Australia news LIVE: Crown Sydney receives conditional licence to open; RBA warns of further interest rate rises; NSW, ACT teacher strike set for June 30

Thanks for reading today’s live news blog. Here are some of the headlines:

• Renowned swimming coach Dick Caine will ask for charges of the sexual assault of two teenage girls in the 1970s to be dropped because he has terminal cancer and will die before a trial.
• Crown Resorts has received a conditional licence to allow gambling at its Barangaroo casino in Sydney just days before shareholders, including James Packer, pocket a multibillion-dollar payout from the gambling giant’s new owners.
• An earthquake has killed more than 280 people in Afghanistan, with officials warning the death toll would likely rise. The quake struck about 44 kilometres from the city of Khost, near the Pakistani border.
• Thousands of NSW nurses and midwives will strike for up to 24 hours next Tuesday, with their union criticising the state government’s lack of transparency in its budget and refusal to adopt staff-to-patient ratios.
• Victoria has dropped its vaccination mandate for teachers, school staff and childcare workers, about two months after hundreds of workers were fired for refusing to get vaccinated against COVID-19.
• Australia’s energy market operator will lift the unprecedented suspension of trading on the electricity market after it confirmed that the “risk of any shortfall has reduced markedly”.

As surely as the sun rises in the east, we’ll be back again in the morning. Goodnight!

The Australian sharemarket lost 0.2 per cent on Wednesday after a see-sawing session, which saw early gains from energy and utilities stocks wiped out as US futures edged lower.

The S&P/ASX 200 fell 15.3 points to close at 6508.5 points, with early momentum from rises on Wall Street overnight falling away.

The tech sector fell the most, dropping by 1.5 per cent, while consumer discretionary stocks also declined, losing 1.4 per cent.

Energy stocks started strongly as oil prices stabilised overnight before falling as the day went on. Petroleum company Ampol rose by 3.8 per cent, while Woodside and Santos added just under 2 per cent and 1.2 per cent, respectively.

Read more here.

An earthquake has killed more than 280 people in Afghanistan.

The state-run Bakhtar news agency reported the death toll, saying rescuers were arriving by helicopter. The Interior Ministry confirmed the toll and said hundreds of people were also injured.

Earthquake victims from Kayani, Paktika, are treated in hospital.Credit: Twitter/@AWahidRayan1/Bakhtar News Agency

“The death toll is likely to rise as some of the villages are in remote areas in the mountains and it will take some time to collect details,” ministry official Salahuddin Ayubi said.

The quake struck early on Wednesday, Kabul time, at about 44 kilometres from the city of Khost, near the Pakistani border. The US Geological Survey put the quake’s depth at 10km. Shallow earthquakes tend to be felt further away.

Read more here.

AP, Reuters.

Unvaccinated teachers, school staff and childcare workers will be free to return to work next week, just weeks after hundreds were officially terminated over their refusal to be inoculated against COVID-19.

The vaccine mandate that requires all education staff to have had three doses will expire at midnight on Friday and school leaders have been briefed on what they need to do to redeploy unvaccinated staff, as well as how to respond to any objections by parents.

It means staff who were stood down or dismissed either because they declined a third dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, or refused to be vaccinated at all, can return to work. Parents will not have the right to pull their children out of a class because a teacher is unvaccinated nor be informed of any school staff member’s vaccination status.

The vaccine mandate will end in all mainstream schools, but will remain in force in specialist schools. Non-government schools can choose to enforce their own mandates.

One principal said the ongoing teacher shortage, which was exacerbated by some quitting over the mandates, meant unvaccinated teachers would have no trouble finding work.

Western Australia and South Australia have also scrapped their vaccination mandates for teachers. In NSW, the public health order requiring teachers to be vaccinated lapsed in May, but unvaccinated teachers still cannot work in state schools while the education department conducts a risk audit for which the timeframe is unclear.

Read more here.

The former Coalition government has been accused of “failing veterans” by not acting on recommendations to fix significant backlogs in compensation claims for more than two years.

Former veterans’ affairs minister Darren Chester was questioned over his time in the position, which he held from 2018 to 2021, at the Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide in Townsville.

Former veterans’ affairs minister Darren Chester at the Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide in Townsville.

Chester was pressed extensively over a Productivity Commission report from 2019, which made several recommendations to improve the Veterans’ Affairs Department, including changes to legislation regarding the processing of veterans’ compensation claims.

But counsel assisting Peter Singleton said information obtained from the department showed that despite the Coalition government receiving the report in 2019, the earliest significant work done to address the issue was in December 2021, in the form of a workshop.

Singleton repeatedly told Chester that the government had not made a decision in three years to accept or reject the recommendations.

He suggested a conclusion could be reached that the government failed in its duty to veterans in regards to the recommendations. Chester disputed this claim.

Read more here.

Thousands of NSW nurses and midwives will strike for up to 24 hours next Tuesday, as the union criticised the state government’s refusal to adopt staff-to-patient ratios and a lack of transparency in its budget announcements.

The NSW government has promised more than 10,000 new full-time health staff in its 2022-23 budget, formally announced yesterday. But despite the staffing announcement being made weeks ago, the union said it was still unclear exactly how many new nurses and midwives would be hired and where they would be stationed.

Nurses will again stop work on Tuesday, after previous strikes in February and March.Credit: Peter Rae

In a statement to the Herald issued last week, NSW Health confirmed the 10,000 figure included roles also announced separately – such as 1858 new paramedic roles and additional palliative care positions – and also 1636 positions which were part of a previous four-year commitment to recruit 8300 health frontline staff, which included 5000 nurses and midwives.

“The sheer lack of transparency is palpable. There are widespread staffing deficits right across the state now and there is no guarantee that the government’s ‘health workforce boost’ will be utilised to plug gaps in the staffing rosters now,” said the NSW Nurses and Midwives Association’s acting general secretary, Shaye Candish.

The union’s acting assistant general secretary, Michael Whaites, said the one-off “thank you” payment of $3000 for health staff did not offset a “real pay cut under the new 3 per cent wages policy”, and members were not impressed.

“There are many who helped this state in its time of need that will not get this payment, those who burnt out and left, those in the private and aged care sectors. Those members are rightly feeling undervalued.”

More than 70 of the roughly 200 branches of the union will stop work for periods ranging from two hours to 24 hours next Tuesday, June 28, with ballots still being counted. An additional 16 branches also voted to undertake industrial action, but decided they could not “due to severe staffing shortages and a commitment to life-preserving care”.

In Sydney, the strike at Liverpool and Bankstown hospitals will last 24 hours. At Westmead, Blacktown, Campbelltown, and Royal Prince Alfred Hospital nurses and midwives will stop work for 12 hours.

Yesterday, the state’s public and Catholic school teachers announced they would hold a joint 24-hour strike on June 30.

Victoria’s ombudsman has uncovered “persistent and endemic” issues around the use of force in the state’s remand centres, where prisoners claim to have been choked, punched, kicked, slammed and badly injured by staff.

Ombudsman Deborah Glass examined eight separate incidents between 2018 and 2020 at the Melbourne Remand Centre and the Melbourne Assessment Prison, where prisoners alleged they were assaulted by corrections officers.

A new ombudsman report has found ‘persistent and endemic’ issues around the use of force in Victoria’s remand centres.Credit: Jason South

In one of the incidents, a prisoner with an acquired brain injury was hit in the back of the head and made to walk into doors by an officer escorting him inside the Metropolitan Remand Centre. On a separate occasion, another prisoner had his wrist fractured by officers attempting to remove his handcuffs.

The investigation found officers weren’t using body-worn cameras as they were supposed to and a concerning number of incidents occurred in CCTV blind spots, making it hard for investigators to determine whether excessive force was used.

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Renowned former swim coach Dick Caine will face court this afternoon after being charged with the alleged sexual abuse of two teenage girls in the 1970s.

Caine, 76, was arrested at his Condell Park home on Wednesday morning after an investigation that began in January 2021 when one of the alleged victims came forward to police.

Dick Caine was head coach at Carss Park Pool in Sydney for more than 40 years until it closed in 2020.Credit: Chris Lane

The police investigation revealed there was another alleged victim and that both attended his swim school at Carss Park Pool in south Sydney, police said.

Detectives will allege the girls, then aged 15 and 16, were sexually abused over an 18-month period in various locations in and around Sydney’s south in the 1970s, Kings Cross Police Area Commander Acting Superintendent Chris Nicholson told reporters on Wednesday.

Caine was head coach at Carss Park Pool for more than 40 years until it closed in 2020. He coached 11 world and Olympic champion swimmers, and athletes from other sports, including boxers Anthony and Jeff Mundine.

Read more here.

Sea turtles stay still to avoid detection by prowling tiger sharks, according to scientists who clamped cameras to the dorsal fins of the apex predator off the coast of Western Australia.

About 70 hours of footage was captured from the backs of four sharks – ranging between 2.8 and 3.5 metres long – at the World Heritage-listed Ningaloo Reef near Exmouth, with the recordings altered to replicate the black-and-white vision of the tiger shark.

The $10,000 video cameras attached to the shark also work like a smartphone, tracking the animal’s physical movements in the water, such as its tail beats and where it travelled, which allowed researchers to study how it would react when it came across turtles.

The resulting scientific paper said several instances showed tiger sharks swimming over the top of turtles without noticing them.

In instances where a tiger shark came across a turtle swimming along the surface, it might slow down or double back to try and find the creature, which comprises a big part of its diet at Ningaloo.

Researchers release a tagged tiger shark with a video camera attached to its dorsal fin at Ningaloo Reef.Credit: Alex Kydd

Read more here.

Health Minister Mark Butler says too many older Australians are dying from COVID-19 and urged anyone aged 65 or over, or with a compromised immune system, to contact their GP as soon as they test positive to access treatment.

The federal government listed drugs including antivirals Paxlovid and Lagevrio on the PBS in recent months but Butler said only 50,000 doses had been accessed so far, despite these drugs "providing strong protection against severe illness and death" in older and medically vulnerable Australians.

Butler, left, at his ministerial swearing-in ceremony on June 1. Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

"At the moment, we have 1.3 million doses of these treatments in our warehouse," the minister told reporters in Canberra on Wednesday. "Our research indicates that the vast bulk of the Australian population are not aware that these treatments exist."

He urged older and chronically ill Australians to make a "COVID plan" with their GP and to ask if they are eligible for oral antiviral treatment if they test positive. The drugs need to be taken as soon as possible after contracting the virus to be effective, within days of a positive test.

"They should be being considered by GPs, by older Australians with compromised immunity to protect them against the worst possible effects of COVID," Butler said. "You can have a script sent by your doctor electronically to the local pharmacy and have these treatments picked up."

The minister also flagged efforts to drive up the rate of fourth doses in aged care, saying he had directed his department to phone providers individually and schedule in-reach COVID-19 vaccination clinics.

While more than 95 per cent of aged care residents have received their booster shot, fourth dose rates are running behind the general population of people aged 65 and over at about 54 per cent.

The government will launch an $11 million advertising campaign on Thursday urging Australians to "take on winter" by getting up-to-date on both COVID-19 and influenza vaccinations, with separate campaigns targeted at parents concerned about vaccine safety and First Nations audiences and materials catering to culturally and linguistically diverse people.

Butler also announced on Wednesday that Australia would contribute funding towards a new Financial Intermediary Fund for pandemics at the World Bank, agreed during his two-day meeting with G20 health ministers. The fund is aimed at addressing gaps in national, regional, and global financing for pandemic prevention, preparedness and response after COVID-19's disproportionate impact on low-income countries.