in the year.
Virgin Australia has cut another 350 jobs, this time at its head office in Brisbane, the Australian Services Union says.
It comes on top of more than 3000 sackings at the airline since it was bought by US investment group Bain Capital last year after going into administration due to the coronavirus crisis.
Continue reading...Limits on gatherings could be lifted in Sydney after more than a week of zero locally-acquired cases
• NSW hotspots; State-by-state restrictions and lockdown rules explained
• Follow the global coronavirus liveblog
Berejiklian was asked to comment on the new Covide-19 vaccine advertising campaign, and said the Therapeutic Goods Administration “would not have approved it if it wasn’t safe”.
We’re able to rely on research, the experience that other nations have had, and I for one will be getting it absolutely the day it’s available to me...I know some people feel strongly about not having a vaccine. I’m not one of them. I think it’s really important for us, for as many of us to get the vaccine as possible in a timely way, to safeguard all of us moving forward. And potentially to give us greater freedoms.
Oh, look, I just focus on what I need to focus on.
My view is all of us should always follow the health advice. We have experts appointed and serving in positions which have kept all of us and Australia safe to this point in time. All of us owe it to the health experts to follow the advice and what we present is based on science and fact.
He’s not in my team. You have to ask...
I’m not going to add any further to what I said. Please ask me other questions.
I think I have answered the question twice already. To say you should always base, base the advice, the actions you take based on health advice. And I think I’ve been saying that straight for about a year everyday. And I don’t think any of us should waste our time on people who express opinions not based on evidence.
NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian said she is “hoping” to receive medical advice that will allow her ease to coronavirus restrictions this week, but wouldn’t be drawn on exactly when or what that might look like.
She told ABC News Breakfast:
Well, look, we’ll behaving those discussions and getting the advice today. I’m hoping to make a announcement by the end of the week. We’re doing more. There’s more contagious strains of the virus coming into Australia. In New South Wales our policy always is don’t keep restrictions or burden our citizens a day longer than you need to. I hoping to have confirmation of advice that allows us to announce that later this week.
I think perhaps people will be looking forward to welcoming more people into their homes, and mask policy moving forward. There’s a number of areas looking forward. The hospitality sector also wants certainty moving forward. We’re looking forward to making the announcements later. I get advice on a daily basis from the health experts and today and tomorrow we’ll be having longer conversations about what it means.
They’re the conversations we’ll have. There could be some settings where we do think it should be an ongoing way of doing things, a way of living. In other settings we may ease off and say we remembered you do this, but you don’t have to.
The important message on public transport and we’re encouraging people to go back to work in a Covvid-safe way. We do want people to catch public transport, where they’re going to work from and how they’re going to work. Because jobs and focusing on the economy is critical for us this year. I think people will feel safer if there’s masks on public transport. Those are the conversations we’ll be having.
Continue reading...‘Accidental’ mayor, elevated to top job under a controversial runner-up succession rule, claims moral (if not actual) victory
A barefoot climate change activist dubbed Queensland’s accidental mayor appears set to fail in his bid to put the coal and beef-loving city of Rockhampton on a greener path.
Chris “Pineapple” Hooper, a bike-riding, self-declared ratbag, is running third as the count continues in Saturday’s mayoral byelection, sparked by the shock resignation of long-serving civic leader Margaret Strelow in November 2020.
Continue reading...Airline will fly to Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane from Monday; Spanish star Paula Badosa has coronavirus. Follow all the latest news and updates, live
Daniel Andrews frustrated by the decision to award an Australia Day honour to Margaret Court:
Do we really have to do this every single summer? But apparently we do. I thought we might not have had to have this debate this summer.
But anyway, others have saw fit to honour her in that way. They’re not decisions that I make; you’ve asked me if I support it, I’ve indicated no, and I’ve also given a sense of why.
More from Andrews on Margaret Court receiving an Australia Day honour. He invokes the recent debate in Victorian parliament about outlawing gay conversion therapy in the state:
I think calling out bigotry is always important. We have just had a debate in the parliament of Victoria to outlaw the bigoted quackery that costs lives.
My position on this has been consistent. I don’t seek to quarrel with people but I’ve been asked a question and I’ve answered it.
Continue reading...Jason Renwick had pleaded not guilty to sexual assault over the 2019 incident in Brisbane, which he said was a ‘workplace accident’
A jury has been unable to reach a verdict in the case of a police sergeant charged with indecently touching a female colleague during a training exercise.
Jason Scott Renwick, 49, pleaded not guilty to one count of sexual assault over the incident at a Brisbane training facility in February 2019.
Continue reading...Two tennis players have tested positive, but hard lockdown of those who shared flights remains. Follow latest updates
As our West Australian readers start to log-on, I bring to you news of possible secession. I have not clicked through to see what other images/tweets etc come up under #WAXIT but please feel free to do so:
A group of business leaders in Western Australia want the state to break away from Australia… calling the campaign #WAXIT.
Should WA be allowed to break away and form an independent nation? #9News pic.twitter.com/mtStO3Ayzh
A $7bn funding injection into social housing would address surging homelessness caused by the pandemic, advocates say.
This just in from AAP:
Social housing advocates fear a surge in homelessness stemming from the Covid-19 pandemic, and are urging swift action from the federal government to ensure Australians have a roof over their heads.
A national campaign to end homelessness, Everybody’s Home, estimates a $7bn injection into social housing would make a serious dent in homelessness, while creating 18,000 jobs a year over the next four years.
Continue reading...Meanwhile, three of four Covid cases found in Victoria hotel quarantine linked to Australian Open. This blog is now closed
That’s where I’m going to leave you for today. Thanks as always for reading along.
Here’s what we learned today:
Fragments of Covid-19 have been detected in sewage at three sites in Queensland, the state’s health department has said.
Queensland’s chief health officer, Dr Jeannette Young, said in a statement released just now that viral fragments of the virus had been detected at wastewater treatment plants after samples were collected last week. The positive results were detected at three locations:
While this does not mean we have new cases of Covid-19 in these communities, we are treating these detections seriously.
A positive sewage result means that someone who has been infected was shedding the virus. Infected people can shed viral fragments and that shedding can happen for several weeks after the person is no longer infectious.
Continue reading...Victoria premier Daniel Andrews says people in most of Sydney can apply for a permit to travel to the state while 10 LGAs still remain in red zones. Follow latest updates live
The ABC has spoken to one of the tennis players who is isolating as part of strict restrictions applied to those who travelled for the Australian Open.
#AusOpen player Artem Sitak happy to be in Melbourne for the tournament. A lot of the players have now realised it's an unfortunate situation. News of the long Victorian lockdown & of Australians unable to return home is making them feel very lucky to be in Melbourne. #Springst pic.twitter.com/EgQ9CEix9P
Of course I’m happy. As I said, I was prepared for the worst and unfortunately it happened to me, but I’m – I’m definitely happy. I’m here, I love Australian Open. I think it’s going to be any sixth or seventh Australian Open and I love playing here. There’s always a really – a really vocal huge crowd. Hopefully this time it will be – I don’t know the percentage of spectators that are allowed but there will still be a lot of people. We haven’t played in front of spectators since back in August. And this is going to be a lot of fun.
The Victorian police union is less welcoming of news that Covid-19 fines in Victoria will be waived. Here’s what Victorian Police Association secretary Wayne Gatt said on radio station 3AW earlier today, according to AAP:
It’s a wee bit frustrating.
None of this was fun for our members. It was bit of a thankless job.
Continue reading...Cyclone Kimi could rise to a category two system as residents in far north told to bunker down
A tropical cyclone has formed off the coast of far-north Queensland, with residents told to prepare to bunker down for gale-force winds and heavy rain.
The Bureau of Meteorology on Sunday declared the formation of tropical cyclone Kimi – a category one system – about 140km north-east of Cooktown.
Continue reading...