Health News at Your Fingertips

With that, we will wrap up the blog for the evening. Here are today’s major developments:

• Agriculture minister Murray Watt has urged travellers to be wary of foot-and-mouth disease as opposition figures criticised the government for its approach.
• The former NSW deputy premier John Barilaro told a staff member to seek changes that would have made the lucrative $500,000-a-year New York trade job a ministerial appointment, telling him to get it done “ASAP”, the inquiry heard today.
• The prime minister, Anthony Albanese, said he found Scott Morrison’s comments during a church sermon on the weekend “astonishing” and unworthy of someone who led Australia.
• The Qantas plane that landed at Perth airport on Monday declared a fuel mayday but there was no safety issue, the airline’s chief pilot has said.
• Josh Frydenberg has moved into the private sector, joining investment bank Goldman Sachs.
• A day after he was found to have engaged in serious corrupt conduct, John Sidoti is refusing to quit NSW parliament, saying he will take the fight to clear his name.
• Childcare workers have voted to strike in September after years of poor pay and conditions.
• A case of meningococcal disease has been identified in a twenty-eight-year-old in Adelaide. NT Health has identified one case of monkeypox in the Northern Territory, but says the person presents “no transmission risk to the community”.
• 89 people died from Covid-19 across the country today.

Western Australia Police have provided a short update on the house fire in Port Hedland, saying the mother of the children has been flown to Perth for specialist treatment, and that no charges have been laid:

The mother of the three children who perished in the fire is now being flown to Perth for further specialist treatment.

No charges have been laid, and investigations are continuing.

There is no further comment at this stage.

The former head of the Prime Minister’s Department, Phil Gaetjens, has hit back at claims he was a political actor in his role, saying he was a “public service plant” not a “political plant.”

Gaetjens was giving his valedictory address at an Institute of Public Administration Australia event in Canberra earlier today, and said accusations he had made his role political was one of the biggest misunderstandings of his role:

What I did was try and connect the public service to the treasurers and ministers that I worked with, to achieve that point where when cabinet, the ministry and the public service, do things in sync, the machine of government hums, and you get good outcomes.

I regard myself sometimes as a bit of a public service plant up in Parliament House rather than now a political plant in the public service.

That comment – all of what I said in the speech – is contested. So for those people who know me, those people who want to say something about me, if they think something different, then they can say that and I’m quite happy for them to have that view.

But certainly from the discussions that I’ve had with people who know me and how I work, it’s that understanding of the process that means you can understand the policy inception to delivery, because unless your policy is delivered as government policy or government statute, it doesn’t go anywhere.

Andrews ‘deserves’ another term as Victorian premier, Albanese says

Prime minister Anthony Albanese has backed Victorian premier Daniel Andrews to go for another term at the upcoming Victorian election, saying he “deserves” to be re-elected.

Speaking to ABC Radio Melbourne this morning, Albanese said Andrews was “someone of integrity”:

Daniel Andrews will be seen to have been taking strong action.

That contrasts with the sort of dragged-out scenarios we’ve seen over serious issues with people on the other side of politics.

I think that Daniel Andrews deserves to be re-elected. He’s someone of integrity … he’s introduced significant social reform. He’s a mate of mine.

Plans to fast-track teachers into classrooms

Trainee teachers may be allowed into classrooms earlier, as staff shortages continue to bite across the country.

The idea was raised by federal assistant minister for education, Anthony Chisholm, on the ABC’s Afternoon Briefing, where he said education minister, Jason Clare, was also pushing to speed up visa approvals for teachers who have applied to come to Australia:

Part of it is speeding up the visa process from some of those teachers who have applied to come and he’s undertaken work on that.

He’s scheduled the first ministerial discussion for a couple of weeks’ time, which will be an important part of those discussions federally. Some states are doing some things already and New South Wales has suggested better access for student teachers.

I was talking to the vice chancellor at La Trobe University and they’ve got an access program where teachers can do their study in two years before they’re qualified.

One of the challenges for us is from what I’ve heard from principal and teachers on the ground in some of these schools, is a lot of teachers have been delaying long service leave and things like that.

So the challenge with sickness and long service and so forth means that this is going to be a problem not only now currently but into the years ahead.

Greens want to keep ‘coal and gas in the ground’, Shoebridge says

Greens senator David Shoebridge was also just on ABC’s Afternoon Briefing, and after an initial chat about senator training and doing politics differently, he was asked what the Greens want from the Labor government on climate.

Shoebridge was direct, saying the party wanted to keep “coal and gas in the ground”:

We want a bill that keeps coal and gas in the ground. That’s what our focus is on. Whatever shape this bill is as it works through parliament, we’re not here to pass a bill and feel good and have some confetti drop from the ceiling.

We’re here to pass legislation that keeps coal and gas in the ground and keeps future generations as safe as we possibly can. And that will be our test for whether or not this bill is working.

I just wanted to return to nationals senator Bridget McKenzie, who had earlier mentioned she would personally cleaning people’s shoes upon their return from Bali.

McKenzie was apparently not joking and expanded her offer to “any and all”:

Taking a quick break from the news, I wanted to just share this great piece from Caitlin Cassidy about a mysterious pink light in Mildura.

As she writes, was it alien invasion? Season five of Stranger Things? A portal to the timespace continuum?

You will have to read it to find out (and yes I do realise the headline gives it away, but we can also collectively imagine it is a mystery):

Urgent clarification on FMD threshold needed, Littleproud says

Shadow agriculture minister David Littleproud was just on ABC’s Afternoon Briefing, and was asked what he thought of measures to prevent the spread of foot-and-mouth disease.

While he stopped short of directly calling for border closures, he also did not actually outline what he thinks should be done, beyond saying the government should have a road map of trigger points towards a border closure with Indonesia.

Here’s what he had to say:

Well, in light of the fact that it’s not contained and it’s increasing the spread across the country, I think if we haven’t hit that trigger point, then what is that trigger point? I think that’s the important thing now. I was shocked that it hadn’t been contained to the extent I thought it had and was led to believe.

So it’s important that we continue to be transparent, with us and the Indonesians, about the threats it poses to us and what are the steps taken, so we are working collaboratively with the Indonesians in trying to isolate this.

But there has to be a threshold question that needs to be answered to us and the Indonesians. And we must be getting dangerously close to that … if we have not even crossed it.

The Victorian Nationals senator Bridget McKenzie has said the agriculture minister, Murray Watt, has been “asleep at the wheel” when it comes to dealing with foot-and-mouth disease.

McKenzie added that she believes it was possible to stop the spread of the disease at the border with the use of “the right measures” but failed to actually say what those measures would look like, apart from saying she would clean people’s shoes:

I don’t believe we need to close the border with Indonesia, I believe this government needs to be serious about stopping foot-and-mouth at the border.

Systems at the border need to respond to the crisis as they occur. Decisions needed to be made weeks and months ago.

The fact we have only foot mats going into Darwin and Cairns when you have 16,000 Australian returning from Bali a week, the risk is huge.

If Murray Watt can’t have foot baths for Sydney and Melbourne airport to get the thousands of people coming from Bali waived through by security washed down, not just on their feet but in their backpack, I am very happy to offer my time to hand-wash those shoes myself.

Lambie calls on Coalition to support climate bill

The Tasmanian independent senator Jacqui Lambie has called on the Coalition to support Labor’s climate bill to ensure the Greens don’t “play” with it in the Senate.

Speaking on Sky News earlier today, Lambie seemed to be referring to the Greens blocking the proposed emissions trading scheme put forward by the Rudd government in 2009.

Here’s what she had to say:

First of all we need to set a target. So if the Greens want to play up like silly little buggers let them go play up.

I can only hope the Liberals come to some sense and actually set a target. We’ve got to be ambitious and we need to set something.

But, once again, you can’t turn coal and gas off overnight. It just doesn’t work like that. Let’s be realists.

AMA in WA calls for mask mandate as Covid cases surge

The head of the Australian Medical Association in Western Australia has directly called for a mask mandate as Covid cases continue to surge across the country.

Dr Mark Duncan-Smith said the pressure hospitals are under could be eased by mandating masks indoors, adding that relying on people to do the right thing was not enough:

Relying on citizens to just do the right thing [has led to] where we are now.

This is to avoid stricter restrictions down the road. We do need the government to step in and protect society.

We need to control this outbreak rather than [maintain] a ‘let it rip’ approach.