Australia news LIVE: Scott Morrison announces ‘temporary COVID disaster payment’; Victoria records three new local COVID-19 cases

Prime Minister Scott Morrison has announced a national plan to give Commonwealth money to people who are caught in coronavirus hotspots.

It’s called a “temporary COVID disaster payment” and will only kick in if a lockdown lasts longer than a week and coincides with a federally-designated hotspot.

The new payment will be $500 a week for people who normally work more than 20 hours a week and $325 a week for people who normally do less than 20 hours.

The Treasurer and Prime Minister in Parliament today. Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

It will only kick in where people can’t work and have less than $10,000 in liquid assets. It cannot be combined with other welfare or coronavirus support payments from the federal government, excluding people on JobSeeker, Youth Allowance and the aged pension.

The Prime Minister kicked off his press conference on an optimistic note that’s a bit at odds with some of the more dour rhetoric out of state governments and, at points, the federal government.

“Where those [people] have independent means of supporting themselves for a week then I think they would agree that reaching out for Commonwealth taxpayer-funded assistance is not something they would consider reasonable for such a short period of time,” Mr Morrison said.

Read more here.

It’s been another big day in news land. Here are some of the highlights:

• Prime Minister Scott Morrison has announced a plan to give $500 a week of Commonwealth money to people in nationally designated coronavirus hotspots. The scheme begins next week.

  

  Matt Golding cartoon on Aged Care Minister Richard Colbeck.Credit: Matt Golding

• Victorian health authorities say two cases of “fleeting” transmission are in fact false positives, after scientific experts found no evidence the virus strain was the fast-moving “beast” the government claimed in justifying the lockdown extension. Meanwhile more than 500 people in NSW are isolating along the state’s South Coast after authorities added locations to the list of sites visited by a holidaying Victorian family.
• There are eight new cases of the AstraZeneca clotting condition, including one person who is fighting for life in hospital.
• The federal government has signed a draft agreement with Victoria to build a dedicated quarantine facility at Avalon Airport near Geelong.
• More than 200 Australian children are stranded in India without their parents as the number of citizens seeking to return home from the country continues to grow.

Broede Carmody will return at 6.30am to do it all again as national cabinet meets. Goodnight!

Two “fleeting transmission” cases that Victorian health officials used as justification to indicate the infectivity of the mutant virus have been declared as false positives by an expert review panel.

The two cases were a woman thought to have acquired the virus at a Metricon display homes exposure site, and a man thought to have contracted the virus at the Brighton Beach Hotel.

“Moving fast and early to contain and isolate a positive case, and test and trace their contacts is a fundamental part of Victoria’s COVID-19 response,” the Department of Health said in a statement.

“Out of an abundance of caution, the Department will always enact immediate public health measures in response to the notification of any positive cases.”

COVID-19 Commander Jeroen Weimar this week said some of the cases in the current outbreak were concerning because they occurred through “stranger to stranger” transmission.

“They don’t know each others’ names. And that’s very different to where we’ve been before,” he said.

The false positive linked to Brighton Beach Hotel had authorities on edge because the man was dining outside (where another infectious person was) in a well-ventilated site.

Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton had said “you wouldn’t expect transmission to occur” in a setting like that.

The display homes and Brighton Beach Hotel remain as exposure sites because they are linked to other confirmed cases.

Cases of common illnesses have hit record lows as hygiene measures used to stop the spread of COVID-19 have put the brakes on the transmission of many childhood viruses and diseases.

As few as three cases of whooping cough were recorded in NSW last month, compared to 565 in May 2019. More than 1000 cases of the highly contagious infection were recorded in the same month in 2011.

It turns out closed borders, lockdowns and physical distancing crushes more than just COVID-19.Credit: Getty

Only 110 cases of stomach flu, or rotavirus, have been recorded up to May this year. More than triple that was recorded in the same period in 2019. Cases of measles have been wiped out in NSW, with none recorded after the pandemic hit in March 2020.

Professor of infectious diseases at the Australian National University Peter Collignon said “this has never been seen before”.

Read more here.

(Note: the outage was fixed at 6pm.)

The mobile app used in NSW for COVID-19 venue check-ins has been experiencing an outage since shortly after 4pm on Thursday.

“Customers are currently unable to login to their MyServiceNSW accounts to perform transactions,” Service NSW said on Twitter. “COVID Safe Check-In and Dine & Discover vouchers are also impacted. We’re working to resolve this ASAP and apologise for any inconvenience.”

The NSW Government advises businesses during unforeseen circumstances, such as an outage, to electronically record customer details in a Visitor Record template, Excel spreadsheet, Word document or other electronic record keeping system.

If paper and pen is used, the information should be digitalised within 12 hours.

A Service NSW spokesperson said in a statement the webform is not impacted by the outage.

“Customers can access the webform by scanning the QR Code or businesses can display the check-in webform on their own devices for customers to use,” the spokesperson said.

There is no evidence at the stage the outage is associated with a cyber attack.

The number of Australians seeking to come home from India has increased over the past month and there are now 209 children stuck there without their parents.

Around the world, there are 35,128 Australians registered as wanting to return, including 4260 classified as vulnerable.

In India, there are 10,998 Australians seeking to return, with 1024 classed as vulnerable, Department of Foreign Affairs officials told Senate estimates on Thursday.

These numbers have risen since the previous update in early May, when there were about 9500 Australians in India seeking to return, including 173 children without their parents. Since that time, about 1200 people have returned on government-facilitated repatriation flights.

Earlier, a DFAT official told senate estimates the government sent a public health expert to India and check out Qantas’ pre-flight testing arrangements for the repatriation flights after 70 passengers were blocked from boarding the first flight.

All passengers are required to return a negative COVID nasal swab and rapid test before they are allowed to travel to Australia.

DFAT official Lynette Wood told Senate estimates she became aware the laboratory contracted to run the rest results had lost its accreditation from media reports the day after the flight landed in Australia.

There is incredibly high demand for the flights with each only taking 150 passengers and almost 11,000 Australians stranded in India wanting to get home.

Ms Wood said officials had contacted each of the passengers blocked from the first flight, but could not say how many had since managed to return to Australia.

Read more here.

ABC management has pulled an upcoming Four Corners episode about the relationship between Prime Minister Scott Morrison and a supporter of the QAnon conspiracy theory, a decision that could be seen as an attempt to dampen tensions between the national broadcaster and federal government.

The episode was expected to run this Monday following weeks of delays, but staff have since been informed it will not go to air following a decision by managing director David Anderson.

A Four Corners episode about Prime Minister will not go to air on Monday.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

The decision comes just days after Industry Minister Christian Porter decided to drop his defamation action against the ABC over its reporting of a historical rape allegation.

Multiple ABC sources told the Herald and The Age the episode was pulled after news director Gaven Morris failed to give it the seal of approval and referred it to Mr Anderson. However, the sources said the story did receive approval from legal and head of investigations, John Lyons.

Read more here.

Here’s some listening content for your commute home (if you have one) or your end-of-day walk around the block (if you’re in Victoria).

Mathematic experts from around the country have expressed concern over a draft plan to fix the national maths curriculum saying it will make it worse by devaluing traditional learning techniques over vague, untested fads.

The group wrote an open letter to the national curriculum authority expressing concern over the ambiguity and shallowness of the draft plan as well as pointing out errors creating tensions with teacher’s groups who argue the new curriculum will help students apply maths skills to their real lives.

Some teachers argue that not every student will become a mathematician but every young person should have access to mathematical knowledge that will equip them beyond school.

Listen to the Herald’s education editor Jordan Baker explain the issue in 12 minutes.

The Victorian government is considering a draft agreement from Prime Minister Scott Morrison on a new quarantine centre to be built near Avalon Airport, marking another step toward a deal that could be signed as soon as Friday.

Mr Morrison signed off on the proposal on Thursday morning and sent it to Victorian Acting Premier James Merlino, with the promise of federal funding as long as the state government also contributed to the project.

The Memorandum of Understanding clears the way for negotiations on Friday, when national cabinet is due to meet to discuss quarantine and a new regime for federal assistance to states that impose lockdowns.

The Victorian government aired the plan on April 29 with a request for $200 million in federal funding to accommodate 500 travellers, with options to expand it over time.

Mr Morrison wants the state government to pay some of the cost.

While we’re on the topic of travel...

Qantas engineers maintaining the airline’s grounded Airbus A380 fleet in a Californian desert are facing a novel problem: rattlesnakes are making homes in the landing gear.

The airline moved its superjumbo fleet to Victorville, in the Mojave Desert, for deep storage last year, due to the downturn in air travel and the suspension of its international routes.

Snakes under a plane: the nifty tool used to knock them out.

The location’s dry heat and low humidity makes it ideal for storing aircraft, but it’s also an ideal environment for highly venomous rattlesnakes and scorpions.

As a result, Qantas engineers have had to start using a “wheel whacker” to try and scare off the animals before carrying out inspections.

Read more here.

Flights between Victoria and New Zealand have been cancelled for another six days.

New Zealand COVID-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins on Thursday said the government is being cautious and the decision will be reviewed on June 9.

“I’m aware that this comes as a further disruption for people who have been stuck in Australia, whose travel has already been disrupted,” he said. “It isn’t a decision we take lightly but obviously the fact that the government there have extended their lockdown restrictions means that we need to extend our travel pause.”

Mr Hipkins has outlined the plan for Kiwis in Victoria to be able to return home.Credit: Getty Images

Mr Hipkins said preparations have begun to allow “green zone flights”, or quarantine-free travel, for some travellers from Melbourne to New Zealand from Wednesday.

Passengers will be limited to New Zealand citizens and residents, people in Australia who normally reside in New Zealand and some critical workers. They will be required to have a negative pre-departure COVID-19 test result in the 72 hours before they fly.

“That recognises that they have effectively been in isolation for 14 days, by next Wednesday, which is the time they would spend in managed isolation if they had come to New Zealand under the arrangements that we had before the trans-Tasman bubble was operating,” Mr Hipkins said.

“I acknowledge it’s a further inconvenience [that] they have to stay a little bit longer.”

“But we are making preparations to allow them to start coming home.”

He said the New Zealand government was working with the Victorian government to ensure people would not be restricted from travelling for their pre-departure test or to the airport, even if the state’s own restrictions remain in place.

Anyone presently in another Australian state who was in Victoria up to May 25, or is in Victoria but hasn’t been in the Greater Melbourne area during lockdown, can fly to New Zealand from another state. They are required to return a negative pre-departure test result 72 hours before boarding.

People who have been at venues of concern identified in Victoria and NSW are prevented from travelling to New Zealand within 14 days of their potential exposure to COVID-19.