Health News at Your Fingertips

A teenager has been transported to hospital after falling approximately eight metres down a stormwater drain in Brisbane’s north.

The young male trainee was doing a landscaping course in Strathpine when the incident occurred.

From AAP:

A NSW Liberal MP has given a speech attacking Covid-19 vaccination mandates, saying she thinks her own government has gone too far.

Tanya Davies addressed the anti-vaccination rally outside NSW parliament on Tuesday, congratulating protesters for calling “on this government for fairness and for freedom”.

The member for Mulgoa in Sydney said she had been “dismayed” that a Liberal government made the decision to mandate vaccinations for construction workers during the Delta outbreak in Sydney last year.

The move, made by former NSW premier, Gladys Berejiklian, was met with opposition from Davies at the time, who called it an “assault on an individuals’ freedoms and civil liberties” in a statement.

“I can’t quite tell you exactly how I felt when I read those words in that media release,” she told protesters.

“As Liberals, we believe in individual freedom and individual responsibility the two are intertwined.”

Davies said she stopped posting live videos on Facebook after NSW premier, Dominic Perrottet, was sworn in last October, saying she “wanted to give the new premier … the opportunity to turn the Titanic around”.

She said she’d been working with Perrottet to show him Covid-19 was not a “deadly disease that is going to eradicate millions of people”.

From AAP:

Domenic Perre, the man charged over the bombing of the National Crime Authority office in Adelaide in 1994, has been found guilty of an unrelated assault charge after spitting on a police detective.

In Adelaide magistrates court on Tuesday, Perre was found guilty of aggravated assault over the incident at the Adelaide Remand Centre in 2018.

Two detectives had gone to speak with Perre over an alleged assault on him by another prisoner.

But when the cell door was opened and one of the officers stood in the doorway and called his name, Perre turned over on his bed, raised his head and spat on the sergeant’s clothing.

He had previously indicated to prison officers he did not wish to speak with police.

Delivering his verdict on Tuesday, Magistrate John Fahey said he was satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that Perre had assaulted the officer, knowing that he was acting in the course of his official duty.

Dying with Dignity NSW supporters will be rallying outside NSW parliament tomorrow in an urgent plea to the NSW upper house to allocate enough time to debate the Voluntary Assisted Dying Bill.

Dying with Dignity NSW president, Penny Hackett, said:

If the upper house does not allocate additional time, such as sitting on Fridays, the bill could drag on until the end of the year or longer.

She added:

In the meantime, more people will continue to die with extreme suffering and agonising pain because the government is playing games.

We have already lost Judith Daley – who stood outside Parliament House last year calling for the lower house to urgently deal with the bill. They did. Now it’s time for the upper house to do the same.

There is no reason why we cannot allocate Fridays as an extra sitting day to give this bill enough time for debate.

This is a bill that passed with overwhelming support in the lower house and had an unprecedented number of co-sponsors for any legislation in Australia.

Looks like more sites are coming back online now – we are still not sure what caused it, but I’ll bring you more when we know.

A severely burnt Hannah Clarke asked why she didn’t just stay with her “babies” inside their car after her estranged husband set the vehicle alight, an inquest has been told.

The inquest heard Clarke was yelling and crying while talking to off-duty paramedic Stephanie Ring, who came across the burning car in Brisbane’s Camp Hill minutes before firefighters arrived on 19 February 2020.

Hello everyone, this is Cait Kelly. It could be an interesting afternoon on the blog – as Josh said, a lot of the breaking news sites are down.

If you want to contact me you can on Twitter (@cait__kelly) and email (cait.kelly@theguardian.com).

Let’s get into it!

And I will now get my colleague Cait Kelly to pick up the blog so I can go and find out what the outage might be.

There seems to be a bit of an outage affecting a bunch of websites in Australia, including News Corp websites, ABC, AAP, and Nine. Some people are still able to get to the websites via mobile devices but not on desktop.

We are looking into it and seeing if we can find out more. Based on the scale, it sounds like another issue similar to the Fastly outage last year.

Assessing how the state budget affects Victorians based on their gender should become enshrined in law, a new report says.

AAP reports the state government announced it would establish a gender responsive budgeting unit as part of its 2021/22 budget last year in a push towards equality for women in budget decisions.

In a report tabled to parliament on Tuesday, the Public Accounts and Estimates committee recommended further development and adoption of gender responsive budgeting practices in Victoria.

Gender responsive budgeting is being increasingly adopted worldwide as a tool to assess whether policies proposed in a budget will benefit or disadvantage individuals based on their gender and guide reform in the interest of supporting more gender equitable outcomes.

Committee chair and Labor MP Lizzie Blandthorn said while the government made some strides forward, Victoria could learn from other jurisdictions, and made 10 recommendations including introducing gender responsive budgeting to future legislation.

Seselja is asked about his election fight, with former Wallabies great David Pocock running for the Senate in the ACT at the upcoming federal election.

He calls Pocock a “green independent”, says Pocock stands for different things than he does.

The Liberal party that I represent has a different view of the world from Labor and the Greens, and some of these green independents. Yes, the economy is important, national security that we’re investing record amounts in – and [which] Labor party cut last time, and the Greens want to cut in half – and yes, issues around housing affordability and the economy.

Yes, we put out ideas for how we can release commonwealth land in the ACT, thousands of blocks. I think that would make a really big difference to first home buyers in Canberra. It’s something that’s not being done by the local government, something where we can effect change because we do have surplus … in the north of Canberra.

International development and Pacific minister, Zed Seselja is on ABC’s Afternoon Briefing and is asked whether a cut in foreign aid is a good thing during the current international turmoil.

Seselja says there are a lot of budgetary pressures in the space, but the government has had a number of targeted and temporary measures in response to Covid, with $1.7bn in aid delivered for the Pacific – the most any government anywhere has delivered into the Pacific.

Obviously, the overall aid budget details are worked through in the budget context. There’s a lot going on in this space. We’re doing a lot particularly in our region, but we look further afield, to other places.