Arrests at violent Sydney lockdown Freedom Day rally as Victorians, Queenslanders march
NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian and police have lashed protesters at a violent rally in Sydney, as thousands stormed streets in Melbourne and Brisbane. WARNING: Graphic
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NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian has said she is “utterly disgusted” by the illegal protestors who stormed the streets of Sydney on Saturday, whose “selfish actions have compromised the safety of all of us”.
“The protestors have shown utter contempt for their fellow citizens who are currently doing it tough,” she said.
“I want to thank the brave Police officers who put their own safety on the line to ensure the protest action ceased.
“This type of activity during lockdown will not be tolerated and the full force of the law will be brought against anyone who engages in this type of illegal activity.”
NSW Police Minister David Elliott also echoed her sentimants, lashing the anti-lockdown protesters “selfish boofheads” and vowed to prosecute them all in a furious press conference hours after dramatic scenes erupted.
The protesters have marched shoulder-to-shoulder through the streets despite NSW recording its highest number of daily infections since the Covid-19 outbreak started.
NSW Police said Saturday’s protest was “a breach of Covid-19 health orders”. A total of 57 had been arrested so far and 90 infringements notices were handed out. But these numbers are expected to climb.
Police said 22 detectives are being dedicated to find protesters and have called for anyone with footage to send it in.
“What we saw today were 3500 very selfish boofheads,” Mr Elliott said. “People who thought the law did not apply to them.”
Mr Elliott has also called on everyone at the protests to get tested for Covid and announced the formation of a police strike force to identify and track down each of the estimated 3,500 protesters.
Police also alleged that officers were assaulted.
“I’m hoping we issue 3,500 infringement notices, I’m hoping we have people before the courts,” Mr Elliott said.
“If you don’t want to be in lockdown, obey the rules.”
Shock photos from the protest emerged showing the brazen protesters huddled together as they walked through Broadway in Sydney’s innerwest to nearby Victoria Park chanting, holding signs and halting traffic.
Others showed the massive police operation enacted after a massive crowd hit the CBD near Town Hall.
Police even used pepper spray to control chaotic crowds, with hundreds of people not wearing any face covering.
Officers on horses followed the crowds as they make their way towards Town Hall.
“The NSW Police Force recognises and supports the rights of individuals and groups to exercise their rights of free speech and peaceful assembly, however, today’s protest is in breach of the current COVID-19 Public Health Orders,” it read.
“The priority for NSW Police is always the safety of the wider community.”
St James and Museum railway stations were forced to close due to the protests.
“Trains continue to operate and for those at the northern end, access is via Wynyard and Circular Quay Railway Stations,” a NSW Police spokesman said.
“For those at the southern end, access will be via Central and Redfern with limited access at Town Hall Railway Station.”
The protest is one of about nine across the country as anti-lockdown and anti-vaccine protesters hold a “worldwide rally for freedom” on Saturday afternoon.
The Tik Tok comedian who shot to fame when he accurately predicted NSW case numbers five days in a row was also spotted at the protest.
Jon-Bernard Kairouz addressed a crowd of thousands who gathered on Saturday in defiance of public health orders designed to slow down the city’s growing outbreak.
Oh look who it is, #tiktokguy joining hundreds of people at the #sydneylockdown protests in the city. I hope they all feel the full force of the law. #covidnswpic.twitter.com/TF1P83twqR
— Adella Beaini (@adellabeaini) July 24, 2021
The 26-year-old dubbed himself “the people’s premier” as he spoke to a cheering sea of people waving Australian flags and holding signs decrying masks and vaccines.
“I must say I’ve crunched the numbers, I don’t think the cases are going to go up tomorrow,” he said.
“But from what I’ve calculated there’s over 50,000 people here today.”
Kairouz posted a video of himself speaking to Instagram, where many of his followers did not mince words in expressing their disapproval.
“This is f..king ridiculous,” one person wrote. “If your aim is freedom — you’ve f..ked up by bringing thousands of people together. Watch the spike. Congrats!”
“There are people in ICU how selfish can you be?” said another.
Other commenters were supportive of his attendance.
MELBOURNE PROTESTERS STORM STREETS
In Melbourne, police made arrests before the protest even took place with officers arresting multiple people for not wearing a mask and failing to show their ID.
Protesters gathered about 12pm at Flinders Street Station, before walking up Swanston Street towards Parliament House.
About 5000 people took to the streets, chanting, waving flags and halting trams and traffic.
Earlier on Saturday NSW Health Minister Brad Hazzard described the move to protest as “silly”.
“We live in a democracy and I am certainly one who supports people’s right to protest, but I actually think it is really silly,” he said.
“At present we’ve got cases through the roof and we have people thinking it’s okay to get out there and possibly be close to each other.”
Victorian Health Minister Martin Foley said he was “beyond disappointed” at the protests and urged people to rethink their motives to protest amid a global pandemic.
“Please be on the side of humanity, not the side of the virus,” he said.
QUEENSLAND PROTESTS GET HEATED
Queenslanders are not in lockdown but that did not stop thousands turning out to join a lockdown rally in Brisbane.
Many who are anti-mask and anti-vaccination supporters turned out with placards, angry about current restrictions across the country.
Police estimated the crowd at around 7500 people but it is understood that up to 10,000 were present at times.
The protest included an assembly at the Botanical Gardens and a short march through the CBD.
Attendees have been seen carrying signs that read “my body my choice” and “experimental vaccines Australia says no.”
Families brought young children and dogs to the gathering where they listen to speeches.
Protests have been organised across the country in protest of the lockdown in Sydney and Melbourne.
The crowd booed chief health Dr Jeannette Young as a speaker discussed a letter he planned to send to her and the Premier.
One speaker named Max said the pandemic had become “an IQ test” as “people can’t see what’s going on here.”
He said lockdown was “worse than being in a prison.”
Can you feel the hate!! POV journalists at an anti-mask, anti-vax, anti-lockdown rally in Brisbane. @7NewsBrisbanepic.twitter.com/v8axBFOCbX
— Alex Lewis (@alexlewisjourno) July 24, 2021
“Sydney is a prison at the moment, they’re not allowed to leave their suburb to even go to work.”
A Queensland Police Service spokeswoman said there had been no arrests but officers would review footage to ensure no laws had been broken.
“QPS recognise and support the right to peaceful assembly and protest,” she said.
“Under current restrictions, persons outdoors are not required to wear or carry a mask as long as physical distancing is maintained.
“We will be reviewing all available footage of today’s events to determine if any clear breaches have occurred and consider initiating enforcement actions if required.”
NSW RECORDS 163 COVID CASES
NSW has recorded 163 new locally acquired cases of Covid-19 on Saturday as the state continues to struggle to get ahead of its outbreak.
There were more than 93,000 tests undertaken in the past 24 hours.
It came after the state recorded 136 infections on Friday, with 53 of those people being infectious in the community.
During yesterday’s announcement, Premier Gladys Berejiklian declared the situation a “national emergency”.
Viral fragments were also detected in a sewage treatment plant at Moss Vale, in the Southern Highlands, on Friday — an area where there are no known cases.
NSW Health Minister Brad Hazzard said most of the cases were spreading in households and cited one gathering of family members in Sydney which resulted in 18 cases.
“Don’t intermingle with family members from other households. It will continue to cause massive grief here in Sydney,” he told reporters on Saturday.
“Just, please, stop doing it. Stop – just one group of family members coming together with other family members where they shouldn’t have been and that has accounted for 18 cases.”
Mr Hazzard said 45 of Saturday’s 163 cases had been out in the community while infectious.
“In other words 45 people were out walking around and potentially spreading the virus which certainly explains why our numbers are going up,” he said.
NSW Health said the positive traces were “of great concern” and urged everyone in the Moss Vale area to be vigilant and seek testing as soon as symptoms developed.
“If symptoms appear again, please be tested and isolate again,” it said in a statement.
The number of exposure sites continues to balloon in the state with a medical practice in Campsie, a Westpac in Lakemba, a BWS in Belrose and a Mr Liquor in Earlwood listed on Friday night.
It came as there were no new local Covid-19 cases in Queensland and a nervous wait due to a flight attendant who worked on six flights having possibly been infectious during the individual’s shifts.
MELBOURNE APARTMENT COMPLEX ‘IN ISOLATION’
Residents inside an entire Melbourne apartment site have been ordered to isolate after a positive case of Covid-19 passed through the building.
Victorian chief health officer Brett Sutton said health authorities had identified a person who had contracted coronavirus at 673 Latrobe Street in Docklands in Melbourne’s CBD.
“With this Delta variant we are seeing multiple cases in residential settings including apartment complexes and just yesterday our continued investigations of positive cases and their movements turned our focus to an apartment complex in the Docklands,” he told reporters on Saturday.
“There are teams on site now who are deep cleaning common areas and will be testing people throughout the day today and tomorrow.”
It came as Victoria recorded 12 new locally acquired cases of Covid-19 on Saturday.
In positive news for the state, 10 of the 12 cases were in quarantine throughout their entire infectious period.
It came as 14 new local cases were identified on Friday and were all linked to known outbreaks, while there were no new cases reported in returned travellers.
Premier Daniel Andrews hinted the statewide lockdown could end on Tuesday night as planned.
“It is difficult for us ... to be able to predict what will happen next Tuesday at midnight, but I would say that the trend is with us,” Mr Andrews said.
“These results are very encouraging, they are positive. Whether the next few days continue that way we will only know with the passage of time.”
‘GET VAXXED BABY’
Prime Minister Scott Morrison has echoed the call from radio personality Kyle Sandilands to “get vaxxed baby” in a bid to get the spiralling Covid outbreak under control.
Mr Morrison said there would be a push to get more first-dose jabs in NSW by increasing the amount of jabs delivered in state vaccination centres. This will mean extending second Pfizer doses to six weeks and a shorter gap between AstraZeneca jabs.
“We discussed and will be confirming over the next 24 hours the ability for, in New South Wales, in their state vaccine centres, for them to do greater amounts of first doses by staying within the medical advice, the target advice, which says that second doses of Pfizer can be extended out to six weeks,” Mr Morrison said on Friday.
“So that is an existing regulation. It is an existing approval, it is an existing medical advice,” he said.
“To increase the dose of first doses that can be delivered, maximising greater supply we have available, then we are working to put that in place in New South Wales because of the situation that exists there.
“Whether it is AstraZeneca or whether it is the Pfizer vaccine, both of those are important. And as Kyle Sandilands said, get vaccinated, baby.
“That is what we need across the country and in New South Wales.”
But Mr Morrison said there would be no extra vaccines for NSW – something Premier Gladys Berejiklian had been seeking earlier on Friday.
“We’re not going to disrupt the vaccination program around the rest of the country. That vaccination program is going and is hitting its marks and we want that to continue.”
Pressed on the subject of extra doses for NSW, and if Ms Berejiklian asked for it he said:
“I don’t discuss what happens in national cabinet. The Federal Government will be working to support New South Wales and whether extra doses that can be provided to support the plan in place that that is what we will do,” he said, when pressed about if the request was made at national cabinet.
Mr Morrison offered ADF troops to NSW on three occasions – but was rejected each time.
The Australian reports Mr Morrison has been offering troops since July 7.
Only the Governor-General, on the advice of Mr Morrison, can declare a national emergency.
Asked about a national emergency, Mr Morrison said he had considered the pandemic to be one from the start.
“I have been treating Covid-19 as a national emergency for the last almost two years and that hasn’t changed in that entirety of the time we have been managing this pandemic. Lives and livelihoods have been at stake right across the country during this entire period.’
But he believed NSW had averted a catastrophic outbreak.
“What I would note, for the data we see coming out in New South Wales, is they have prevented the exponential growth we have seen in other countries, which has taken hold with Delta. So they have been able to suppress that exponential rate of growth, which is very important. So when you have exponential growth in cases that’s what you would call out of control – and that’s not occurring in NSW.”
The Prime Minister said he agreed with Health Department Secretary Brendan Murphy who said higher vaccination rates would not have prevented the current lockdowns.
“That is the lived experience of countries all around the world who do not have higher rates of vaccination,” he said.
“I don’t think that’s an opinion.”
“I have been making this point for some time, that is the nature of the Delta variant … Professor Murphy has simply stated a clear fact.”
CALL FOR ‘RING OF STEEL’ AROUND NSW
Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews said he agreed with NSW’s decision to label its Covid-19 outbreak as a “national emergency”, adding the state was dealing with a “very significant challenge”.
“Any help we can provide, of course we stand ready to do that, and it can be practical support or it can be some of the learnings and some of the practical experience that we tragically have, as Victorian, given what we went through last year,” Mr Andrews said.
Asked if he providing help would include sending vaccine doses to NSW, Mr Andrews said he had not received a redistribution request, but said there was “barely enough” allocated to Victoria.
Mr Andrews said there was a “national responsibility" to put a “ring of steel” around Sydney.
“Just as we did last year. Because that will happen stop the spread of this virus across
the whole nation,” he said.
“I want to be able to deal with our outbreak, have it settled and then have thousands of contact tracerings on the phone helping out Sydney. I can’t do that while ever we have got cases to chase and we have got to be on this hyper alert because there is, even with the strictest border closures that ever have been put in place, we still have got people moving around New South Wales and potentially spreading the virus.”
Victoria has now recorded 147 cases linked to the two outbreaks that jumped the border from Sydney’s deadly Delta cluster – one from a team of Sydney removalists that transited through the state and the other a family who returned to Melbourne’s north from a NSW red zone.
More than 19,000 primary close contacts have been identified during the state’s latest outbreak, with 6800 of those linked to the MCG, AAMI Park and Trinity Grammar.
Victoria’s fifth lockdown is set to last another six days until 11.59pm on July 27.
The number of active cases in Victoria at 160 — up from 146 on Wednesday.
NEW CASE IN SOUTH AUSTRALIA
South Australia has recorded one new locally acquired case of Covid-19 as authorities monitor thousands of contacts in home isolation.
Premier Steven Marshall said the new infection was detected in quarantine and linked to a known cluster but was unable to confirm whether the statewide lockdown would end early next week.
“It’s early days,” he told reporters on Friday morning.
“We’re day three of a seven-day lockdown but all of the early indications are positive and I’m hopeful that we will come out on seven days, as I said at the outset.
“We have cause for optimism but we’ve only got cause for optimism because of the great co-operation that we’ve had from the people of South Australia.”
The update comes as health authorities grapple to contain an outbreak, with thousands in quarantine and about 100 close contacts of existing infections ordered into medi-hotel facilities on Thursday.
Mr Marshall plunged the state into a seven-day lockdown on Tuesday evening.
PFIZER APPROVED FOR KIDS
Kids in Australia are set to get the coronavirus vaccine, with the country’s drug regulator green-lighting Covid-19 vaccination for children as young as 12.
The Therapeutic Goods Administration will today announce it has approved Pfizer’s application for a licence for its vaccine to be given to children aged 12 to 16, according to an exclusive report in The Daily Telegraph.
Health Minister Greg Hunt said “protecting children would be an important and welcome additional step in the national vaccination program”.
“Significantly we planned for this outcome and acquired the vaccines in the event of eligibility,” he said.
The nation’s expert immunisation panel must now consider how children over 12 will be included in the roll out.
Senior government sources are confident the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation will fast-track approval for children with underlying health conditions within days.
ATAGI approval for the Pfizer vaccine for all children aged between 12 and 16 is likely to take at least a month.
Pressure to protect high school-aged children from coronavirus has been growing amid a spate of cases across Victorian campuses.
The TGA granted provisional approval for the Pfizer vaccine in January but until now it has only been approved for people over the age of 16.
Regulators around the world have been split on whether the Pfizer vaccine should be given to children under the age of 16.
So far Pfizer is the only company with a vaccine approved for use in Australia to have applied for a licence to jab children as young as 12.
But in the US Moderna and Pfizer are both undertaking trials of their Covid-19 vaccines for children under 12 with results expected this year.
PM ‘SORRY’ FOR JAB DELAYS, CHEMISTS GET JABS
The Prime Minister revealed Australia has hit 184,000 Covid vaccinations a day, as he apologised the country had missed its jab targets.
“As I said yesterday, I take responsibility for the vaccination program. I also take responsibility for the challenges we’ve had,” he told a media conference in Canberra.
“Obviously some things are within our control, some things that are not. And I am keen to ensure as we have been over these many months that we’ve been turning this around. I’m sorry that we haven’t been able to achieve the marks that we had hoped for at the beginning of this year. Of course I am. But what’s more important is that we’re totally focused on ensuring that we’ve been turning this around.”
Mr Morrison said a new record of 184,000 vaccines a day had been reached.
“That is the equivalent per head of population of 2.36 million doses in the United States a day or 481,000 in the United Kingdom when you express it as a per head of population. So we are really hitting these marks now.”
The prime minister announced an “accelerating” pharmacy program that would see “three times” as many offering vaccines in the coming weeks.
“We will be bringing further forward the pharmacy program and accelerating that … Right now there are 118 community pharmacies currently vaccinating around the country. Particularly in rural and regional areas where they’re supplementing the GPs, where there’s a shortage of GPs in particular areas. By the end of this month there’ll be 470. For every pharmacist that’s out there, doing vaccinations right now, there’ll be three timings as many by the end of
this month.”
Pharmacies will be able to register from Monday to administer AstraZeneca vaccines.
Dumped cabinet minister Darren Chester reiterated Mr Morrison’s apology on his Facebook page by saying: “And I’m sorry that some people have lost confidence in our government and our world-class health system as a result.”
It came as two people have died and four have had blood clots after getting the AstraZeneca vaccine.
The Therapeutic Drug Administration has confirmed the two Australians who have died from blood clots after receiving the AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine include a 44-year-old man from Tasmania and a 48-year-old woman from Victoria.
The four other people who have had blood clots linked to the vaccine were a 76 and 77-year-old men and a 79-year-old woman from NSW.
Tasmanian Health Minister Jeremy Rockliff said the man from the state was included in the latest statistics of adverse events produced by the Therapeutic Goods Administration.
“This report included confirmation that a Tasmanian man in his 40s has passed away following a first vaccination with the AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine,” Mr Rockliff said.
Mr Rockliff said the cause of death would be a matter for the coroner.
The man died from a rare complication associated with the vaccine known as Thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome (TTS), Department of Health Secretary Kath Morgan-Wicks said.
In its vaccine weekly safety report released on Thursday, the medicines watchdog said:
“Sadly, this week we were notified that two confirmed cases of TTS after the first dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine were fatal.
“One was in a 44-year-old man from Tasmania and the other was in a 48-year-old women from Victoria (this case was reported as probable TTS in last week’s report).
“The TGA extends its sincerest condolences to their families and loved ones.”
Since the beginning of the vaccine rollout in Australia, a total of seven deaths from TTS have been reported out of 6.1 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine. All of them were related to a first dose of the vaccine.
Health experts have said that for most patients, the risks of Covid-19 far outweigh the risks posed by the vaccine.
– with , Andrew Koubaridis, Jack Paynter, James Campbell, Maria Bervanakis
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