Health News at Your Fingertips

I just got this text from Spotlight, where I am a member because I have aspirations to be good at sewing and am instead just good at buying fabric.

And because this is apparently the issue of the morning, Berejiklian was also asked about the Black Lives Matter rally planned for Sydney next Tuesday.

She said:

Irrespective of the issue, we need to follow the health advice. Large crowds are a huge concern. We cannot allow that march to continue unfortunately. If people feel strongly about that issue, they’re welcome to express their views in different ways, but it’s just not sensible at this time to expose yourself and others to the spread of the virus. We’re at a critical point in New South Wales and we don’t want to see the virus spread and actions like that are a huge health risk.

But going to the football is ok?

Well there’s a difference there, if it’s a seated-ticked event where there’s good social distancing, ironically, an event like that is more controlled than walking into a public space which may have a lot of people. And we also know the health risk is indoor events.

Berejiklian said that family gatherings were among the highest risk transmission events. Much of the community spread in Melbourne has been from family gatherings.

Said Berejiklian:

Even though the health orders Say you can have up to 20 guests in your home, the health advice this weekend is for people to consider not having any more than 10 and even then make sure nobody has symptoms and nobody has been exposed.

Berejiklian said she remained on “high alert” about the the spread of community transmission in NSW.

The one positive takeout for us is that yesterday it was confirmed that all the clusters we have in New South Wales at the moment do have the same genomic sequencing which means at this stage we have not found anything which isa new situation, a new cluster. It’s all from the same source, the same genomic sequencing.

That gives us a degree of comfort, but of course our state remains on high alert and I have been saying to citizens — be extra cautious, don’t move around unless you have to, be careful about what you’re intending to do over the weekend, avoid large crowds, and these are just sensible bits of advice to give people in addition to the additional restrictions we have put in place that come into effect on Friday in relation to hospitality venues.

She also reiterated that people who have been exposed to the coronavirus — such as people who attended a venue at the time of an identified transmission event — had to self-isolate for 14-days from the point of exposure even if they tested negative. That’s been the protocol all pandemic long, for people who have been specifically identified as a potential contact.

Asked if she would now consider locking down hotspot suburbs, Berejiklian said she would follow the health advice.

What we also need to remember is when people attend avenue, it’s not necessarily people who live in that locality. They might be coming from suburbs all across the place. Similarly, if there’s a breakout in a regional community, it may have occurred that people from outside that community have been visiting that venue.

Berejiklian said NSW had immediately shut down any venues identified as the site of a transmission event for a deep-cleaning and notified patrons to immediately self-isolate for 14-days in order to stop the spread.

We are at a critical stage when we want to obviously control the spread in New South Wales and that can only happen if all of us do the right thing.

I’m urging everybody in our state to consider what they’re doing over the weekend… just be sensible, have common sense, if we get through the next few weeks in New South Wales and maintain what we have at this stage, we’ll be in a position to continue moving forward and we are definitely at a critical point. Our level of concern remains high, our level of community messaging remains strong in terms of asking people to really consider their mobility over the weekend.

NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian said she would recommend the mandatory wearing of face masks in Sydney if the health advice changed to recommend mandatory face masks. She told ABC News Breakfast:

It would be not the right thing for elected members of parliament to make up policy but for us to take the health advice in our state.

At the moment, people in NSW, particularly in hotspot ares like the southwest suburbs, are recommended to wear face masks in circumstances where they cannot maintain physical distance, including on public transport.

If you happen to be in a situation where people aren’t respecting social distancing, where you do experience crowding, of course, you should wear a mask. That’s been our advice from day one. If — it’s not just related to public transport, it’s related to any situation — if you feel you’re going to be in a situation where people around you or yourself aren’t going to be able to respect the social distancing requirements, then you should be wearing a mask and that’s been the consistent advice from day one. And it remains the advice.

Burney was also asked about the Black Lives Matter march planned for Sydney next Tuesday.

She said both organisers and people who attend the rally need to observe the health advice. Organisers are requiring people to wear masks and remain 1.5m away from each other, as they did at earlier rallies in June.

Burney said she would not tell grieving Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families not to protest, but suggested alternative actions people could take.

I will not be telling people who have lost loved ones not to demonstrate. But they have a democratic right to see their local member, to write to their local member and make it very clear what their feelings are.

Labor has been advocating for years that there needs to be justice targets in the new Closing the Gap targets and I understand that’s going to happen. But there is absolutely no way that it is OK that something like 400 people have died in custody since the royal commission and that continues to happen and the incarceration rates of Aboriginal people and Aboriginal young people are completely unacceptable.

Those issues will not go away whether there’s a Black Lives rally or not. Those issues are persistent and they are part of this country and they also have to be dealt with and understood by the public and by government.

Labor’s social affairs spokesperson, Linda Burney, said the new permanent jobseeker rate has to be an amount “where people can live with dignity and children, in particular, are not thrown on to the poverty scrapheap”.

Burney told ABC24:

We have heard that the old Newstart rate, which was $550 a fortnight, was just throwing people into poverty, there was absolutely no way it was an incentive to work.

Labor hasn’t said what it thinks the new rate should be, but Burney said prime minister Scott Morrison should have announced it, whatever it was, yesterday.

One of the things that Labor is saying very clearly is we believe that the Government missed an enormous opportunity yesterday and that is to announce a permanent increase in JobSeeker, which Labor and others have been arguing for for a very long time.

Still on Radio National, the former treasury secretary, Ken Henry, is talking to Fran Kelly now and said, with a laugh, that it was “deeply ironic” to hear Labor criticising waste in the jobkeeper payment system because many people were paid more than the wage they would otherwise have earned, when they were put on the $1,500 flat payment in May. He noted the positions were reversed when he was the head of Treasury during the then Labor government’s response to the GFC.

Henry also said he was surprised the Morrison government didn’t set a permanent new rate for the jobseeker unemployment payment yesterday, instead of just extending the coronavirus supplement, at a reduced rate, for another three months.

I would have thought that the government would have taken an opportunity to announce a permanent new rate for Newstart (jobseeker). I don’t understand why they did not do so. But come October they will have to, because they will have to put a figure in the budget for the budget forecasts.

Henry said government has to “strike the right balance between keeping people out of poverty and at the same time not destroying incentives for people to go out and look for work”.

But he said that with the base, non-supplemented rate of jobseeker set at $560 per fortnight and “widely regarded, in fact I would have thought universally regarded as insufficient,” even increasing it by 50% “would hardly do much to dent incentives to work”.

Interestingly, increasing jobseeker by 50% would bring you to $840 per week. With the reduced coronavirus supplement, jobseeker recipients will be on $815 per week from October to December.

The social services minister, Anne Ruston, has told Radio National that she expects that the unemployment rate and the effective unemployment rate “will actually be reflecting each other at 10%” by Christmas, and that there will be a “higher level of unemployment going into 2021”.

That means there will be a need to maintain “a higher level of support”, but what that support will look like for the 2m people on the jobseeker payment has not been set out.

The jobseeker payment will be stepped down from $1,100 per fortnight to $800 per fortnight from 28 September to the end of the year (by reducing the coronavirus supplement from $550 to $250), and what the payment looks like after that point has not been specified.

Prime minister Scott Morrison yesterday indicated the jobseeker payment would not be returned to its pre-coronavirus rate, of $560 per fortnight, but the question of what it will look like is unlikely to come before the October budget.

RN Breakfast host Fran Kelly asked Ruston if she had any idea what families living on income support had been able to buy with the extra $300 per fortnight.

Ruston said:

Clearly we recognise that the coronavirus payment has had a significant impact on Australians particularly those who lost their jobs in March when we shut the market, basically we shut the jobs market entirely. Now we need to make sure we have the balance of support… we want to encourage people to go out to apply for jobs.

“Oh minister, fair cop,” said Kelly. There are 13 applicants for every job in Victoria at the moment, is she suggesting people are choosing not to get a job?

I am not making that accusation at all, Fran. What I am saying, Fran, is we need to make sure we have got the balance right and we need to make sure people are keen to go out and looking [for a job].

She added that the jobkeeper review found that enhanced income support “may have been creating a reservation for people to go out and find work by providing a floor in the market”.

Ruston would not give a figure for what level the jobseeker payment should be set at post-December.

Morrison was asked about Centre Alliance Senator Rex Patrick’s argument that federal MPs should have their pay docked by $1,000 for every parliamentary sitting day that was cancelled, not rescheduled.

Unsurprisingly, Morrison does not agree.

Well if he’s not working while the parliament’s not sitting that’s a matter for him, I can assure him that my government ministers are certainly working and I’m certainly working… that kind of stuff is just political clickbait.

He was also asked whether more support should be offered for community sport clubs, which may struggle to survive if they have to shut down again due to lockdowns.

Well we did a … The state government in particular would be the first port of call for them.

Bit of a slip up at the start there. Apropos of nothing, here’s our latest reporting on sports rorts.

Finally, Fordham congratulated Morrison for kicking a ball to start the Southern Districts Rugby Club season. It is “always a bit of a kick and a giggle”, Morrison said.

Fordham also asked Morrison about the Black Lives Matter protest which has been scheduled for Sydney next Tuesday, and which the NSW police have said they will go to the supreme court — again — to prevent.

The NSW police commissioner Mick Fuller told 2GB on Monday that “we know from the Victorian (BLM) protest that it put a lot of lives at risk and it’s just not worth it”.

Again: that is not true. The Victorian health department has said there is no link between the protest and any other infection clusters in Victoria, that the current second-wave outbreak in Melbourne was traced back to failures in hotel quarantine, and that there was no evidence the six people who attended the June rally and also tested positive to coronavirus were infectious while at the rally, or caught the virus at the rally.

Anyway. Asked about the new protest planned for Sydney, Morrison said:

I just think that’s appalling. Where police and the government have said that there’s a mass gathering that shouldn’t go ahead then they should obey the law … what gives people a ticket to not obey the law?

Prime minister Scott Morrison has been on 2GB this morning, talking to Ben Fordham. He said that the situation in Melbourne and Sydney at the moment “could not be more different”.

The comment came out of some questions about the wearing of face masks. Fordham asked Morrison if he would wear a face mask, noting that even US president Donald Trump has been photographed in a mask.

Morrison said:

Well if the medical advice wherever I am requires me to do so, of course I would

Does he think people should wear masks on public transport?

Yes. And I should say that’s what the New South Wales government is saying, by the way … I think the approach is for people to exercise that common sense.

The situation in Sydney and NSW more broadly is not the situation in Melbourne. It could not be more different.

Asked to confirm that the CovidSafe app has not identified a single previously unknown close contact of a coronavirus case, Morrison said that identifying contacts that were not already identified by teams of human contact tracers “wasn’t the point” of the $2m app.

Well that wasnt it’s point. Its point was to support the manual contact tracing being done by the contact tracers … so it’s there as a support, it’s belts and braces, as you say Ben.

That is not how it was sold in April, when the sizzle about the app was that it would ping and identify random contacts, like people standing nearby in a bus queue.

Morrison suggested that it would be more effective if more people downloaded the app. The Australian government back in April set a target of 40% of all Australians who could do so downloading the app, and that target has been met. He told Fordham, “that means 60% hasn’t”.

Good morning,

The Australian Medical Association has called for the national cabinet to urgently adopt a nationwide position on face masks and the strengthening of domestic borders to curb the spread of Covid-19.

The Australian Health Protection Principal Committee has a position on face masks, which is that they should be worn in situations with a significant risk of transmission when it’s not possible to remain physically distant. The acting chief medical officer, Prof Paul Kelly, said that now included Melbourne and the Mitchell Shire. And the prime minister has repeatedly maintained that decisions on domestic border controls are for state governments to make.

AMA president Dr Tony Bartone said mask use in areas with community transmission is now “essential”.

It is now clear that masks reduce virus spread when worn in areas where there is community transmission …

The Victorian and NSW governments are to be commended for encouraging mask use, but a consistent National Cabinet-backed approach is now needed should outbreaks occur elsewhere.

Every Australian in current areas of community transmission must make mask use part of their daily routines.

Bartone said the AMA wanted national cabinet to release community transmission modelling to inform the community about virus spread patterns, and develop a national network of contact tracing.

Meanwhile, haberdashery suppliers Lincraft have reported that Victoria and NSW are experiencing a run on fabric and Victoria risks running out of elastic because of people making cloth face masks. From midnight tonight, it will be compulsory to wear a face-covering when you leave your house, with limited exceptions, in Melbourne and the Mitchell Shire.

Staying in Victoria, and the thing justice advocates have feared has come to pass. Six prisons are now under lockdown after a guard tested positive. Advocates have called for low-risk prisoners to be released.

Nerita Waight, the co-chair of National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Legal Services, said Victoria should:

… urgently and responsibly release at-risk Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people from adult and youth prisons due to our high vulnerability to severe and lethal impacts of Covid-19.

Let’s crack on. You can follow me on twitter at @callapilla or email me at calla.wahlquist@theguardian.com