That’s the end of our live coronavirus coverage for Thursday 23 April. Thanks from me, Graham Readfearn, and my colleagues Calla Wahlquist and Amy Remeikis, for staying with us through 13 and half hours of live coverage today.
Follow our global live blog here. Here are the main Australian developments from today.
Australia saw 12 new cases of Covid-19 reported between 3pm Wednesday and 3pm on Thursday. The NT, WA, ACT and SA had no new cases. Victoria had 1 new case, Queensland 2, Tasmania 4 and NSW 5 (and sorry I forgot Victoria’s case in an earlier post!).
A 79-year-old woman with Covid-19 died at Newmarch House – the fourth death at the western Sydney aged care facility.
The Ruby Princess cruise ship linked to 10% of Australia’s coronavirus cases left Australia. Some 21 former passengers of the ship have died. The remaining 500 crew are now heading to the Philippines.
Raelene Castle resigned as chief executive of Rugby Australia. She said “the board believes my no longer being CEO would help give them the clear air they believe they need”.
Some 456,000 Australians have applied for early access to $3.8bn from their superannuation funds.
The government will introduce regulations preventing law enforcement and government agencies from accessing data from its planned Covid-19 contact tracing app.
Look after you and everyone else. Cut yourself and others some slack, stick to the rules and we’ll be back tomorrow. Goodnight.
The Ruby Princess cruise ship sails past Wollongong on its way to the Philippines. Photograph: Mark Metcalfe/Getty Images
Senior University of Wollongong staff including vice chancellor Paul Wellings have agreed to take a 20% pay cut for the next 12 months.
In a public statement sent to staff, Wellings said the university was facing a $90m budget shortfall because of the Covid-19 pandemic and its impact on student recruitment.
We unfortunately must now confront the other major impact of this global pandemic.
The census date has now passed and I am writing to advise you that the university is facing significant revenue loss because of reduced onshore international student enrolments and associated impacts.
We think that the 2020 losses will be with us for a number of years as a consequence of the scale of the recession and the limitations on the movement of people across international borders.
At this stage we believe UOW is facing a budget shortfall of about $90m linked to the Covid-19 pandemic restrictions and its ongoing impact on student recruitment. This not only has an immediate impact on our 2020 budget, but has compounding effects for subsequent years.
As well as announcing the pay cuts, Wellings said all non-essential external recruitment would stop, all approved study leave was being reviewed and a 2020 round of academic promotions would not go ahead.
Environment minister Sussan Ley says the government might make changes to the country’s national environment laws before the scheduled review is finished later this year.
Business groups and the government have been claiming there needs to be cuts to administrative burdens as part of the economic recovery from coronavirus.
Raelene Castle has resigned as chief executive of Rugby Australia.
ABC 7.30 reports a statement from Castle, saying:
I love rugby on every level and I will always love the code and the people I have had the honour of working with since I took this role.
I made it clear to the board that I would stand up and take the flak and do everything possible to serve everyone’s best interests.
In the last couple of hours, it has been made clear to me that the board believes my no longer being the CEO would help give them the clear air they believe they need.
The game is bigger than any one individual – so this evening I told the chair [Paul McLean] that I would resign from the role.
Rugby Australia CEO Raelene Castle at a press conference in March. Photograph: Mark Metcalfe/Getty Images
The education minister, Dan Tehan, was asked earlier on ABC TV about independent schools’ demands to guarantee their funding.
Independent schools face a dropoff in enrolments as parents cut back due to hard times, and because the student census date is in August (term 3), declining enrolments will hit their government funding.
They want the census date brought forward to term 1 and payments brought forward.
Tehan said the best thing schools could do to ensure their viability is to reopen, but he also sounded open to the funding guarantee.
Asked what the federal government could do to assist, he replied:
For instance, there are payments which are made throughout the year. So we could look potentially at bringing some of those payments forward to help with cash flow.
There are regulatory things that we ask of independent schools and the Catholic schools, so the non-government sector. So some of those things we could ease the regulatory burden on. There’s issues around census dates. These are all the things we said we would explore.
Some of these issues we have to talk to states and territories about and we’ve begun those discussions. So we understand that these are difficult times for the non-government sector and we said we would work with them.
But we also gave a very clear message that what we wanted to see was them reopened and providing that classroom teaching to children.
Queensland police has intercepted more than 100,000 vehicles since the border closures four weeks ago.
There’s been swarms of gidgee bugs, hauls of cannabis and cross-border campfires to keep NT police and Queensland officers warm.
Stink bugs, dodgy border pass fashion and drug busts - our officers have seen it all! Today we pay tribute to those on the front line patrolling the Queensland divide 🐛 pic.twitter.com/soBDy1d3Ng
Virgin Australia’s administrators will be in the federal court Friday morning as they prepare for the first meeting of creditors of the stricken airline next week.
It is understood the administrators, a group of partners at big four accounting firm Deloitte, will ask judge John Middleton for permission to hold next Thursday’s meeting by video hookup due to the coronavirus crisis.
They’ll also ask for more time to hold a second meeting, which normally has to be held within 25 days of the first one.
Such requests are common in large or complex administrations. Creditors were already put on notice this move was likely in a circular sent on Tuesday.
The court hearing itself will be held by videolink due to the Covid-19 outbreak.
Police in Western Australia say they have granted exemptions to 900 of the 3,000 people who arrived in WA via air since the hard border came into effect on 6 April to allow them to quarantine at home.
Those people were given directions to self-quarantine, at their house or elsewhere, rather than being put in supervised quarantine at a “quarantine centre” like a hotel.
There’s going to be lots of talk about Australia’s economic recovery and where policy makers should focus their attention. There’s going to be a scrap among major industries for the recovery to favour their interests above others.
But what about climate change?
UK-based marketing and research company Ipsos MORI has released some interesting data from their online polling carried out between 16 and 19 April across 14 countries.
Now, make what you will of marketing polls.
But Ipsos MORI asked if it was important that in the economic recovery “government actions prioritise climate change?”
Some 57% of Australians either agreed or strongly agreed with that statement – the joint lowest level of agreement and similar to the levels of agreement in the US, Great Britain and Germany.
For comparison, China (80%), Mexico (80%) and India (81%) showed the highest levels of support.
Some 59% of Australians also agreed with a statement that “in the long term, climate change is as serious a crisis as Covid-19 is.”
Again though, the level of concern in Australia was the joint-lowest, alongside the US.
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