Health News at Your Fingertips

My colleague Mostafa Rachwani has some good news for those of you battening down the hatches in NSW.

The Narrabri coal mine expansion has been conditionally approved in NSW, AAP reports:

The NSW government has conditionally approved the expansion of a coal mine in the state’s north, with critics lambasting the move as “reckless” and “catastrophic”.
The Narrabri underground mine, operated by Whitehaven for the past decade, produces 11 million tonnes of coal annually.
Originally slated to mine coal until 2031, the Independent Planning Commission on Friday granted it an extension to 2044 to extract a further 82 million tonnes.
The IPC panel said the project fulfils an “appropriate balance between relevant environmental, economic and social considerations”.
Whitehaven says the extension will provide the state with nearly $600 million in economic benefits and keep 500 local jobs alive for decades.
The firm said it would “reduce CO2 (carbon dioxide) emissions at the mine over time”.
But the approval has been slammed by those calling for action on climate change.
“The decision to approve Whitehaven Coal’s Narrabri mine extension… is reckless and dangerous given the climate disasters Australia is experiencing right now,” said Rod Campbell, Research Director at The Australia Institute.
“The NSW government cannot hide from the fact these emissions will be its responsibility.”
Boggabri farmer Sally Hunter referred to a Thursday ruling by the NSW Land and Environment court fining Whitehaven $158,000 for polluting a creek in the Narrabri region.
“It beggars belief this company can commit serious crimes and instead of being appropriately punished, it is given more land to destroy, more water to drain, more lives to upend,” said Ms Hunter, who is based in the Narrabri Shire.
Independent NSW MP Justin Field described Friday’s decision as “unfathomable” against the backdrop of flooding in the Northern Rivers region, which has claimed 10 lives so far.

Plans to build one of the world’s biggest prawn farms at an outback cattle station in the Northern Territory have been shelved, AAP reports.

Project Sea Dragon at Legune Station, about 340km southwest of Darwin, was set to double Australia’s prawn production.

But aquaculture company Seafarms says the 10,000-hectare black tiger prawn pond project was not financially feasible in its current form.

The company said “construction, breeding, processing, operating costs and logistics are all challenged due to distance and remoteness”.

“It will not generate acceptable financial return,” it said in an investor briefing submitted to the Australian Securities Exchange on Friday.

“The existing scope cannot be completed for targeted costs or achieve target completion dates, and the project currently involves unacceptable risk.”

Pond construction has been put on hold until its “unproven” production plan can be tested over the next three years at the station, near the Western Australian border.

Seafarms said significant international markets for the prawns would also need to be developed as supplying the Australian domestic market with fresh, cooked product from the remote location is unlikely to be feasible.

Competing against lower priced suppliers in other countries is also likely to be a problem, given the current construction costs per hectare.

The $1.87 billion project was set to become the biggest aqua-culture project in the Southern Hemisphere, supplying 6,000 tonnes of prawns per year.

The company said it “remains committed to delivering on the promise of Project Sea Dragon” but it will need to lower the cost of production.

My colleague Graham Readfearn reported on the blog earlier about an upcoming report on water quality across the Great Barrier Reef. In that post, Graham said the Morrison government had pledged $253m for water quality improvements over the next nine years.

He’s just emailed to ask if I can apologise on his behalf, as the correct figure should have been $580m. We’ll change the original post.

A team of aviation experts will spend at least three days combing through wreckage to determine the cause of a Victorian helicopter crash, AAP reports.

The aircraft came down at Mt Disappointment, north of Melbourne, on Thursday morning, killing a pilot and four passengers.

Meat industry boss Paul Troja, 73, has been identified as one of the victims.

The Albert Park man’s fifth grandchild was born a day earlier, his son Luke Toja told Nine News, revealing his father vowed this trip would be his last before retiring.

Troja, the chairman of Warragul-based meat processing company Radfords, has been remembered as a passionate and accomplished leader.

A 50-year-old Inverloch woman and two NSW men, aged 59 and 70, were also on board the helicopter, flown by a 32-year-old Cheltenham man.

Australian Transport Safety Bureau chief commissioner Angus Mitchell said crews from Canberra and Melbourne will take at least three days to analyse the crash site.

“What we do know is it was in company with another helicopter from the same operator and that they lost visual contact,” Mitchell said.

Drone analysis of the helicopter’s flight path, along with assessment of flight control records and weather conditions, will be part of the investigation.

Mitchell said the helicopter operator Microflite had a very strong safety record.

The crash is Victoria’s deadliest aviation disaster since February 2017, when five people were killed after a charter plane crashed into Melbourne’s Essendon DFO shopping centre.

The Morrison government has axed a $1.3bn program to buy armed drones, redirecting the money towards the “Redspice” cybersecurity package that the Coalition trumpeted as a centrepiece of the defence budget, Daniel Hurst reports:

No campaigning for a little while for Steph Hodgins-May, the Greens candidate in the inner-Melbourne federal seat of Macnamara (held by Labor’s Josh Burns).

A child under five has died with Covid-19 in South Australia as the state winds back reporting of classroom contacts, AAP reports.

The child was one of two people to die with the virus in the latest reporting period, along with a woman in her 80s.

“This was a young person that had other very severe health problems and in fact had been on a palliative care pathway,” chief public health officer Nicola Spurrier told reporters on Friday.

“But because they did test positive for Covid, it will be counted as one of our Covid deaths.”

Spurrier said she understood the child had contracted the virus from a relative before testing positive at the Women’s and Children’s Hospital.

The child’s family members are believed to have been fully vaccinated.

“Unfortunately for this little one, they were not old enough to be vaccinated,” Spurrier said.

“But by vaccinating ourselves we also protect those people that are more susceptible in our community.”

About 57% of children aged five to 11 in SA have been vaccinated, a figure Spurrier described as being well below other age groups.

SA Health on Friday reported 5,134 new infections, while the number of people in hospital fell slightly to 169 including seven in intensive care.

Public schools will no longer have to notify parents if there is a single case in their child’s classroom in a bid to ease “burdensome” contact tracing pressures.