7.01pm EDT19:01
Daniel Andrews says he wants to have “a conversation” about dramatically reducing the capacity in hotel quarantine, which would reduce even further the number of people able to return home.
Yes, there would be inconvenience, with less people being able to get home, and a lot of that would be heartbreaking … but it’s about time and it would not be forever, it would be until we got a critical mass of Australians through the vaccine program.
He is not sure what that critical mass would be – at a press conference yesterday he said the science on that critical mass is not settled. But it is worth considering for argument’s sake that the UK has 60% of its population fully vaccinated and has almost 20,000 new cases a day. So, more than that.
Andrews said you have to weigh up the pain and inconvenience of “reducing that travel cap by 50%, 75% or 80%” versus having to do continual lockdowns, because the virus – particularly the delta variant – escapes hotel quarantine, which is not fit for purpose.
“There’s no comparison,” he said – lockdowns outweigh the travel cap.
Calla Wahlquist
(@callapilla)It’s always good to hear Daniel Andrews grilled one-on-one by a competent journalist. This interview by Virginia Trioli is worth a listen (and I think shows very clearly that Andrews always gives as good as he gets).
Calla Wahlquist
(@callapilla)“Anyone who has done a kitchen reno knows —”
“Oh you can’t use that comparison, premier!”
“Yes you can.”
“No you can’t, not with precious public funding.”
“The alternative is to do what every other government has done and say it’s too hard..”
“No, it’s about costing it properly.”
Updated
at 7.14pm EDT
7.00pm EDT19:00
The Victorian premier, Daniel Andrews, is doing his first radio interview since returning to work yesterday, speaking to ABC Melbourne’s Virginia Trioli.
They start off by talking about last night’s national cabinet meeting – which Andrews says made for a very tiring first day back:
I was going all right and then the prime minister called a national cabinet meeting for five o’clock.
But on to the substance of the meeting. He said he welcomed the opening up of AstraZeneca shots for younger people prepared to accept the risk. But first he had a message to everyone who has had their first AZ shot and has become nervous about the second:
If I can get one message across today, other than that I’m happy to be back, it is this … if you have had the first AstraZeneca shot and you did not have an adverse reaction [he later clarified to say specifically a blood clot], the advice says that you won’t have an adverse reaction from the second.
People under the age of 60 who want to sign the waiver to get their first AstraZeneca should go to their GP in the first instance, he says. It may be possible to go through the mass vaccines later, but at this stage it’s GP first.
Updated
at 7.05pm EDT
6.44pm EDT18:44
The private school sector in Australia is likely to have reaped hundreds of millions of dollars in extra government funding from jobkeeper and other schemes designed to support not-for-profits during the Covid-19 crisis, despite few recording any significant impact on their revenues.
A survey by Guardian Australia of the handful of schools that have reported their 2020 financial results early to the Australian Charities and Not-for-Profits Commission finds that roughly half have claimed jobkeeper and/or the $100,000 cashflow boost, despite suffering little or no fall in their fee revenue.
The payments range from as little as $100,000 for schools, which claimed only the cashflow boost, to as much as $18m, with the size of jobkeeper payments directly related to the size of the school staff.
In some cases the schools’ surpluses increased by the same amount as the jobkeeper payment received.
You can read the full report below:
Updated
at 6.49pm EDT
6.39pm EDT18:39
Infrastructure minister defends controversial car park project
Updated
at 6.45pm EDT
6.27pm EDT18:27
Not one of the 47 commuter car park sites promised by the Coalition at the 2019 election was selected by the infrastructure department, with projects worth $660m handpicked by the government on advice of its MPs and candidates.
That is the conclusion of a scathing Australian National Audit Office report released on Monday, which found that the department’s administration of the program was “not effective” and identification of projects “was not demonstrably merit-based”.
The infrastructure department has rejected the conclusions, arguing it was entitled to give funding to projects selected by the government and promised as election commitments.
The ANAO found that the department had been involved in drawing up an “indicative” list of projects in November 2018, but then the office of the urban infrastructure minister, Alan Tudge, asked it to add potential projects to its spreadsheet and a column for the government to set its relative priority.
You can read the full report below:
