What happened today
This is where we leave our coverage for the day. This is how things stand:
- Victorian premier Daniel Andrews may need surgery on a fractured vertebrae sustained when he fell down slippery steps at a holiday house on Monday.
- NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian, health minister Brad Hazzard, and chief health officer Dr Kerry Chant received the first dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine today.
- Federal health minister Greg Hunt is in hospital receiving treatment for cellulitis, which is a serious bacterial infection.
- Attorney general Christian Porter will not return from leave before parliament resumes next week.
- Prime minister Scott Morrison said he will not consider moving Porter to another portfolio, saying he is “an innocent man under our law”. He also said he was comfortable with Porter implementing a Respect at Work campaign.
- Victoria’s Yallourn power station will be shut down in mid-2028, four years earlier than previously planned. Victorian energy, environment and climate change minister, Lily D’Ambrosio, said that “old coal fired power stations [are] creaking to a stop right around the world” as people switch to renewables, and that workers would be supported.
- Another 149,000 doses of the Pfizer vaccine have arrived in Australia. The target of vaccinating four million people by April has been abandoned, but the government says the “major target” has always been to offer every Australian adult the vaccine by the end of October.
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Morrison will meet with new US president Joe Biden in a virtual meeting on Friday, in the Australia-India-Japan-United States Quad foreign leaders’ meeting. Australia’s chief medical officer, Prof Paul Kelly, and the medical adviser to the White House, Dr Anthony Fauci, met for an online event.
- Home affairs minister Peter Dutton has introduced legislation that will give federal law agencies new hacking and account takeover powers, that legal groups worn are “so expansive as to be practically unlimited in scope”.
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In that same interview, Labor MP Amanda Rishworth was asked about former Labor adviser Anna Jabour’s op-ed, published on news.com.au on Wednesday afternoon, which detailed her experiences while working as a Labor staffer during the Gillard-Rudd era.
Rishworth said she “100%” encouraged any Labor staffers to come forward with their stories.
I would suggest that anyone that has experienced this type of treatment should come forward and participate in the inquiry because that is the only way we are going to get a full account of what is occurring and, importantly, a pathway forward to changing the culture.
So I certainly would encourage anyone, from all sides of politics, to come forward to share their stories. I think it is going to be a very important inquiry and one that will have recommendations and a pathway forward that I think will be incredibly important.
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Dr Fiona Martin has become the latest government MP stymied over how to answer questions on how an independent inquiry into the allegations against Christian Porter would impact “the rule of law”.
Porter denies all allegations that have been made against him and NSW police have closed an investigation into the claims, after the woman who made the allegations died without giving a formal interview or signed statement.
Martin, the federal government MP for Reid, was asked by the ABC’s Patricia Karvelas why the solicitor general should not be consulted, and was unable to provide an answer.
Here’s how it played out:
Q: The prime minister said that Christian Porter is “an innocent man under our law” – and that he will return to work as attorney general – which, of course, many people are saying hang on a minute we need to at least establish an independent inquiry. Why not ask the solicitor general for some advice on this?
Martin: The attorney general has worked with the New South Wales police ...
Q: He hasn’t been interviewed by the police, he hasn’t worked with them at all.
Martin: The New South Wales police have closed the case and the attorney general denies allegations.
Q: He denies them, but it can’t be tested right, so why not ask the solicitor general for advice?
Martin: No, no one is above the rule of law.
Q: That’s why you ask the solicitor general for advice.
Martin: No one is above the rule of law ... people are innocent until proven guilty, no-one is above the law ... New South Wales police have investigated it and have closed the case.
Q: Can I just ask, how would asking the solicitor general for advice on this be above the law?
Martin: This is where the New South Wales police have actually investigated this...
Q: .... how would it be above the law to ask for advice from the person who is meant to give legal advice?
Martin: The attorney general has denied the allegations. The matter has been investigated by the New South Wales police and it is closed.
Q: But the attorney general has never been asked for an interview.
Martin: I’m not privy to that.
Q: I am, and he hasn’t been interviewed by New South Wales police. (Christian Porter said he had not been interviewed during his press conference last week, which the NSW police confirmed.)
Martin: As I said, no one is above the law, I’m not above the law, you are not above the law.
Q: I am certainly not, but I know that the solicitor general provides advice. Why not ask for it?
Martin: That is not a matter for me to decide.
Q: No, but do you think it would be a good idea for the government?
Martin:
I think it is important that cases are investigated but they also think it’s incredibly important that no one is above the rule of law and that people are innocent until they are proven guilty. If we start doing this then we are going to get into a very dangerous place where people who are alleged [to have committed crimes], you know, are treated as criminals until they are proven guilty. What a dangerous world that would be.
The interview then moved on.
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After a decade of war in Syria, the head of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Australia says all countries need to make sustained efforts to resolve the conflict.
David Tuck, the head of the ICRC mission in Australia, says Syrians have “endured injury upon injury”, with 5.6 million Syrians forced to leave the country and another 6.2 million displaced within its borders.
In a statement issued this afternoon, coinciding with the ICRC in Geneva releasing new research showing the heavy price paid by young Syrians, Tuck said:
The tragedy of a decade of conflict is in both specific, individual incidents of violence and hardship, and also in the steady collapse of infrastructure and vital services. If the conflict can be resolved, Syria’s youth, after everything they have already been through, will have the daunting task of rebuilding everything. With the passing of 10 years, we need renewed, sustained and concerted international diplomatic efforts to resolve the conflict, giving the youth a meaningful second chance.
The international director of Australian Red Cross, Michael Annear, said the situation for the Syrian people was “as bad as it has ever been, even after 10 years of conflict”. Annear said the international community “must not abandon them”. The Australian Red Cross works with partners in Syria to deliver assistance and aid, as well as supporting resettled Syrian refugees across Australia.
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Mallacoota to become navy ship's home port after bushfire evacuation
Mallacoota has been named as the new ceremonial home port for the navy ship HMAS Choules, which was used to evacuate Mallacoota residents and tourists stranded on the beach during the 2019-20 bushfires.
Today the bond that was formed between HMAS Choules & Mallacoota during the 2019-20 bushfires will be cemented with the announcement of the town as Choules’ homeport - as significant for the crew as it is for the people of Mallacoota. #TYFYS #lovegippsland @Australian_Navy pic.twitter.com/tnt0pGu00b
— Darren Chester MP (@DarrenChesterMP) March 10, 2021
The local MP and veterans’ affairs minister, Darren Chester, made the announcement on Wednesday, saying:
The ceremonial homeport is a significant connection for any navy ship, bonding the ship and crew to a community for the life of service, and ensuring the friendships developed during a time of devastation continue....
Mallacoota was one of the hardest-hit areas during the bushfires with images of the devastation circulating around the world.
It was our navy personnel from the Choules who helped hundreds of locals and visitors in their time of need..
The ship evacuated 1,305 people, 162 dogs, three cats, a rabbit and a parakeet from Mallacoota to the Port of Hastings near Melbourne across two trips in early January.
Another 58 people, two dogs, a cat and a rabbit were rescued by the navy training vessel MV Sycamore.
The ship’s crew plans to return to Mallacoota in November to meet with community members.
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And a reminder that flights from New Zealand to Australia will resume from 11.59pm on 11 March.
Auckland will be an orange zone under Victoria’s traffic light system, which means travellers are required to get a permit and get tested within 72 hours of arrival in the state, remaining at home or in their place of accomodation until they get a negative result. The rest of New Zealand is a green zone – no testing is required.
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Victorian health authorities administered 2,831 doses of Covid-19 vaccines yesterday, bringing the total number of doses administered in the state in the two-and-a-half weeks since the program began to 18,325.
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Patrick is also asked by ABC host Patricia Karvelas about Scott Morrison saying Christian Porter is “an innocent man under our law” and will retain his position as attorney general.
Patrick says people need to “distinguish between making a criminal allegation that needs to be tested against the burden of proof, which is beyond reasonable doubt, and a very separate question, which is, is Christian Porter fit for high office?”
He adds:
That is not a question that necessarily needs to be played out in court. That can be done by way of a proper, independent inquiry and indeed it must be done because we cannot have an attorney general sitting in such a place, being questioned in terms of his integrity. Again, that’s not saying that he is guilty of anything, but he has to have his name cleared so that he enjoys the trust of government and indeed the trust of the Australian public.
Patrick says the allegations “will become an albatross around [the Morrison] government’s neck if [the prime minister] does not act, if he does not act to clear Christian Potter not from a criminal offence but from the questions as to whether or not he is fit to hold high office”.
Patrick says it may be possible to hold a Senate inquiry into the matter if an independent inquiry is not called, but says that would risk becoming “politically charged” and should be “an option of last resort”. It would be better, he says, if a former judge was appointed to the task.
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Patrick is then asked whether he agrees with the federal energy minister, Angus Taylor, who said the early closure of Yallourn power station in Victoria raises concerns about power reliability and prices going forward.
Yallourn isn’t closing until 2028 – still a ways away, and the Victorian government is confident in its mix of renewables and big batteries, another of which was announced today.
Patrick says:
Well, the interesting thing is that everyone keeps saying that coal is the cheapest form of energy, but we are seeing that is not the case any more. We need to be moving towards renewables as quickly as possible, making sure that the energy that we generate is clean, reliable and affordable.
Now what we have got is a [federal] government that has been reluctant to commit to that pathway and we are now seeing industry making the decisions ahead of government.
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The South Australian senator Rex Patrick has been asked on the ABC about the fate of the Whyalla steelworks in the face of Greensill’s collapse. He says he is “not asking the prime minister to write a cheque, certainly not at this point”, but that “the people of Whyalla, the people of SA, need to know that the federal government will stand up and will make sure that no matter what happens, there will be steelworks in Whyalla”.
That sounds like cheque-writing language to me.
Patrick says he’s holding off on going cap in hand to the PM because commercial plays are still being made within the steelworks’ owner, GFG Group.
At worst we see GFG go into administration, and hopefully, knowing the company is in the black, we would see some willing buyers. But right now the people of Whyalla need certainty and that certainty can be given by the prime minister simply making a statement saying that, no matter what happens, in the end Australia cannot afford to be without a steelmaking capability, the people of Whyalla will be protected, the steelworks will remain open.
So no specific cheque now, but a promise of a blank cheque later.
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The MinterEllison chief executive, Annette Kimmitt, will leave the law firm after the board decided her position was no longer tenable after she sent an email to staff about the firm acting for the attorney general, Christian Porter, the Australian Financial Review has reported.
Kimmitt is only two-and-a-half years into her five-year term as CEO.
MinterEllison chief executive Annette Kimmitt will leave the law firm after its board decided her position was no longer tenable in the wake of an email she sent to staff. https://t.co/uZM7lWrghu
— Financial Review (@FinancialReview) March 10, 2021
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Cairns hospital called a code yellow on Tuesday due to an influx of patients, including a number of Covid-19 patients from Papua New Guinea.
More from AAP:
More than 260 people presented at the emergency department on Tuesday, with road crash victims adding to increased pressure on services.
“A sustained high number of presentations to the ED, alongside a spike in trauma admissions and several patients needing isolation for Covid-19 had led to the hospital declaring a Code Yellow,” the hospital said in a statement on Wednesday.
The hospital has six patients with Covid-19 in isolation, all of whom travelled from PNG.
“All patients were detected with the virus in hotel quarantine, and transferred to the hospital as per usual processes, to prevent any risk of community infection,” the executive director of medical services, Don Mackie, said.
He is confident the hospital will be able to cope with the increased demand in the short term, but said some elective surgery has been postponed.
“We are balancing our Covid-19 pandemic response with the continued delivery of essential health services, but we are asking far north Queenslanders to please keep our EDs for emergencies only,” he said.
The premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk, said vaccination hubs on Thursday and Saibai islands were a priority given the outbreak in PNG.
“It means greater protection for our communities, especially in the Torres Strait,” she said in parliament on Wednesday.
The government first flagged plans for a sped-up vaccination rollout for the islands neighbouring PNG last week.
“It’s only a matter of kilometres, and there’s a lot of trade and commerce that usually happens, and we are seeing more and more cases, unfortunately, in Papua New Guinea,” Palaszczuk said on Friday.
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Hong Kong politician Ted Hui to settle in Australia, likely angering China
News that the Hong Kong legislator Ted Hui is settling in Australia after being granted a travel exemption by the Australian government is unlikely to go down well in Beijing.
When Guardian Australia contacted the Chinese embassy in Canberra for comment on the matter, an official pointed us to remarks made by the foreign ministry spokesperson in Beijing last week. The foreign ministry spokesperson, Wang Wenbin, told reporters Monday last week:
China’s position on Hong Kong-related issues is consistent and clear. Hong Kong is China’s Hong Kong, and every bit of Hong Kong affairs belongs to China’s internal affairs, in which no other country has the right to interfere.
The Chinese side urges the Australian side to stop meddling in Hong Kong’s affairs and China’s internal affairs in any way. Otherwise the China-Australia relations will only sustain further damage.
Emphasis added by me. These are not new comments but they reflect Beijing’s thinking.
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Christian Porter won't return to work before parliament resumes next week
Christian Porter won’t be returning to work in time for next’s week parliament sitting, which means the government is short a leader of the house as well as an attorney general (a role Michaelia Cash has stepped into).
So come on down, acting leader of the House, Peter Dutton.
The home affairs minister will take charge of government business during the sitting – meaning you’ll be seeing a bit more of him than you usually do. The leader of the House not only sets the agenda for the government, they also challenge questions during question time if they think they go against practice.
It seems Labor is looking forward to duels.
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About 220,000 people are hospitalised following a fall in Australia every year, according to new data released today from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare.
The AIHW says falls were the leading cause of injury requiring hospitalisation in 2017-18.
It’s hard to read this report without thinking of the Victorian premier, Daniel Andrews, who is in hospital with a fractured T7 vertebra and broken ribs and may require surgery, after falling on steps.
The AIHW also released new data today on instances of spinal cord injury in Australia. Thankfully this report is less relevant to the premier.
There were 187 new cases of traumatic spinal cord injury reported to the Australian Spinal Cord Injury Register for 2017-18. Eighty per cent of these cases were in men, 46% were from ‘land transport crashes’ (cars, motorbikes, bicycles) and 36% were because of a fall.
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The state memorial for unionist Jack Mundey was held today. The pioneering conservationist died in May last year but his memorial was delayed due to the pandemic.
More from AAP:
The former NSW premier Bob Carr was the master of ceremonies at the state funeral for the passionate environmentalist on Wednesday at Sydney’s Town Hall.
Mundey died in May last year aged 90 but his memorial service was delayed because of the pandemic.
Mourners turned out in droves for the feisty radical, including his widow, Judy, NSW governor Margaret Beazley, former governor Marie Bashir, NSW Labor leader Jodi McKay and Sydney lord mayor Clover Moore.
Carr said “Australia’s most famous communist” was best remembered for leading the green bans movement that preserved many of Sydney’s heritage buildings but noted he also eventually became a Sydney City councillor, was on the Australian Conservation Foundation board and chair of the NSW Historic Houses Trust.
The firebrand led the NSW Builders Labourers Federation during Sydney’s construction boom in the 1970s, implementing 40 green bans – where unionists refused to work on projects – saving numerous heritage buildings from the bulldozers.
“What he was doing at that time was galvanising public opinion ... and laying the basis for heritage protection,” Carr said.
Never far from controversy, he took on powerful developers who under Liberal premier Robert Askin “were levelling Sydney block by block” during a “feverish property boom” in the 1970s, he said.
“He stood with all of us in this hall today in seeing global warming as an existential threat,” he said.
He was also remembered as a crusader for safety on building sites, an anti-Vietnam war campaigner, an advocate for feminism, gay rights and a passionate anti-apartheid campaigner.
Moore said Sydneysiders owned Mundey a huge debt for the preservation of the city’s treasures, including The Rocks, Centennial Parklands, Pitt Street Congregational Church and Kellys bush park.
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Australian organisations urged to update after Microsoft hack
A “large number” of Australian organisations could be left exposed to cyber compromise if they don’t update their systems, Andrew Hastie has said.
The assistant defence minister issued a statement this afternoon urging Australian businesses to follow updated advice from the Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) after vulnerable Microsoft Exchange systems were compromised by malicious cyber actors.
Hastie said:
Australian organisations cannot be complacent when it comes to cyber security, which is why all users of Microsoft Exchange are being urged to patch their vulnerable systems. The ACSC has identified a large number of Australian organisations yet to patch affected versions of Microsoft Exchange, leaving them exposed to cyber compromise. This can be done by implementing the necessary network security patches as soon as possible and then following the detection steps outlined by Microsoft.
Hastie – who until his promotion to the outer ministry in December was chair of the powerful intelligence committee – has urged people to follow advice at cyber.gov.au. The ACSC, which is part of the Australian Signals Directorate, first published the advice on 3 March and updated it yesterday.
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The Australian Capital Territory has recorded one new case of Covid-19 in hotel quarantine. The new case is a close contact of a previously reported case, also in hotel quarantine.
It brings the number of active cases in the territory to five.
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The Morrison government appears set to oppose a push by World Trade Organization member nations to allow developing countries to make cheap copies of licensed Covid-19 vaccines, unless it can secure last-minute changes to a proposal to waive intellectual property rights for Covid vaccines.
Ahead of a key WTO meeting on Wednesday and Thursday, the Guardian revealed international aid groups, health organisations and unions have been pleading with Australian the government to support the waiver proposal, which would suspend Covid vaccine patents for successful jab formulas invented by pharmaceutical giants for the duration of the pandemic.
More than 85 poor countries are not predicted to achieve widespread vaccination rollout before 2023, if at all, because of licensing rules and distribution limits that the World Health Organization director general, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has labelled a “catastrophic moral failure”.
Tedros, writing in the Guardian, has also warned that the longer Covid-19 circulates in developing nations, the greater the chance more deadly and vaccine-resistant variants emerge that could stifle immunity in wealthy, well-vaccinated countries.
The proposal to waive the required 20-year patent right for medicines under the WTO’s Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights agreement has the backing of 100 countries, however WTO members are split. Low and middle-income countries are in favour of the waiver, while pharmaceutical companies and governments in the US, UK and Europe are understood to be strongly opposed to the waiver.
Australia’s trade minister, Dan Tehan, speaking to ABC Radio on Wednesday morning, said that while Australia was “working very constructively” with the director general of the WTO on the waiver proposal, “we’ve got to make sure that there are some protections in place for the millions of dollars that has gone into the research to create these vaccines”.
Asked if Australia would support the proposal, Tehan said:
... we’re working through this to make sure that we can get the proper outcome.
If we can get a proper resolution that we’re working towards, and all the discussions have been very constructive so far, so my hope is that we can get a resolution.
You can read more about the WTO proposal to waive patent rights for Covid vaccines here:
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Daniel Andrews to learn today if he needs surgery for T7 vertebra fracture
We have an update on Daniel Andrews’ condition.
The Victorian premier was moved to The Alfred trauma centre last night for scans. The advice was he had broken several ribs and hurt his vertebrae in a fall down wet slippery steps at a holiday house on the Mornington Peninsula on Monday.
I now understand that he has fractured his T7 vertebra, which is the seventh thoracic vertebra, located in the middle of the back between the seventh and eighth ribs.
Doctors are today trying to determine if the 49-year-old will require surgery to reinforce this vertebrae, which could include using plates or pins. Even without surgery, it’s a significant injury with a potentially lengthy recovery time.
He has broken ribs on the left and right side of his body, but Guardian Australia understands that hasn’t caused any secondary injuries.
There will be an official update later today. We wish him and his family all the best.
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Here’s a photo of the NSW health minister, Brad Hazzard, getting a shot in the arm.
Just had my first dose of Astra Zeneca vaccine at St George Hospital from Nurse Lauren. Didn’t hurt a bit. And there were chocolates! Thnx Lauren and everyone at NSW Health 4 delivering the vaccine that will keep us all safe. @NSWHealth pic.twitter.com/yHUDIgbEDD
— Brad Hazzard (@BradHazzard) March 10, 2021
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West Australians are heading to the polls early in greater numbers than ever before – more than 500,000 have already voted and that could rise to 1.2 million before Saturday, the ABC’s Bridget Fitzgerald reports.
More than half a million people have already voted in the WA state election. Just over 1.7 million enrolled. The WA Electoral Commission estimates 1.2 million people could end up early voting.
— Bridget Fitzgerald (@msbfitzgerald) March 10, 2021
In the last state election in 2017, just 200,000 voted in-person early or by post.
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Western Australia has reported two new cases of Covid-19, both in hotel quarantine.
The new cases are a man and a woman in their 40s.
The state’s pandemic-long total has only increased by one to 921, after a previously reported case was reclassified as a historical infection.
Some 2,084 people were vaccinated in WA yesterday, bringing the total number of people who have received their first jab to 11,373.
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NRL great Cameron Smith announces retirement
Melbourne Storm great Cameron Smith has announced that he is retiring from the NRL.
He says he came to the decision after spending several months in Queensland with his family.
It felt like the right time to finish off the back of what was a very successful season last year – albeit a very different season, being away from home. And everyone knows we didn’t get an opportunity to play down here in Melbourne in front of home fans. Couldn’t have asked for more, you know, finishing with a premiership for a club that I have played my entire career with.
Smith says he was wrestling with the idea for “quite some time” throughout last year.
I still felt good within myself physically and mentally. I still felt like my form was good enough to play in the NRL, but, you know, at the end of the day, you know, once I spent good quality time with my family up in Queensland, I knew that it was the right time to finish. And now it just gives me the opportunity now to enjoy what’s going to be, you know, the next phase, next chapter of my life. Hopefully it will involve rugby league in some capacity, but the most important thing for me is that I get to enjoy quality time with my wife and my three children.
You can read our full story here:
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NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian receives Covid jab
The NSW premier, Gladys Berejiklian, got the AstraZeneca vaccine alongside the health minister, Brad Hazzard, and chief health officer, Dr Kerry Chant, at the St George hospital vaccination hub, which was officially opened today.
Getting a needle in the arm is a bit of a change to the traditional ribbon-cutting ceremony but it is a sign of the times.
The first staff member at the hospital to get the vaccine was Hailey Sharif, the cleaning services supervisor. She said:
I feel so fortunate to receive the vaccine, it gives extra assurance that I’m going to be protected. I want to protect my kids and my grandkids. I’ve got five children, 14 grandchildren and one great-grandchild. It’s so important that we all receive our vaccine to keep each other safe.
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Reshuffle of federal seat boundaries in WA could impact Christian Porter's electorate
The Australian Electoral Commission will release new proposed federal seat boundaries for Western Australia and Victoria next week – and one option on the table is the possibility of abolishing Christian Porter’s seat of Pearce.
The AEC said today that it would announce the proposed new federal seat boundaries on 19 March.
According to AAP’s Canberra bureau chief, Paul Osborne:
With WA set to lose one seat due to population shifts, one option raised with the AEC is to abolish Pearce and redistribute its voters into neighbouring seats, which have low growth projections and are below the voter quota.
Labor says the change is the least disruptive to four other seats in order to achieve the loss of one seat in the state.
The Liberals have proposed the abolition of the seat of Cowan, held by Labor backbencher Anne Aly, which would make major changes to six other seats.
Objections to the proposed WA seat changes close on 16 April, with the final determination due on 2 August – just days before the first possible date for a half-Senate and full House of Representatives election.
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D’Ambrosio has also said the premier, Daniel Andrews, remains in good spirits after he had a nasty fall at his home yesterday.
.@LilyDAmbrosioMP says the Premier @DanielAndrewsMP is in good spirits and is receiving the best of care. She says she looks forward to him making a full recovery @abcmelbourne #springst
— Bridget Rollason (@bridgerollo) March 10, 2021
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Back to Yallourn for a minute.
Victorian energy, environment and climate change minister, Lily D’Ambrosio, has been speaking in Victoria. We’ll bring you more from her press conference shortly, but in the mean time we’ve just received this statement from her office.
D’Ambrosio says the Andrews government will put Yallourn power station and mine workers “at the heart of its long-term response to Energy Australia’s decision to close the plant in 2028”.
She goes on to say that while it is difficult day for the workers, “the truth is we’re seeing these old, coal fired power stations creaking to a stop right around the world as countries and companies are switching to new, clean, more reliable and more efficient forms of energy.”
We can’t ignore that change or pretend it’s not happening – and we owe it to these workers to build a modern energy network that creates and supports thousands of Victorian jobs.
The 2028 closure date announced today by EnergyAustralia gives us time to do that – and it gives us time to manage this transition properly for workers, including contractors and casuals.
There are not a lot of details about the support package in the release, but it sounds similar to what was offered to workers of Hazelwood power station: help retraining and finding new jobs, workforce transition programs, etc.
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Let’s go back to the big industry news of yesterday, which is the impact the collapse of finance company Greensill Capital could have on the British and Australian steel industries.
The Australian Manufacturing Workers Union national secretary, Steve Murphy, says the union is working with Greensill workers to ensure their jobs are secure and they are paid on time.
We are working with unions within the sector to focus on making sure these workers’ entitlements are not at risk.
It’s crucial as we head toward economic recovery from this global pandemic that Australian manufacturing is protected and that local supply chains are central to creating secure jobs in manufacturing.
AMWU SA state secretary, Peter Bauer, said the union had been in contact with local management and “are assured by commitments that there is a current financial buoyancy within its local operations to enable it to maintain its operations in the immediate future.”
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The Queensland government is reviewing the school curriculum to ensure education programs concerning sexual consent and reporting sexual assault are adequate.
Education minister Grace Grace told parliament on Wednesday that she had asked her department to examine the existing respectful relationships program to ensure it adequately addresses sexual consent and reporting, and will examine the curriculum to ensure it is “addressing the needs of students in relation to these issues”.
But she said parents “and society more broadly” bore the brunt of the responsibility for teaching kids about consent.
She said:
Young Queenslanders have been sharing their personal stories of disturbing behaviours, including sexual violence, during and after their school years.
It is a responsibility of parents, carers and society more broadly to educate and support young people in addressing issues of sexual harassment, assault and consent.
Education can play a role, and Queensland introduced compulsory respectful relationship education into state schools in response the Not Now, Not Ever report of the Special Taskforce on Domestic and Family Violence in Queensland.
I have asked the Director-General of my department to work across the non-government and state education sectors, P & Cs and school communities to explore whether current Australian curriculum and respectful relationships education adequately address all issues, including consent and reporting.
The Australian Centre for Corporate Responsibility (ACCR) says the closure of Yallourn power station was “inevitable” and has called for AGL to follow suit and close the Bayswater and Loy Yang A power stations.
ACCR’s climate and environment director, Dan Gocher, said:
While EnergyAustralia’s announcement is welcome, continuing to operate a brown-coal fired power station after 50 years of age poses a safety risk to workers and a health risk to the Latrobe Valley community.
The closure of ageing coal-fired power stations is inevitable. The Federal Government’s willful blindness to the need for an agreed closure policy will be to the detriment of the entire market.
EnergyAustralia can see the writing on the wall - lower electricity prices and Yallourn’s continued unreliability means it must close early. AGL and Origin should do the same for their coal fired power stations, and their investors must pressure them to do so.
AGL, in particular, must follow the lead of EnergyAustralia and accelerate the closure of Bayswater and Loy Yang A, while supporting the communities built around them.
Lawyers warn against 'practically unlimited' new police hacking powers
Proposed new hacking and account takeover powers for law enforcement are more troubling than any of the other national security powers passed by the government in recent years and could have significant unintended side effects on innocent people, the Human Rights Law Centre and the Law Council of Australia have warned.
Home affairs minister Peter Dutton has introduced legislation into parliament giving three new powers to the Australian Federal Police, the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission and Australian Signals Directorate to disrupt and monitor networks and take over accounts, with a warrant granted by a member of the Administrative Appeals Tribunal.
Dutton has said the legislation would be aimed solely at people engaged in child sexual abuse, terrorism activity and selling weapons online, however the legislation covers any serious offence that carries a jail term of three years or over.
Speaking before the joint standing committee on intelligence and security, which is reviewing the Surveillance Legislation Amendment (Identify and Disrupt) Bill, Kieran Pender, senior lawyer at the Human Rights Law Centre, said the powers in the bill are “extraordinarily intrusive” and the legislation needed to be sent back to the drawing board:
The definitions provided by the network activity warrants are so expensive as to be practically unlimited in scope, we would urge the committee to recommend that these warrants be redrafted to prevent their application to individuals that have no involvement whatsoever in the relevant offence, otherwise every single Australian is at risk of having their online activities monitored by the federal police even where they’re not suspected of having done anything wrong.
Law Council president Dr Jacoba Brasch QC told the committee the legislation represented a major expansion of powers for the AFP and it was not clear it was justified:
The new powers depart sharply from the traditional focus of investigative powers on the collection of admissible evidence of specific offences. They also had the potential to cause significant loss or damage to large numbers of non suspects who are lawfully using computer networks or the systems being targeted. Our key concern is the need for the proposed powers. The need has not been adequately established most acutely in respect of data disruption warrants. We’re also concerned that new powers are disproportionately brought to the threats of serious and organised cyber crime, to which they are directed on the threshold of necessity.
Questions were also raised about whether having an AAT member sign off on a warrant was appropriate, or if a higher court judge needed to be authorising the use of the powers.
The legislation has the support of the Carly Ryan Foundation and the Victorian and Tasmanian Synod of the Uniting Church. Representatives from both organisations told the committee the legislation was necessary to break into and take down child exploitation networks.
Updated
The vice-chancellor of the University of Queensland, Prof Deborah Terry, is speaking at the National Press Club. Her academic background is in psychology.
Her theme is on speaking truth to power, which is pretty broad. And also the pandemic. And also geopolitics.
Underpinning this, not surprisingly, is a message about the importance of universities.
I believe Australia’s relative success reflects strong leadership and a community united against the common threat.
It also owes much to the fact that from the outset our governments listened to and acted on the advice of our medical experts and our researchers. They have provided timely evidence and guidance to anticipate the likely course of the virus, map its path, and understand more about how it operates. And they have contributed to global work on novel diagnostics, new therapeutics and vaccine development. And those medical experts who are all university educated have been trained to follow evidence and find truth.
There’s a lesson there. If our nation wants to find the best solutions to the hardest challenges we face, we need the university sector. We need their expertise, their innovation, their research.
Updated
Hello time team.
Thanks to Matilda Boseley for taking you through the morning.
Let’s start with a bit of data, via CovidLive.
It is just 12 days since Victoria had its last locally acquired case of Covid-19.
On the other end of the spectrum, the ACT has gone 243 days since its last locally acquired case. The NT has gone 221 days, Tasmania 211, South Australia 76, Queensland 54, New South Wales 52 and WA 37.
Updated
It’s been a big old morning but it’s time I leave you in the caring hands of Calla Wahlquist who will be with you through the afternoon.
Stars arrive in Melbourne to pay tribute to Michael Gudinski
Stars including the Minogue sisters and Jimmy Barnes are among the mourners who have arrived at a private funeral for entertainment industry icon Michael Gudinski.
Molly Meldrum, business tycoon Lindsay Fox, Eddie McGuire, Melbourne lord mayor Sally Capp and actor Sam Neill also are attending the Melbourne service for family and friends, reports AAP.
Premier Daniel Andrews is in hospital after his fall, with MP Martin Pakula at the service.
There will be a roadie guard of honour after the funeral when Gudinski’s hearse leaves the Ormond Hall venue, near the Melbourne CBD.
Gudinski died suddenly in his sleep on 2 March, aged 68, and is set to have a state memorial held in his honour on 24 March at Rod Laver Arena.
Updated
AAP have a bit more information on the man arrested after suspicious packages were delivered to the electorate offices of Western Australia premier Mark McGowan and a federal Labor MP:
McGowan’s office in Rockingham, south of Perth, was evacuated on Tuesday after a man threw an item wrapped in tinfoil into the building.
One staff member was taken to hospital as a precaution.
A similar tinfoil package and a letter were earlier delivered to the nearby electorate office of federal Labor MP Madeleine King.
This comes just days from Saturday’s state election.
A 67-year-old man was arrested overnight and is undergoing mental health assessments.
Police commissioner Chris Dawson told Perth radio 6PR on Wednesday the package at McGowan’s office contained a “water-based substance” which was not toxic or harmful.
We don’t believe there’s any broader connection with any other group or anything like that.
We believe it’s just a person acting by himself and we’ll continue our way through that investigation ... we don’t believe there’s an issue for broader public concern.
Dawson confirmed police were also investigating an alleged death threat indirectly received by the premier on the campaign trail.
A spokesperson for the premier said the threat was made by a man who approached Labor’s candidate for Carine, Paul Lilburne, at an early voting centre in Hillarys on Monday.
Police do not believe that incident is linked to the suspicious packages.
Updated
And while we are on the topic, SA has also recorded a local Covid-19 free day.
They have just one case in hotel quarantine.
South Australian COVID-19 update 10/3/21. For more information, go to https://t.co/mYnZsG7zGQ or contact the South Australian COVID-19 Information Line on 1800 253 787. pic.twitter.com/lEp9qstcE2
— SA Health (@SAHealth) March 10, 2021
Updated
NSW reaches 52 days with no local Covid cases
NSW has now gone 52 days with no locally acquired Covid-19 cases.
The state recorded five news cases in returned travellers in hotel quarantine.
Updated
Scott Morrison has declared Christian Porter “an innocent man under our law” and says he will remain as attorney general when he returns to work after a period tending to his mental health.
Digging in behind Porter, the prime minister on Wednesday flatly dismissed advice from a former solicitor general, Justin Gleeson, that he engage the current occupant of the position, Stephen Donaghue, to help determine whether or not the attorney general is a fit and proper person to remain in a justice portfolio.
Gleeson told the ABC that seeking such advice could act as a “circuit breaker” to the current impasse over the accusation that Porter raped a 16-year-old in January 1988 when he was 17. Porter has strenuously denied the allegation.
You can read political editor Katharine Murphy’s full report below:
If you were wondering how things were going at the Santos building in Adelaide, police have got the cherry pickers out.
Police & firefighters have hopped on the cherry picker to extract two protestors who are glued to the Santos building. The protestors have been up here for two hours. pic.twitter.com/Eh3RFybLun
— Ashley Wick (@ashleywick9) March 9, 2021
Nine News is reporting that both protesters on the building have been arrested, but those glued to the road remain.
Updated
The Greens have come out and slammed the federal and Victorian government handling of the Yallourn power station closure, saying a plan should have been in place years ago to close all stations on the government’s terms.
Greens leader Adam Bandt has just released this statement:
Liberal and Labor have refused to plan the transition out of coal and workers and communities are paying the price.
Coal has had its day, but instead of planning for this closure, Liberal and Labor haven taken millions in donations from big coal corporations, leaving workers and communities at the whim of decisions made in overseas boardrooms.
The transition must put workers and communities at the forefront. They have powered Australia’s industry for centuries, and as we move to renewables they deserve certainty over their future, but Liberal and Labor are siding with the big corporations instead.
To tackle the climate crisis, all of Australia’s coal-fired power stations must join Yallourn and be closed by 2030, but with a planned transition that looks after workers.
Updated
Victoria sees dramatic rise in gastro outbreaks across childcare centres
Yikes! Victorian childcare centres have already recorded 246 outbreaks of gastro so far this year, four times more than the five-year average.
This has prompted the executive director for communicable disease, Dr Bruce Bolam, to put out a warning urging parents to make sure their kids wash their hands with soap and water and stay home when sick.
Now, you might be thinking that message would be pretty engrained by now given the year we’ve had, but it turns out our newfound reliance on hand sanitiser might actually be to blame.
A good old-fashioned scrub with soap and warm water is the best way to remove the norovirus from our hands and prevent passing it on to infect others.
Alcohol-based sanitiser is not very effective against bugs such as norovirus, which is the predominant cause of the current childcare outbreaks.
Bolam said this rise in gastro outbreaks has been seen across the country.
The state’s health department warned children and staff who come down with vomiting or diarrhoea should stay at home for at least 48 hours after their symptoms have stopped to avoid infecting others.
Updated
More AstraZeneca hubs are on the way for Queensland: the RBWH, Redcliffe, Rockhampton, Mackay and Ipswich 🙌
— Annastacia Palaszczuk (@AnnastaciaMP) March 10, 2021
That's on top of the clinics in Logan, Bundaberg, QEII and Toowoomba Hospital launched this week.
The Victorian energy minister will stand up later today following Energy Australia’s announcement that they will close the Yallourn power station four years earlier than expected.
Energy Minister @LilyDAmbrosioMP will hold a press conference at 12:45 after Yallourn Power Station announced it will close in 2028, four years earlier than expected. It will build the world's biggest battery at the Latrobe Valley site @abcmelbourne #springst
— Bridget Rollason (@bridgerollo) March 10, 2021
Updated
Man arrested over suspicious package thrown into WA premier's local office
An update on the case of the suspicious foil-wrapped package reportedly thrown into the electorate office of WA premier Mark McGowan.
A spokeswoman for WA police said that a 67-year-old man has been taken into custody and is currently undergoing a medical assessment.
At this stage, no charges have been laid.
Updated
Just on the Yallourn power station, here are some interesting statistics on brown coal power stations from Simon Holmes à Court, senior advisor to the Climate and Energy College at Melbourne University.
your periodic reminder that #victoria's brown #coal power stations are responsible for ~6x as much CO₂ as the entire australian domestic aviation sector, in pre-covid times. https://t.co/zmsPjyc7eP
— 💧simon holmes à court 🕯 (@simonahac) March 9, 2021
Victoria power plant to close four years early
The owner of the Yallourn brown coal power plant in Victoria’s Latrobe Valley has announced it will shut in mid-2028, four years earlier than previously planned.
The announcement by EnergyAustralia follows widespread speculation that one or more of the 15 coal plants remaining in the national grid would shut early due to a flood of cheap solar and wind energy into the grid making them financially unviable.
Workers at the 1,480-megawatt plant were told of the plan on Wednesday morning ahead of a press conference.
The company’s managing director, Catherine Tanna, said the company had approached the Victorian government with a plan to close the plant, including a multimillion-dollar support package for workers and the region.
She said it would build what she described as the world’s largest battery – with 350-megawatt maximum capacity and four-hour storage duration – by 2026 to ensure a smooth transition when the coal plant shuts.
The closure would cut the company’s emissions by 60%, Tanna said.
EnergyAustralia’s goal is to be carbon neutral by 2050.
Formally known as Yallourn W, the plant was built in the 1970s and has suffered several outages in recent years. The company’s previous position was that it would be shut progressively between 2029 and 2032.
While federal and state governments have largely not acknowledged the likelihood coal plants would close earlier than scheduled, analysts have found they are increasingly under pressure for two basic reasons – they are not be able to sell as much electricity as they once were, and the price of wholesale electricity has fallen.
A recent analysis by two groups – Green Energy Markets and the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis – found previous estimates had understated just how much solar and wind was coming into the system.
They found renewable plants built between 2018 and 2025 would add 70,000 gigawatt hours of new electricity supply – equivalent to more than a third of what is currently used across the national grid each year.
Experts have stressed the need for a national transition plan to guide the inevitable shift away from coal-fired power, given it could accelerate sooner than expected.
Yallourn’s closure will follow the Liddell coal plant, in New South Wales, shutting in 2023.
Updated
No local Covid cases in Queensland today! Honestly, I’ve lost count of how many days in a row this is now.
Wednesday 10 March – coronavirus cases in Queensland:
— Annastacia Palaszczuk (@AnnastaciaMP) March 9, 2021
• 0 new locally acquired
• 5 overseas acquired
• 37 active cases
• 1,368 total cases
• 2,012,660 tests conducted
Sadly, six Queenslanders with COVID-19 have died. 1,321 patients have recovered.#covid19 pic.twitter.com/QuEx6YNN0X
Updated
The owner of the Whyalla steelmill, GFG, insists it has “adequate funding for our current needs” following the collapse of its major backer, finance group Greensill Capital.
As we reported overnight, GFG owes Greensill some $4bn, hundreds of millions of dollars of which relate to its Australian operations. GFG is in dispute over the debt, and in the short term needs to find a fresh backer.
In a statement, a GFG spokesman said:
GFG Alliance as a whole is operationally strong and we are benefiting from a thirteen year high in steel prices as well as strong markets in aluminium and iron ore. While Greensill’s difficulties have created a challenging situation, we have adequate funding for our current needs.
Through our global efficiency drive we’ve improved our operations’ margins with most of our major businesses generating positive cashflows. Discussions to secure alternative long-term funding are progressing well but will take some time to organise. While this takes place we have asked all of our businesses to manage cash carefully. We thank our employees, customers and suppliers for their continued support.
Meanwhile, Labor’s industry spokesman, Ed Husic, has been speaking about the crisis at a press conference in Sydney, calling on the Morrison government to protect the 5,000-odd jobs in GFG’s Australian operation.
Husic said Labor has previously raised concerns about Greensill’s supply chain finance products, which he likened to pay day lending for companies.
We need to know that steel workers will be looked after should anything happen, and we also need to ensure that we’ve got a Government that’s on the side of manufacturing workers...
And this has been a question that we’ve seen and had for quite some time with the Coalition Government. They have pummelled manufacturing over the years, driven out car manufacturing, cobbled together manufacturing plans after getting rid of them just because
Labor had brought them in. It’s not good enough to have the foot-dragging that we’ve seen out of the Morrison Government, and now, some of that indolence, some of the delay, has caught up here and that’s now generated concerns about the viability of some of these businesses that are providing thousands of jobs to manufacturing workers.”
Updated
........and the Adelaide protesters have glued themselves to the road.
The protesters have glued themselves to the ground pic.twitter.com/p5PoYBFyj0
— Patrick James (@PatJamesTiser) March 9, 2021
Look, maybe I don’t need to clarify this, but cellulitis is a fairly serious bacterial infection that makes your skin swell up.
It is very different from cellulite which is lumpy fat deposits beneath the skin.
I’m sure marathon running Hunt would be aghast to think that we thought he might have cellulite.
Updated
Hunt diagnosed with cellulitis on his leg
Health minister Greg Hunt’s office has put out a statement confirming he has a bacterial infection in his leg:
Overnight, testing confirmed Minister Hunt’s diagnosis to be Cellulitis, a bacterial infection in his leg.
The Minister is improving and will be discharged in the coming days and expects to be back at work next week.
The Prime Minister will be acting Health Minister during his absence.
The minister was admitted to hospital last night but is expected to be back in action or parliament next week.
Updated
Extinction Rebellion protesters appear to be active in Adelaide today, blocking a major city road and allegedly graffitiing the offices of power company Santos.
Extinction Rebellion protesters have blocked off the majority of Flinders Street in the city, and have graffitied on the Santos building, with two members sitting on the roof. Traffic diversions are in place at Pultney Street and King William Street @theTiser pic.twitter.com/78lquHSh0f
— Patrick James (@PatJamesTiser) March 9, 2021
Updated
Yallourn power station expect to close early
We are expecting to hear from Energy Australia, owners of the Yallourn power station in about half an hour.
The Herald Sun is reporting this morning that the Victorian Latrobe Valley station is expected to close four years earlier than expected.
This will potentially be mid-2028.
I’ll bring you more as soon as I can.
Breaking: EnergyAustralia is about to announce that the Yallourn coal-fired power station - which produces 22 per cent of the state’s electricity - will close four years earlier than expected in 2028. @theheraldsun #auspol #springst
— Tom Minear (@tminear) March 9, 2021
Updated
Scott Morrison and Christian Porter have been accused of ignoring the disability royal commission’s “urgent” request for an extension to the inquiry, after failing to reply to the commissioner for more than four months.
In its interim report in October, the commission said it needed a 17-month extension, acknowledging the scope of the $527m inquiry may have been underestimated and noting the impact of the pandemic on the hearings.
Guardian Australia can reveal the government is yet to respond to two letters from the commission chair Ronald Sackville requesting the extension, despite him stressing the “urgency” of an early response.
You can read the full story below:
From the prime minister’s press conference, we also learnt that health minister Greg Hunt is expected to be back to work by the time parliament reconvenes next week.
Morrison said he will running the health and aged care portfolios until Hunt is back:
He will be fine by next week, he will be back up on his feet.
Minister Hunt and I have worked hand-in-glove this last year in particular in this matter [the pandemic]. Until he returns I will be personally addressing the ministerial responsibilities on health and aged care, together with minister Colbeck
Richard Colbeck is the minister for senior Australians and aged care services.
Updated
Porsche driver linked to fatal Eastern Freeway crash pleads guilty
Porsche driver Richard Pusey has pleaded guilty to outraging public decency after filming the scene of a crash where four police officers died, reports AAP.
The 42-year-old formally pleading guilty to three charges, including reckless conduct endangering serious injury by driving at high speeds in the lead up to the quadruple fatality on Melbourne’s Eastern Freeway.
Senior constables Lynette Taylor and Kevin King and constables Glen Humphris and Josh Prestney died in the crash, after a truck ploughed into their stationary cars on the side of the road.
The charge of outraging public decency related to Pusey’s actions after the crash, which included allegedly filming the scene as one of the officers died.
Updated
NSW chief health officer Dr Kerry Chant has been named the 2021 NSW Woman of the Year this morning.
Premier Gladys Berejiklian and Chant have been close allies during the Covid-19 pandemic and fronted media hundreds of times together in the last year.
Congratulations to Dr Kerry Chant, the 2021 NSW Woman of the Year. Her tireless work and expert advice has kept NSW safe during the pandemic. pic.twitter.com/9CLHiFfcsl
— Gladys Berejiklian (@GladysB) March 9, 2021
And it seems like Chant’s day is only going to get better, as she is slated to get the first dose of the AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine later today along with Berejiklian and health minister Brad Hazzard.
Updated
The prime minister has also been asked about comments made by Kylie Moore-Gilbert who was previously a political prisoner in Iran.
Although expressing her gratitude, Moore-Gilbert criticised the Australian government’s approach to securing her freedom saying she was “not convinced the quiet diplomacy case stacks up”.
Morrison said she “obviously can’t be aware of all the things that the government has been involved in to secure her release”.
There are obviously things, particularly within the national security dimension of what the government handles on a day-to-day basis.
I am aware of those issues and have been directly involved in many of the decisions, in fact all of the decisions that ultimately ended up in securing her release.
I know Kylie Moore-Gilbert is very appreciative of that. And there will be views about this matter. But what I know is that at all times, this was our top priority, our top priority consular case to get Kylie home.
You can read more of Moore-Gilbert’s comments here:
Updated
PM says he's comfortable with Christian Porter continuing with Respect at Work campaign
And of course, attention has now turned to if there should be an independent investigation into an allegation of rape levelled against attorney general Christian Porter (which he categorically denies).
This has been a relentless line of questioning towards the prime minister over the past week, who seemed to hope the matter would have been put to bed after Porter stood up and faced the media last Wednesday.
Morrison today said he would be happy for Porter continue heading the “Respect at Work” campaign.
Reporter:
Prime Minister, is it tenable for Christian Porter to continue as the attorney general given he will be responsible for implementing the Respect at Work report and will you consider moving him to a different position in cabinet as something of a circuit breaker?
Morrison:
No, I wouldn’t consider moving him to somewhere else. He is a fine attorney general and a fine minister for industrial relations, he is an innocent man under our law.
To suggest there should be some different treatment applied to him, based on what had been allegations that the police have closed the matter on, I think it would be grossly inappropriate to take actions against him on that basis.
And there is no basis for doing that at law, at all. And when it comes to the principles upon which we run our country. That would be highly inappropriate.
Reporter:
Would you be comfortable with him implementing the Respect at Work campaign?
Morrison:
Yes, I would.
Updated
Murphy says the vaccine rollout is “not a race”, which – I don’t know about you – but sort of sounds like retconning to me after the rollout hit some bumps along the road.
This is not a race. We have no burning platform in Australia.
We are taking it as quickly and carefully and safely as we can. We are not like the US or the UK or any, most other countries in the world where they have got people in hospital dying.
We can take our time, set up our systems, do it safely and care we are expanding our rollout every day.
Updated
In more positive news Morrison says we now have enough imported vaccines keep us going until Australia’s AstraZeneca production capabilities are up and running and TGA approved.
The important point about the 1.3m we have been able to secure and have in country now, means that has built the bridge to get us to the commencement of the locally produced vaccines.
Updated
Government indicates goal of four million vaccinated by April has been abandoned
Looks like we might be abandoning that “four million by the end of March” target.
Prof Brendan Murphy, Australia’s former chief medical officer who is now the secretary of the federal health department, is now saying the REAL goal has always been the October deadline.
The major target has always been to offer every adult Australian the vaccine by the end of October.
That is what we are working to and particularly to get the vulnerable people in phase 1 and 1b vaccinated as quickly as possible by the middle of this year.
It is a dynamic program, that is what we are targeting.
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm, sure Brendo.
Updated
Morrison has boasted this morning about the “steady” and “safe” vaccine rollout, despite criticism from medical experts that we are already lagging behind.
“Steady” is definitely a carefully chosen word to describe the countrywide effort.
Yesterday we went past the mark where 100,000 of those have been jabbed into the arms of Australians and I’m pleased to say a quarter of those vaccines have been administered to the most vulnerable of Australians, in aged care facilities and those with disabilities and so the vaccination program is under way.
It’s sure. It’s steady. It’s safe. It’s well planned. And it’s overseen by the best medical experts in the world, and so we welcome that development and we look forward to the continued rollout of the vaccines.
The federal government originally planned to have four million people vaccinated by the end of March, which would require a very significant ramp up, given there are only 21 days left.
Updated
Additional 149,000 Pfizer vaccine doses arrive in Australia
Morrison says another 149,000 Pfizer vaccine doses arrived in Australia yesterday.
Last Sunday we also received 414,000 AstraZeneca vaccine doses bringing the total number of vaccines in Australia’s possession to 1.3m.
Updated
Morrison has begun by praising TGA workers that have been tasked with approving Covid-19 vaccines for use in Australia.
We often think of those on the frontline of this pandemic and rightly think of those in the intensive care units and directly to those in the frontline of the virus, those in aged care and disability care but the frontline of Australia’s effort has been right here at the Therapeutic Goods Administration.
Over the course of this past year, they have been working night and day.
Updated
Prime minister Scott Morrison is speaking now from the Therapeutic Goods Administration offices in Canberra.
I’m sad to say there was no powerful bookcase background from either Australia’s chief medical officer Prof Paul Kelly or the US’s Dr Anthony Fauci in today’s Zoom call.
America's top infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci and our Chief Medical Officer Paul Kelly had a chat this morning about each country's response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the new challenge of variants. pic.twitter.com/oKhx5FHCx4
— Benita Kolovos 🐯 (@benitakolovos) March 9, 2021
Updated
While speaking with ABC News Breakfast earlier, former education minister (and current trade minister) Dan Tehan called for states to make quarantine arrangements to allow international students to come back to Australia for the new university school year.
What we need from all states and territories is a plan from them as to how they want to bring international students back into their state and territory, how they’ll be accommodated, how they’ll put those quarantine arrangements in place. We want that to occur.
Then we went national cabinet obviously to look at the issue of caps to make sure we can accommodate returning international students as well as all those Australians we want to return home.
We’ll continue to work through that issue with them but remember this is a $40bn export earner for Australia. All of us have an interest [in] making sure we can get the international student education market back up and running as quickly as possible.
.@DanTehanWannon responds to NSW Treasurer's call for international students to be included in the cap of returning Aussies.
— News Breakfast (@BreakfastNews) March 9, 2021
"What we need from all states and territories is a plan from them as to how they want to bring international students back into their state & territory." pic.twitter.com/40rU5I1c76
Updated
Victoria is Covid free today, marking 12 days since there has been a locally acquired case.
And it seems testing numbers have risen back up above 10,000, perhaps the numbers we have been seeing in the last few days were just a weekend slump?
Yesterday there were no new cases reported. 16,614 test results were received. Thank you to those who got tested - #EveryTestHelps.
— VicGovDH (@VicGovDH) March 9, 2021
More later: https://t.co/lIUrl0ZEco#COVID19Vic #COVID19VicData pic.twitter.com/PfRNHZI4Do
Updated
Morrison to meet with Biden
Scott Morrison will meet virtually with US president Joe Biden and their Japanese and Indian counterparts this Friday for the first ever leader-level talks of the “Quad” grouping – and the climate crisis will be among topics on the agenda.
The group, which is viewed warily by China which sees the forum as an effort to contain it, has previously met at the foreign minister level but never before at the leader level.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters this morning that Friday’s virtual meeting among Biden, Morrison, Yoshihide Suga and Narendra Modi would discuss a range of issues, “whether it’s addressing the climate crisis, whether it’s working together to address the global pandemic or of course economic cooperation”.
She stressed the growing importance of the Quad format for talks among the US, Australia, Japan and India:
Formed in the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami, and formalised in 2007, the Quad has met regularly at the working and foreign minister level; however Friday will be the first time the Quad is meeting at the leader level. That president Biden has made this one of his earliest multilateral engagements speaks to the importance we place on close cooperation with our allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific.
Updated
Members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard attempted to recruit Australian academic Kylie Moore-Gilbert as a spy “many times” during the more than two years she spent as a prisoner in the country, offering to free her if she “made a deal” with the regime, she has claimed.
In a tell-all interview on Tuesday night about the 804 days she spent locked up inside Iran’s notorious Evin prison, Moore-Gilbert said she rejected repeated attempts by guards to get her to agree to spy for Iran in exchange for her release.
Moore-Gilbert told Sky News she suspected the Iranians had wanted to “have their cake and eat it too” – receiving something from Australia through a diplomatic solution to her incarceration while also using her status as an academic to spy for Iran.
You can read Michael McGowan and Ben Doherty’s full story below:
NSW premier to get the jab
It’s time for my favourite game show called “Who’s getting vaccinated today!” (It’s a pretty self-explanatory concept).
In today’s round we have some big NSW names lining up for the AstraZeneca jab.
Premier Gladys Berejiklian, health minister Brad Hazzard and NSW chief health officer Kerry Chant, will all be rolling up their sleeves and getting the first of the two jabs.
Berejiklian has previously stated that she was waiting for the AstraZeneca injection to be available to increase public confidence in the somewhat maligned vaccine.
Almost 22,000 people have received the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine in NSW since 22 February, with frontline workers and the elderly and vulnerable the first in the queue.
Updated
Tehan has been asked about his ailing colleague, health minister Greg Hunt, who was admitted to hospital last night with a suspected infection:
I spoke to him yesterday. He sounded well. Obviously, he needs some antibiotics to fix the issue he currently has got.
He’s very confident he’ll be out of hospital sooner rather than later. Don’t think there is a fitter or more active member than Greg. He will bounce back. But yesterday he was going well.
Tehan was asked the infection in any way related to the AstraZeneca vaccine Hunt received on Sunday, to which he replied:
No.
Glad we got that sorted, then!
Updated
Federal frontbencher Dan Tehan appeared on ABC news breakfast a short time ago to discuss the Australia-India-Japan-United States Quad foreign leaders’ meeting (long name I know) which is happening on Friday.
(Tehan is now the minister for trade, and has moved on from education.)
Any big trade meeting that excludes China is pretty notable and Tehan said this meeting was a positive sign for the US’s involvement in the region:
This will be an absolutely historic meeting, bringing together the leaders of the United States, Japan, India and Australia to discuss the Indo-Pacific and, in particular, our agenda for a free and open Indo-Pacific.
So an historic meeting bringing all these leaders together and really shows that President Biden puts the Indo-Pacific at the top of the agenda.
Updated
A bit more from that meeting:
In an online webcast being hosted by the US Center for Strategic and International Studies, Prof Paul Kelly and Dr Anthony Fauci are being asked about the rollout of the Covid-19 vaccines in their respective countries. Kelly responds first, acknowledging a couple of “hiccups” in the Australian rollout:
We had a bit of a hiccup there for a while about whether Pfizer was was better than AstraZeneca but I think the real-world experience now from the UK, in particular, has shown that that’s not an issue. People are embracing the vaccines.
He said in the first two weeks of rollout, 100,000 people had been vaccinated with Pfizer, but he added: “This is the first vaccine and not the last vaccine that people will have, and people are understanding the need for a booster at some time.”
While there had been some import issues with the AstraZeneca vaccine, “that hasn’t changed our plans at all”.
Fauci addresses the issue of vaccine hesitancy. He says it is important to understand why people are vaccine hesitant and to respect their experiences. There are a number of different hesitant groups, he said.
In our minority population [there is] understandable hesitancy due to the history of mistreatment on the part of the federal medical initiatives, dating back to the infamous Tuskegee incident ...
So the first thing we need to do is to respect that hesitancy ... and say that we understand why you are hesitant. And we have, now, ethical constraints in place, that would make something like that impossible to happen again.
Then, [we need to] address the concerns that the process has gone too fast, and explain the speed did not compromise safety, it was merely a reflection of its spectacular advances in the science of platform technology, then to explain and articulate this clearly by people who they trust in their community.
The decision to make this available because of its safety and efficacy was made, not by the federal government as a political organisation, not by the drug companies, but by independent data and safety monitoring boards and advisory committees.
Once you get that through them you will convince a considerable proportion of the people who have hesitancy, and we’re starting to see that.
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Chief medical officer meets with Anthony Fauci in online event
Australia’s chief medical officer, epidemiologist Prof Paul Kelly, is in conversation with Dr Anthony Fauci, the medical adviser to the White House and director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
The online event is being held by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in the US.
The first question is to Kelly, and he is asked about the differences in experiences with Covid between the US and Australia. Kelly responds that Australia and US saw their first cases of the virus “on almost the same day in late January last year”:
We closed our borders quickly to China, as the US did. And we had a first wave predominantly of overseas cases, as the US did. But we controlled it, and I think a lot of that was due to the way that the leadership at both the political level and the health level, and indeed the economic level has been so strong in Australia. I think there was an element of luck as well.
Today marks the 40th day this year since Australia has had zero locally acquired cases, he says, and there have been no deaths this year. But he warns:
In many ways, we can only go one way with this, which is to have more cases eventually, and as we start to open up that will be an issue.
He says so far Australia has recorded 140 cases of the variant that was first identified in the UK strain and 25 of the variant identified in South Africa, “but mostly they’ve remained in hotel quarantine”.
Fauci says something Australia did well, which the US did not, was lock down:
When Australia, locked down, they really did. They got the level down very, very low ... if you look at the monitoring of how well we locked down, we never really locked down completely. We had a terribly good economic impact, but we never really locked down, as well as completely as Australia did, and I think a combination of the other things that Australia did correctly, really led to the fact that they’ve done really quite well when you compare them to other countries in the world.
Updated
Good morning, Matilda Boseley here on this beautiful Wednesday morning.
Get your coffee, get your Weet-Bix and buckle in because there is a lot going on.
One of the main things to watch out for is the sheer number of high-profile politicians off sick today.
Victoria’s premier Daniel Andrews has been moved to a specialist trauma facility after breaking ribs and damaging vertebrae after a fall.
Andrews was staying at Mornington Peninsula holiday rental over the long weekend and was preparing to return to work when he slipped on wet stairs outside the home.
The 48-year-old was expected to be transferred from Peninsula private hospital to the Alfred Trauma Centre in Melbourne on Tuesday evening after specialists assessed an MRI scan.
He is set to remain in intensive care for a few days on medical advice, before providing an update on his health later in the week. It’s now unclear if he will be back at work for the next sitting of state parliament.
Victoria’s minister for police, emergency services and Covid quarantine, Lisa Neville is also on extended sick leave.
On a federal level, we already know that attorney-general Christian Porter is on stress leave after he vehemently denied accusations that he raped a 16-year-old girl when he was 17. Defence minister Linda Reynolds is off due to an underlying health condition and now health minister Greg Hunt has been sent to the hospital with a suspected infection. (Which his office has been quick to clarify is not related to the Covid vaccine he received this week.)
Fingers crossed no one else gets sick today!
Also this morning, Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce is pushing for the easing of border controls as Covid vaccines roll out. (No surprises there.)
Speaking at yesterday’s AFR business summit, Joyce warned that tourists and students could abandon Australia and investors pull out if border closures remain a long-term plank of pandemic proofing.
The travellers will go elsewhere. The students will go elsewhere ...
We need to be part of the world economy again. What are we waiting for?
Joyce questioned why the focus shifted from ensuring hospitals were not overwhelmed to stamping out any local transmission, suggesting states should end the practice of shutting borders after just one case.
That’s enough to get us started, so let’s jump into the day!
If there is something you reckon I’ve missed or think should be in the blog but isn’t, shoot me a message on Twitter @MatildaBoseley or email me at matilda.boseley@theguardian.com.
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