And that’s where we will leave it for tonight. You can keep up to date with everything happening around the world with our global live blog. Here’s a quick rundown on everything that happened today:
A 30-year-old Queensland man died of Covid-19, the youngest person to die of the virus in Australia. The state’s premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk, said the coroner would investigate the death. The man had been displaying Covid-19 symptoms in the week leading up to his death, but had many other health complications. Australia’s deputy chief medical officer, Paul Kelly, said the case “shows that there is community transmission of some sort”.
The New South Wales premier, Gladys Berejiklian, announced a 12-month wage freeze for public servants in line with decisions made in other jurisdictions. She said the freeze was “about saving livelihoods, saving jobs and saving lives”.
The Western Australia premier, Mark McGowan, called for better state-federal communication after six Covid-19 cases were confirmed among the crew of a ship which docked at Fremantle. McGowan admitted there were “errors made all around”.
Cedar Meats, the Melbourne abattoir at the centre of a Covid-19 cluster, will restart operations, including processing, on Thursday. About 300 staff are expected to return to work.
During an interview on the ABC, the prime minister, Scott Morrison, refused to guarantee workers would be better off as a result of the so-called Accord 2.0, saying that was what he “wanted” to see.
After a two-year investigation, the AFP announced it will not lay charges against the News Corp journalist Annika Smethurst.
The Victorian premier, Daniel Andrews, said people would continue working from home “for all of June” after the state recorded eight new cases of Covid-19.
Good evening and welcome to the Guardian’s live blog after dark (it is not called that. Sorry. That is not a thing).
A little earlier the South Australian premier, Steven Marshall, defended a decision by health officials in the state to allow a British woman into South Australia to visit a dying relative after she later contracted Covid-19.
The woman was one of 22 people given exemptions to travel into the state in the past two months, despite its border closure. Marshall said on Wednesday that she had quarantined after arriving in Australia, and had tested negative while in isolation.
She then travelled from Victoria to SA, but returned a positive swab soon after flying into Adelaide on the weekend and has now been returned to quarantine.
Marshall defended the decision to allow her into the state, saying authorities have “got to have a heart”.
Chief Public Health Officer Nicola Spurrier said the woman was among 22 people from overseas given exemptions to come to SA on compassionate grounds.
About half of those were to attend funerals and the rest to visit a close dying relative.
Spurrier said in any situation there was some risk, and her team would now review its processes.
“I think this is very consistent with what we’ve done over the past two and a half months,” she said.
“We haven’t had a problem (until now), though we’ve now found we have a case.
Thanks for your company and correspondence this afternoon, I’m handing you over to the estimable Michael McGowan. You’re in good hands, make sure you wash yours.
The bushfire royal commission this afternoon heard of two missions to endangered species from bushfires – the Wollemi pines in NSW and the “brown and drab” and “quite secretive” eastern bristlebird in far eastern Victoria, near Mallacoota.
The NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service director, David Crust, said the operation – which involved winching people in to hand operate an irrigation system around the ancient trees and two days of water-bombing along the cliffs edge – prevented the fire from getting into the canopy of the mature pines, although some juvenile pines appear to have been lost.
“If the canopy had burned the results would have been catastrophic,” he said.
Crust said it would take five years to see the full impact of the fire on the mortality rates of the pines.
A firefighter rappels into a gorge in the Blue Mountains as a crew tries to save Wollemi Pines on 9 January 2020. Photograph: New South Wales Department of Planning, Industry and Environment/AFP via Getty Images
In Victoria, the royal commission heard, a team of 11 scientists and zoologists from Melbourne Zoo flew in to Mallacoota in January to catch an insurance population of 15 endangered eastern bristlebirds, whose only population in Victoria is just on the other side of Lake Barracoota. There are only 2,400 eastern bristlebirds in the wild and about 140 in the Howes Flat population near Mallacoota.
They caught the birds, described by the ecologist Dr Rohan Clarke as ground-dwelling weak flyers that were “relatively cryptic” animals with a “loud and distinctive metallic call” using mist nets and bluetooth speakers.
One speaker would be set up to play the eastern bristlebird’s call and then, when it sounded as if the real birds had approached the speaker, the sound would be remotely switched to a second speaker, which would draw the birds into the path of the fine cotton net.
The fire stopped on the edge of the Howes Flat habitat, but another bristlebird population a short distance away, crossing the border with NSW, appears to have been destroyed.
An Australian trial of two experimental drugs to treat Covid-19 is under review after the World Health Organization halted all its trials involving hydroxychloroquine due to concerns about its efficacy and safety.
A final epistle from Josh Taylor at the bushfire Senate committee hearing ...
The Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet faced questions at the Senate committee hearing on the 2019-20 bushfires over whether the prime minister, Scott Morrison, had been adequately briefed about the bushfires during the fire season last year.
PM&C hadn’t provided verbal or written briefings to him while he was in Hawaii from 15 to 21 December (he cut his trip short by two days), but that doesn’t rule out the possibility that PMO was updating the PM on the situation.
The department secretary, Phil Gaetjens,told the committee that the PM was in Australia when the fires in Victoria, NSW and South Australia flared up in late November, and back when the state of emergency declarations were made in four states on 30 December, so it was incorrect to say he was absent during the crisis.
“I don’t think it’s a correct interpretation to say that the prime minister was not here in the crisis,” he said.
Gaetjens himself was on leave for half of December, he told the committee.
The department confirmed that before Morrison left on holidays in Hawaii he was “very well informed” about the bushfire situation via a series of teleconference meetings with the head of Emergency Management Australia and others in November.
“It seems to me that what you were telling us is that he would have had considerable knowledge about how extreme the crisis was and what was unfolding, yet he still decided to go off on holidays,” the Greens senator Janet Rice replied.
Dr Farvardin Daliri, an academic and artist, unveiled the huge bird this week on the streets of Brisbane, and will soon take it north to the Townsville cultural festival.
While we can only endorse the creative and community-minded use of time in lockdown, the laugh does sound slightly maniacal.
Giant kookaburra built during lockdown in Australia takes 'flight' – video
Covid commission chair Nev Power to face Senate committee
Ben Butler
Nev Power, the chairman of the government’s coronavirus commission is to be questioned by a Senate committee next Wednesday.
The National Covid-19 Coordination Commission is tasked with looking into options to recover from the coronavirus-induced economic meltdown and has so far said gas is the way to go.
It’ll be a chance for senators to ask Power, a former chief executive of mining company Fortescue Metals, about his conflict as interest as the deputy chairman of WA gas field developer Strike Energy.
The manufacturing taskforce advising the commission has been particularly enthusiastic about gas, proposing in a secret report revealed by Guardian Australia that the government underwrite a massive expansion of the domestic gas industry, including by helping open new fields and building hundreds of kilometres of pipelines.
The plan for a ‘trans-Tasman bubble’ to allow Australians and New Zealanders to travel between the two countries could be presented to both governments as early as next week, and could be operational by September, the expert working group behind the proposal has said.
Cedar Meats, the Melbourne abattoir at the centre of a Covid-19 cluster, will restart operations, including processing, on Thursday. About 300 staff are expected to return to work.
Staff who have been medically cleared to start work attended a return to work information session at Cedar Meats’ Brooklyn site today.
“Our aim is to provide a safe and healthy environment as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. The control measures will be regularly updated to reflect changes resulting from government announcements, directions of the Victorian chief health officer and best practices for the sector,” the general manager, Tony Kairouz, said.
Cedar Meats was at the centre of Victoria’s largest Covid-19 cluster, with more than 100 cases traced to it.
From the Senate committee on the bushfires (and my indefatigable colleague Josh Taylor).
The federal government yesterday claimed around $1bn of the $2bn bushfire recovery fund had been spent so far.
But the Labor senator Murray Watt said only around $529m of that money had actually been spent by the government, with another $471m that had been spent by the states and territories and was in the process of being reimbursed by the federal government.
Watt also raised questions about whether the money had been spent by the agencies in the community, in terms of clearing debris or on mental health counsellors or the other projects the funding was allocated for.
The national bushfire recovery coordinator, Andrew Colvin, said the $1bn was either spent or in the process of being spent.
“That is money that has already been dispensed or dispersed to the organisations that needed it,” Colvin told the committee.
From the commonwealth point of view, the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet secretary, Phil Gaetjens, told the committee that once it was out of federal government hands it was deemed spent.
“I think if money is spent from the commonwealth, cash has gone out of the commonwealth system,” he said.
Paul Kelly on the ‘six sick sailors on board the sheep ship’ – those crew on board the Al-Kuwait which docked in Fremantle.
The six sailors ... are not severely unwell, they are in hotel quarantine, safely for them, safely for the public of WA and the other sailors onboard are being monitored for their own health.
Kelly has more information regarding the death of a 30-year-old Queensland man who tested positive for Covid-19 after his death.
The man was found unresponsive yesterday afternoon at his home in the small western Queensland town of Blackwater, and could not be revived. He had been displaying Covid-19 symptoms in the week leading up to his death, but he had several other significant health complications. He had had “respiratory illness” for three weeks before his death, Kelly said.
A post-mortem Covid-19 test returned positive.
The man had not travelled overseas, or left Blackwater since February. He had spent most of the last few weeks at home.
There had been no other recorded cases of Covid in Blackwater prior to the man’s death.
Kelly:
This is a terrible tragedy and my condolences go to his wife and other family and friends. It is by far our youngest death so far from Covid-19 and it is a reminder firstly that this is a serious illness and whilst it does affect ... older people and people with chronic illness, it can affect anyone and it can affect people severely.
Kelly said he could not comment in detail on the case, because it was now before a coroner, but that he was concerned by the fact there is no clear chain of transmission to the man’s case of Covid-19.
Yes, that in itself is a concern because it shows that there is community transmission of some sort. [It is] unusual that we haven’t had many people in rural areas in any state and so at this point in the pandemic it is a concern. I understand that he had been sick for some weeks and I guess he hadn’t assumed that it was Covid-19.
Kelly has urged Australians to get their flu shots.
There has been little influenza this year (aided by improved hygiene practices and social distancing measures), but the deputy chief health officer says vaccines will be vital to keep pressure off public health systems.
There are 18m vaccines available in Australia this flu season (up from 13m last year).
Already this year, 7.3m people have had a flu shot, up from 4.5m all of last year.
Deputy chief medical officer gives Covid-19 update
Paul Kelly (the deputy chief health officer, not the singer-songwriter, nor the former Brownlow medallist) is on his feet in Canberra, providing an update.
There have been 11 new confirmed cases of Covid-19 in Australia in the past 24 hours. There has been one more death, in Queensland, bringing the nation’s death toll to 103.
There remain fewer than 500 active cases in Australia, with 30 people in hospital, six of them in intensive care, and just three on ventilators.
Kelly:
We are continuing to do a lot of testing ... over 1.3 million tests in Australia since the beginning of this pandemic and 35,000 tests in the last 24 hours. The positivity rate remains extremely low and this is a good sign that we are picking up cases if they are indeed there.
Apologies for the brief interruption in transmission there, dear reader. I had my head in another story. Standby for it. Ben Doherty here with you for the afternoon.
A global update from my colleague Helen Sullivan. The news internationally continues to be grim: the total known deaths from Covid-19 around the world has passed 350,000.
And with that, I will leave you in the very capable hands of Ben Doherty.
He’ll take you through Prof Paul Kelly’s update – hopefully there will be a little more information on the Queensland case, where authorities are still trying to find out how an unwell man who had not left Blackwater in months contracted Covid-19 in a town which had no recorded cases.
At 30, he became Australia’s 103rd death, and the youngest the nation has recorded.
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