As it happened: Victoria records ninth COVID case, restrictions, masks reintroduced; Jodi McKay to remain NSW Labor leader

Thanks for following our live coverage of today’s news. I’m Natassia Chrysanthos signing off following a day of COVID-19 updates for Victoria and politics news in NSW.

We’ll be doing things a little differently tomorrow, and running an additional Victorian coronavirus blog. It will be free for all readers on recognition of the public benefit, and live from about 7am.

If you’re just catching up on today’s news or on your way home from work, here’s a summary of the main events:

• Victoria’s northern suburbs COVID-19 cluster has grown, with four additional cases announced this afternoon bringing the week’s total to nine cases. There are new restrictions in place: private gatherings are limited to five people, public gatherings to 30, and masks will be required inside. New Zealand has paused quarantine-free travel with Victoria for 72 hours, while the list of exposure sites is expected to grow.
• NSW Labor leader Jodi McKay has vowed to remain in her position, despite a leaked dirt file deepening internal divisions in the party and causing Shadow Treasurer Walt Secord to resign from the frontbench. Federal Labor MP Meryl Swanson, who holds the Hunter Valley seat of Paterson, also weighed in on the weekend’s byelection and warned Anthony Albanese he is leading the opposition to an election defeat.
• The NSW government today announced landmark new sexual consent laws, which will require people accused of sexual assault to show they have had consent communicated to them verbally or by a gesture. They follow years of advocacy led by Saxon Mullins, as well as months of public outcry provoked by a petition started by former Sydney student Chanel Contos and the alleged rape of Brittany Higgins in Parliament House.
• Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s chief of staff has said he didn’t find strong evidence that media advisers gave negative briefings against Ms Higgins’ partner after she made her allegations public. Police are investigating 15 claims of misconduct involving federal politicians or their staff, including sexual assaults, while investigators prepare a brief of evidence about Ms Higgins’ case. And Mr Morrison took recommendations from his department’s deputy secretary, Stephanie Foster, on how to improve workplace conditions for political staffers at Parliament House to a cabinet meeting.

• Up to 400,000 Queensland homes and business have been without power today after a widespread outage affected cities and towns all over the state, caused by a fire at Callide Power Station. And in WA, the lawn next to Perth Children’s Hospital was crammed with nearly 1000 nurses and doctors calling for change after a young girl’s death.

Have a lovely night and we’ll be here again tomorrow morning, when Broede Carmody signs on about 6.30am.

People travelling from Victoria to Western Australia from 6pm tonight will be required to wear a mask and self-quarantine until they test negative for COVID-19.*

WA Premier Mark McGowan said all arrivals from Victoria must be tested within 48 hours of landing in Perth and quarantine until they return a negative test result.

“I hope this additional testing regime is all we have to do,” Mr McGowan said.

“But I will do whatever it takes to keep West Australia safe, and we won’t hesitate to put in place additional border controls, if that is what the health advice recommends.”

Anyone in the state who has visited a Victorian exposure site must isolate for 14 days and undergo testing on the second and 11th day of their stay.

“People coming from Victoria, entering Western Australia must continue wearing their masks from the airport, to be tested, until they return a negative test result,” Mr McGowan said.

“In addition, arrivals cannot use public transport, until [they get] a negative test result.”

Correction: An earlier version of this post said people arriving in WA from Victoria would be required to be tested for COVID-19 and self-quarantine for 14 days. This is incorrect, people will only need to isolate until they return a negative COVID-19 test result.

After a busy day in NSW Labor politics - with a leaked dirt file deepening internal divisions, Shadow Treasurer Walt Secord resigning from the frontbench, and opposition leader Jodi McKay vowing to stay - words have also been exchanged at the federal level.

Federal politics reporters James Massola and Rob Harris are reporting that Labor frontbencher Meryl Swanson warned Anthony Albanese he is leading the opposition to an election defeat, telling a closed door caucus meeting in Canberra the party is “sleep walking off a cliff”.

Labor MP Meryl Swanson warned the party it was sleep walking to an electoral defeat.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

Ms Swanson holds the Hunter Valley seat of Paterson and her blunt warning comes just days after NSW Labor lost the state seat of Upper Hunter in a by-election, amid concern in some parts of the caucus about the party’s direction and strategy.

Ms Swanson told her colleagues “we sound like we are whinging and people don’t like it”, a reference to the fact that Labor had pushed for big companies such as Harvey Norman to repay their job keeper payments.

“I worry that we are sleep walking off a cliff,” she told the regular Parliamentary sitting week meeting of all Labor MPs, according to several sources in the room.

The MP, who is Labor’s shadow assistant minister for defence, also complained Labor’s message was not cutting through with voters, while in contrast the “clever and cashed-up” government was more effective in getting its message to voters.

Read the exclusive full story here.

West Australian Premier Mark McGowan is expected to provide an update on the COVID-19 outbreak in Victoria at 4.15pm local time (7.15pm AEST).

The border between Western Australia and Victoria is still open but on Tuesday morning, health authorities urged recent arrivals from Melbourne to check whether they had visited 10 exposure sites linked to five new community cases, and to isolate and get tested if so.

An emergency management meeting was taking place in the afternoon to consider any further health advice on borders.

We’ll bring you the updates here.

Millions of Australians could receive their Pfizer shots in GPs, pharmacies and Commonwealth run respiratory clinics after a crucial decision by the Therapeutic Goods Administration to allow the vaccine to be stored in regular refrigerators for up to a month.

Previously the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine needed to be stored at temperatures of -70 degrees, limiting its distribution to vaccination hubs with special cold storage facilities.

But health journalists Lucy Carroll and Mary Ward report that it can now be kept for up to 31 days at between 2-8°C, after being taken out of deep-freeze conditions.

Melburnians line up for their COVID-19 vaccinations on Tuesday, as the city’s cluster grew to nine.Credit: Wayne Taylor

Federal Health Minister Greg Hunt said the TGA’s ruling last night regarding Pfizer being stored at refrigerator levels was an “important development”.

“That will open up general practice and pharmacy options with Pfizer,” he said. “We will be able to have a dual track program of our general practices and community pharmacies.”

Read the full story here.

A group of Victorian government ministers met earlier this afternoon and discussed the latest coronavirus outbreak, according to two sources.

A senior Andrews government source, speaking on the condition on anonymity, told The Age the government was expecting to receive further updates tonight.

A cabinet sub-committee met at 4pm today, but no decisions were taken.

The meeting later tonight is not unusual and would take place even if only one positive case of coronavirus was detected in the community.

In some positive news, a celebration of Aboriginal culture and themes of resilience and diversity will mark the return of Sydney’s light, music and ideas festival following its cancellation in 2020 due to COVID-19.

Arts writer Linda Morris reports the Opera House’s sails will be lit with the art of eight female Indigenous artists from the Pilbara, bringing the painted beauty of Australia’s desert country to the harbour for this year’s Vivid Festival.

Yarrkalpa - Hunting Ground by the Martu Artists will light the sails of the Sydney Opera House for this year’s Vivid Festival.Credit: DESTINATION NSW

The centrepiece of Vivid 2021 will be a looped 15-minute digital rendition of Yarrkalpa – Hunting Ground, Parnngurr Area 2013, an iconic Aboriginal painting created by the Martu artists of the Sandy and Gibson Deserts of Western Australia.

The painting that will be projected onto the Opera House reflects the artists’ connection with country, cataloguing seasons, traditional burning practices and cycles of regrowth and hunting.

Without international headline acts due to border closures, the festival has been forced to rely on homegrown talent to anchor its extensive music program. Hip hop star Sampa the Great headlines the Sydney Opera House which pre-COVID-19 had hosted The Cure in 2019 and Solange in 2018.

The festival will run in Sydney between August 6 and 26 - you can read more here.

In Western Australia this afternoon, the lawn next to Perth Children’s Hospital has been crammed with nearly 1000 nurses and doctors calling for change after a young girl’s death highlighted problems staff said they had raised for years.

The rally was a boiling point for tensions between the government, hospital administration, staff and the unions that have been building since seven-year-old Aishwarya Aswath died waiting nearly two hours for medical attention at the hospital on April 3.

Angry staff from hospitals across the state booed and blew deafening horn blasts, as WA Health Minister Roger Cook repeated previously announced promises to boost staffing, and add 500 beds, over the next four years.

But there were wild cheers when he said he would proceed with requests from the Australian Nursing Federation’s 10-point plan and put an extra 16 nurses in the children’s hospital emergency department, including boosting triage with a separate resuscitation team.

The crowd was dotted with signs demanding the government listen to frontline staff. One said: “Stop shifting the blame, you were told 12 times”.

The protest was the nursing union’s first rally in eight years.Credit: Hamish Hastie

One simply said: “We care about Aishwarya.”

It is highly unusual for medical staff to protest. The Australian Medical Association WA and the Australian Nursing Federation combined forces for the first time for the rally, and it was also the nursing union’s first protest in eight years. Read the full story here.

Up to 400,000 Queensland homes and business have been without power today after a widespread outage affected cities and towns all over the state.

The outage was caused by a fire at Callide Power Station in central Queensland, which took the station offline. A witness reported a “major explosion” at the power station.

In the state’s south-east, residents from the Gold Coast to Caboolture were affected by the large-scale outage, while Ergon Energy reported outages across Cairns, Townsville, Mackay, Rockhampton, Bundaberg, Gladstone and Agnes Waters.

Traffic was impacted after traffic lights lost power at several intersections throughout the south-east, including Brisbane suburbs. Read more here.

Victorian Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton said the state government would look to boost testing capacity in response to the sudden uptick in demand.

Testing sites across Melbourne have been swamped since this morning, with the Northern Hospital in Epping turning visitors away 20 minutes after opening.

Real estate agent Ashleigh Phillips took the day off work to go and get tested after both of her room mates were at the Highpoint exposure site during the hours a positive case was wandering through the shopping complex.

Ashleigh Phillips spent hours waiting for a COVID test on Tuesday morning at Maidstone, near Highpoint Shopping Centre, where the queue stretched for more than a kilometre.Credit: Jason South

Even though the 20-year-old doesn’t have any symptoms, she wanted to pre-emptively get a test, but wasn’t expecting the wait at the Maidstone site to be so lengthy.

Ashleigh arrived at the site at around 10.20am, and she was still waiting when we last checked in with her about 2pm.

Professor Sutton said the long queues were an indication that people weren’t turning up to get tested when they were symptomatic in normal times.

“I hope that will change from now ... I’m sure we’ll stand up some more. Epping is obviously the hotspot here where we expect demand to be very high, but we’ll have to look at all the throughput from today and stand up more as required,” he said.

A long line of people in cars waiting for a COVID-19 test in Epping, Victoria.Credit: Justin McManus

Asked to explain to Victorians how the state went from zero active community cases on Monday morning to nine cases 30 hours later, Professor Sutton said “well, it’s coronavirus”.

“You can be absolutely lucky with a single case who’s not particularly infectious. We’ve had that in Victoria, we’ve had that around Australia... You can be very unlucky with a case who is particularly infectious, has been to lots of places and transmits to lots of people.”

The virus spreading in Melbourne’s north is the Indian variant, B1617, which Professor Sutton said was “at least as infectious as any other variant of concern that’s been reported”.

But he was optimistic that restrictions beyond those announced on Tuesday morning would not be necessary in response to the four additional cases revealed in the afternoon.

“We’ll review, you know, with further information tonight and tomorrow, as we do every day. But at the moment, it just relates to four primary close contracts who’ve tested positive. We need to interview all of them and understand exactly where they’ve been,” he said.