Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
The Queensland government will pay a $3,000 subsidy to electric vehicle buyers and build new charging stations to incentivise take-up, under a new strategy to be announced on Wednesday.
The 10-year strategy includes measures the state says will help to drive down emissions and ultimately help Queensland meet its net zero commitment by 2050.
Queensland’s integrity commissioner says the premier’s department took no further action after a top public servant rejected her plea for mediation over his alleged behaviour towards her.
The state’s integrity commissioner, Dr Nikola Stepanov, became upset when she told a parliamentary committee on Monday that the Public Service Commission chief executive, Robert Setter, allegedly described her as a “bitch on a witch-hunt” during a 2018 phone call.
Treasurer Josh Frydenberg is being questioned about his promises to keep the cost of living down as he chats to ABC News Breakfast:
Well, we have been making policies that have been driving down the cost of living, for example, around electricity prices which are down by 8% in the last two years.
They doubled under our political opponents, but what I was referring to last night is the international events in the Ukraine have seen a spike in oil prices, and that is flowing through with some people paying more than $2 a litre.
This high and increasing burden of skin cancer emphasises the need for continued investment in skin cancer education and prevention.
We know what needs to be done. Now is the time to do it so that one day Australia is no longer considered the skin cancer capital of the world.
A...scamdemic? AAP reports that a record amount has been scammed from Australians this year.
Australians have lost a record $211m to scams so far this year, with people bombarded by bogus calls and texts purportedly from well-known businesses or the government.
The losses between 1 January and 19 September this year have surpassed the $175.6m reported to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s Scamwatch throughout 2020.
The prestigious Melbourne University joins several other tertiary institutions in announcing mandatory vaccination policies.
The University of Melbourne will make having a COVID-19 vaccine a compulsory requirement for attending any of its campuses. Exemptions to apply on medical or eligibility grounds. #springst@UniMelb
Opponents of Queensland’s proposed voluntary assisted dying laws have tabled 55 separate amendments to the bill ensuring there will be a protracted debate in the state parliament this week.
Many MPs shared emotional personal stories during Tuesday’s debate with packets of tissues passed around the Legislative Assembly.
12 Sydney LGAs to get half of the one million extra Pfizer doses secured from Poland; rapid antigen testing to be trialled in some Sydney aged care homes. This blog is now closed
We’ll leave it there for now. Here are today’s main developments:
Police are cracking down on large gatherings in breach of Victoria’s lockdown restrictions, reports AAP.
In the inner city, dozens congregated for a takeaway drink pub crawl event on the streets of Richmond on Saturday, while in Northcote about 200 people gathered for a street party.
Anthony Albanese wants the Morrison government to provide a one-off $300 payment to every person who has been fully vaccinated by 1 December. Follow latest updates
The greater Sydney lockdown has been extended for a week after New South Wales recorded another 27 local Covid cases and health officials expressed concern about the growing spread of the virus in some south-western suburbs.
The NSW premier, Gladys Berejiklian, said the decision to extend the lockdown was a difficult but necessary one.
Two residents of SummitCare home at Baulkham Hills taken to hospital as a precaution and facility is in lockdown; Queensland records one new local case. Follow live
Police have recovered the bodies of three fishermen and their upturned boat near Wollongong south of Sydney.
Relatives raised the alarm about 6am on Sunday after the trio set off from the Bellambi boat ramp in Wollongong about 2pm the previous day.
Tasmanian’s opposition leader, David O’Byrne, has announced he’s quitting as Labor leader, with the ALP investigating allegations he sexually harassed a woman more than a decade ago.
O’Byrne announced he was resigning on Sunday and said while he would remain in parliament as the member for Franklin, he would not seek or accept a position in the shadow cabinet.
Brisbane’s lockdown ended at 6pm on Saturday despite the state recording five new Covid-19 cases, including one not linked to an existing outbreak.
Queensland’s premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk, told reporters on Saturday morning that the state was “not out of the woods yet” and that some restrictions, including mask mandates, would remain in place, but that the snap lockdown announced last week would end.
Experts raise alarm about Covid vaccination rates as Coalition government explores digital certificates that could unlock international travel; trade minister confident of reaching free-trade deal with UK. Follow the latest news live
Real estate website Domain has alerted customers that is has been the victim of a phishing attack - where an email is made to look official and gets a user to hand over their login details - meaning hackers had access to the company’s administrative system, and was able to access the personal information of people who had recently made inquiries about rental properties.
They had then emailed some of those people asking them to pay a deposit in advance to secure the property, but Domain said so far it had received no reports of anyone paying the deposit.
Mick de Brenn claimed he was blindsided when Stanwell chief executive Richard van Breda said company was pivoting from coal to renewables
The board of Queensland state-owned power generator Stanwell corporation spent 18 months planning a transition strategy to pivot from coal to renewables, before the unexpected resignation of its chief executive last week.
Guardian Australia understands Richard van Breda quit Stanwell after the state energy minister, Mick de Brenni, complained to board members he was blindsided by an announcement – revealed by the Guardian – that rapidly changing market conditions would probably force the scaled-down operation of its coal plants.
The health department secretary, Brendan Murphy, has made opening remarks at the Covid-19 Senate inquiry. Murphy said Australia is “still in a very good place” even as comparable countries are battling fresh outbreaks and a fourth wave of the novel coronavirus.
He said:
“We are in a very fortunate place, even though we have border measures in place we are basically living a normal life – we have full football stadiums, restaurants, things are back to normal.”
Two state education ministers, Labor and Liberal, had criticised the milkshake video earlier today, via AAP.
Victoria’s Education Minister James Merlino called for the federal government to pull all content featured on The Good Society website, which launched as part of the Department of Education’s Respect Matters program last week.
No new properties have been purchased under the Queensland government program since 2017, a report finds
Cape York Indigenous groups have warned that a successful Queensland government program to return land to traditional owners is on the verge of stalling, potentially leaving large and significant swathes of the peninsula at the mercy of mining speculators.
The Cape York land tenure resolution program has returned more than 4m hectares of land to traditional owner groups since 2007, including about 2m hectares that is designated as national park.
A number of states have slammed their borders shut to Queenslanders as greater Brisbane enters a snap three-day snap lockdown after authorities discovered four new locally-acquired coronavirus cases.
Queensland’s chief health officer, Dr Jeannette Young, on Monday described the growing cluster of seven cases as “significant community transmission” of the UK variant. She warned people in greater Brisbane to stay home over the coming days.
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.”
‘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.
Police have charged four men with unlawfully lighting fires on K’gari/Fraser Island that started the blazes which scorched more than half of the World heritage-listed tourism drawcard.
Queensland Police and and Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service carried out a joint investigation and detectives yesterday charged the four men in their 20s who are all from the Warwick area, 130 kilometres southeast of Brisbane.
Berejiklian says she is frustrated with other premiers who are closing borders to the whole of NSW.
“There are parts of New South Wales completely unaffected by this current outbreak and yet everybody in New South Wales is suffering because other state leaders made decisions,” she says.
Exclusive: In email to fellow officials after election loss, Jenny Goodwin warns disciplinary process leads to ‘accusation of bullying’
The president of the Queensland Liberal National party women’s branch has emailed fellow officials to warn of a “culture of anger and mistrust”, amid an increasingly fraught fallout from the party’s state election loss.
News Hub reports New Zealand’s US ambassador has commented on the election. As government employees, ambassadors are prevented from indicating political views (despite being political appointments) but it looks like Scott Brown, for one, is feeling confident enough in the result to be a little honest.