Health News at Your Fingertips

And with that, we are going to put this blog to bed. Thank you so much for spending the day with us. Here’s a recap of what we saw today:

• The NSW premier, Dominic Perrottet, and his wife, Helen, announced the birth of their seventh child – a girl named Celeste Grace.
• The federal environment minister, Sussan Ley, said the response to the full federal court’s ruling that she did not have a duty of care to protect young people from the climate crisis was “an emotional response”.
• Ukraine’s embassy added to calls for the Australian government to impose sanctions on two Russian oligarchs, Oleg Deripaska and Viktor Vekselberg.
• NSW Labor leader, Chris Minns, called for an upper house parliamentary inquiry into the northern rivers flood response, saying: “The worst thing that could happen, worse than even the floods … is if we don’t learn from the mistakes that were made.”
• The AFLW finals series has been thrown into chaos, with a Covid-19 cluster at Collingwood causing the Magpies’ qualifying final to be postponed.
• Unemployment rates are now at 4.0%, the lowest they have been since 2008.
• WA premier, Mark McGowan, and Scott Morrison announced a multimillion-dollar boost for two Perth construction projects, a new city campus for Edith Cowan University and a new Swan River bridge.
• Flood disaster payments have been extended beyond Lismore to the Ballina, Byron, Kyogle and Tweed LGAs in the form of an additional two-weekly payment.
• The NSW Electoral Commission won its bid to overturn three NSW local government elections in Kempsey, Shellharbour and Singleton after electronic voting failures last year.
• Labor has launched its first election ad, featuring leader Anthony Albanese promising to “show up and take responsibility” and a suite of policies to tackle the cost of living.
• Victoria recorded seven Covid deaths and 9,752 new infections; NSW recorded 20,087 new Covid infections and five deaths; Tasmania recorded 1,859 Covid cases; the ACT recorded 1,311 Covid cases; Queensland recorded 10 Covid deaths and 7,190 cases; WA recorded one Covid death and 7,151 cases; and South Australia recorded three Covid deaths and 4,474 cases.

We will see you all again tomorrow.

From AAP:

Most of Australia’s threatened species are not being monitored and there’s no effort to determine if rescue plans are working, a new audit has found.

The Australian National Audit Office has offered a scathing assessment of the federal government’s efforts to save threatened plants and animals from extinction.

It said the Department of Agriculture, Water and the Environment did not have measurement and reporting systems to provide reliable information on the status of threatened species.

Nor did it have systems to monitor and report back on efforts to safeguard species.

“There is limited evidence that desired outcomes are being achieved,” it said.

“There is no measurement, monitoring or reporting on progress, or on the contribution of listing assessments, conservation advice, recovery plans and threat abatement plans to their desired outcomes.

“Available information indicates that the status of threatened species is declining.”

Conservation groups says the audit is full of alarming findings, including a blowout in the time it takes for species of concern to be formally listed as deserving of protection under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act.

Experts have called on the New South Wales government to reintroduce mandatory face masks in high-risk settings as Covid-19 infections spike across the state.

NSW reported its second day in a row of cases above 20,000, with 20,087 cases recorded in the 24 hours to 4pm on Wednesday and an estimated 20,402 the day before. NSW health minister, Brad Hazzard, warned the number could double by next month.

2GB is reporting that the Rail, Tram & Bus Union have called off their planned industrial action tomorrow, and are now negotiating with the government:

We will bring you more on this as it breaks.

A report by the Australian National Audit Office (ANAO) has found the government is unsure if its efforts to prevent the extinction of flora and fauna are working.

The federal environment department oversees the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act, which requires the government to make plans to prevent the extinction of threatened species.

But the report says there is “limited evidence” the government is meeting its requirements:

There is limited evidence that desired outcomes are being achieved, due to the department’s lack of monitoring, reporting and support for the implementation of conservation advice, recovery plans and threat abatement plans.

Most recommendations from past evaluations and reviews have not yet been implemented.

The report adds that failings identified in previous audit reports have not been addressed and there is “no schedule or plan for future evaluations”.

2h ago06:20

Labor party launches its first federal election ad

Paul Karp

Labor has launched its first election ad, featuring leader Anthony Albanese promising to “show up and take responsibility” and a suite of policies to tackle the cost of living.

The ad nominates childcare, reducing power bills, fee-free Tafe and making it “easier to see the doctor” as Labor priorities – the latter signalling that a new health policy is imminent that will focus on GP and specialist out-of-pocket costs.

With the Morrison government struggling in opinion polls, the Coalition has increasingly sought to frame the election around the economy and national security.

In the ad, Albanese declares that “Australians deserve a prime minister who shows up, takes responsibility and works with people”, in an implicit criticism of Morrison’s handling of the pandemic and natural disasters including bushfires and flood.

“I’ll work with business to invest in manufacturing. Making more things here will create more secure jobs here … It’s my plan for a better future.”

The ad will run from Friday on primetime on all commercial TV networks including in rugby league and Australian rules football matches, and in South Australia after the Saturday state election.

The ad refers to three policies Labor has already released, to improve subsidies to reduce the cost of childcare, to “reduce power bills”, in reference to its clean energy policies, and to create 465,000 fee-free Tafe courses in areas of skills shortage.

Labor is yet to release its health policy, but Albanese has signalled the opposition will outbid the Morrison government in the leadup to the election by declaring it “will always be better” on health and education than the Coalition.

The finance minister, Simon Birmingham, was on ABC’s Afternoon Briefing this afternoon, discussing unemployment figures and the risk of increasing inflation.

Birmingham said Australia’s inflation rate was running at “half” the US’s, but conceded it was a “deeply uncertain time” and referred to international “pressures” in his explanation, a recurring theme for him this week.

This is indeed a very challenging and uncertain environment, that for all the goodness we have in the jobs numbers, it sits against a global environment where we still face the challenges of the Covid recovery and, in Australia, the first winter with Covid and the flu to run concurrently, we face the challenges of inflationary pressures, and while Australia is doing much better than many other nations – it has in fact an inflation rate running around half that of the United States – we do face the knock-on effects of those other nations, and we face a war in Europe and the disruptions that is causing to supply chains, as well as the humanitarian catastrophe that is unfolding here.

So it is a deeply uncertain time against which we frame the budget, and we do so very clear that our objective is to ensure we keep the economic growth going in Australia, we keep the jobs growth going in Australia, because that is the most important pillar for Australians, in terms of addressing any pressures they face, is to have a job and to have the income that comes from employment.

But we also do so mindful of the fact that with those global inflationary pressures, we don’t wish to add to those, we don’t wish to put any additional pressure that is already there from the rest of the world for upwards movement in interest rates.

An interaction from earlier today that I just had to share:

Results from three local government elections in NSW have been voided after electronic voting failures last year, AAP is reporting:

The NSW Electoral Commission has won its bid to overturn the results of three local government elections, after a broken electronic voting system failed to register people’s votes on election day last year.

“With considerable reluctance I consider that, because the system of election for the three councils is proportional representation, it is necessary to declare all of the councillors’ elections void,” the supreme court judge Robert Beech-Jones said in his judgment on Thursday.

The election results for Kempsey, Shellharbour and Singleton could have been different if all voters who registered to use iVote had been able to vote on the day, the electoral commissioner argued in December.

The iVote system failed when registered voters were blocked from voting because the system failed to recognise their security credentials.

Voters will have to head to the polls once again for fresh elections.

Beech-Jones noted that although the number of voters blocked by the iVote failure was small “the votes that were denied to those voters had the real potential to affect the election of at least one councillor in each of the three subject elections”.

The electoral commissioner approved last year’s disputed results while waiting for the judgment, saying last year it would have been impossible to hold fresh elections until mid-2022, due to it being a federal election year.

In a statement on Wednesday, the commission said it would not use iVote at the state election scheduled for 25 March 2023 or at any byelections between 1 July and then.

The decision not to use iVote at the state election in 2023 has not been driven by any concerns about cybersecurity matters in previous elections.

The Queensland education minister, Grace Grace, says she is appalled at federal minister Stuart Robert’s comments that there are “dud teachers” in public schools who couldn’t keep a job in the private sector.

Grace says:

He’s been acting in the job for five minutes and thinks he knows it all.

The account of the minister’s comments at the conference reeks of a boys club, slapping each other on the back telling themselves how good they are, and sneering at the state system that educates around 580,000 students in Robert’s home state of Queensland.

Our state system has some of the best teachers in the world, who go above and beyond every single day for the benefit of their students.

Over the past couple of years in particular, the support they have provided students throughout Covid has been outstanding.

And the latest Naplan results suggest state schools and teachers are doing something right.

For minister Robert to say our state schoolteachers are ‘dragging the chain’ is outrageous, inaccurate, and an insult to hard working teachers across Queensland and Australia.

Victorians are being warned the combination of flu and Covid-19 is set to create a difficult winter, AAP reports:

Premier Daniel Andrews on Thursday would not give a timeline for the removal of the remaining few coronavirus public health measures, including masks for hospitality and retail workers and some primary school students.

“At this stage I’ve got no advice that we’ll be able to take off those mask rules,” he told reporters.

“We are open and things are closer to normal than they have been for a long time.”

However, as the more contagious BA.2 sub-variant of the Omicron coronavirus strain starts to dominate in the state, the government has been pushing for people who have not yet had a third dose of vaccine to do so ahead of the colder months.

“Winter will be challenging, it always is whether you’ve got a pandemic or not – flu, for instance, always knocks our health system around every single winter,” Andrews said.

However, the opposition leader, Matthew Guy, said it was time for the state to do away with masks completely and “move on” from the pandemic.

“How’s it fair that there’s 60,000 people at the MCG, sanctioned by the state government, but kids in primary school in grades four, five and six are wearing a mask? That’s ridiculous,” Guy told reporters.

The Australian Education Union has slammed “the deplorable comments” directed at public school teachers, principals and education support staff made by the acting education minister, Stuart Robert, at an independent schools’ conference today.

The Australian Education Union federal president, Correna Haythorpe, said:

Referring to public school teachers as the ‘bottom 10% dragging the chain’, Stuart Roberts has slandered the public school workforce that has been the backbone of Australia’s education system, especially during the past two turbulent years.

Public school teachers have always been an easy target for politicians like minister Robert who think that a cheap and easy headline which attacks teachers for declining educational outcomes will let his government off the hook for their failure to prioritise public education.

Today’s comments once again show the Morrison government’s outrageous preference for the private school system, a preference which comes at great cost to the teachers and students in public schools.

Public schools are underfunded by at least $4bn every year and successive Coalition governments have shirked their responsibility time and time again. Where is minister Robert’s outrage about the deep inequality facing public school students across the nation? Put simply, the Morrison government is missing in action for public schools.