Australians are furious at the Queensland Premier over her Sunday trip to Tokyo because of her “brutal” stance on stranded Australians.
news.com.au
July 16, 2021 3:45PM
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Last updated July 16, 2021 7:57PM AEST
More than 120,000 Australians have signed a petition calling for Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk to be denied the right to travel to Tokyo.
Ms Palaszczuk is flying to Tokyo on Sunday as part of the Queensland Government’s push to cement hosting rights for the 2032 Olympic Games.
She says that if she does not attend the Games, “the whole bid could fail”.
But a change.org petition has struck a nerve. Its author takes exception with Ms Palaszczuk’s stance on placing new caps on those stranded abroad re-entering Australia.
“Annastacia Palaszczuk has successfully advocated for a brutal and heartless halving of Australian quarantine spaces, making it even more difficult for stranded Australians to return home,” the petition reads.
“Annastacia Palaszczuk should not be allowed to steal a precious hotel quarantine space from a more deserving stranded Australian trying to return home.”
It comes as NSW recorded 97 new infections on Friday and officials expressed “incredible concern” over the 29 people who were infectious in the community before receiving their positive test on Thursday.
Premier Gladys Berejiklian says she won’t hesitate to enforce tougher rules if cases continue to rise.
Follow along for today’s Covid-19 updates. You can find Victoria’s blog here and yesterday’s blog here.
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Dr Khorshid said the AMA “is calling for a lockdown more Victorian in style, with very clear restrictions on what people can do to limit contact between people, between families and in particular to limit contact at work”. “What we do mean by this is we mean closing retail that is not essential. That should not be up to common sense, not up to people doing the right thing but an edict from government to close non-essential retail,” he added.”It means closing non-essential businesses, as was done during the lockdown in Victoria…These measures are needed, they are not going to have a negative economic impact on Sydney because if they are not done, the economic impact on Sydney will be extraordinary.”It is time to take this seriously, it is time to not be hesitant, do not be worried about how this might be perceived by the community.”Take decisive action to address this crisis in Sydney and to give Sydney the best chance of getting out of this within weeks rather than months.”
More than 120,000 people have signed a petition calling for Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk to be denied an exemption to travel to Tokyo for the Olympic Games.
Ms Palaszczuk is flying to Tokyo on Sunday as part of the Queensland Government’s push to cement hosting rights for the 2032 Olympic Games.
The change.org petition author takes exception with Ms Palaszczuk’s stance on placing new caps on those stranded abroad re-entering Australia.
This is doing numbers. pic.twitter.com/JGmiCmXqto
— Rohan Smith (@Ro_Smith) July 16, 2021
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
“Annastacia Palaszczuk has successfully advocated for a brutal and heartless halving of Australian quarantine spaces, making it even more difficult for stranded Australians to return home,” the petition reads.
“Annastacia Palaszczuk should not be allowed to steal a precious hotel quarantine space from a more deserving stranded Australian trying to return home.”
Ms Palaszczuk says that if she does not attend the Games, “the whole bid could fail”.
Australia’s former deputy chief medical officer Dr Nick Coatsworth says the country could stop locking down with as little as 50 per cent of the population vaccinated.
Speaking to the Australian Financial Review, Dr Coatsworth said the current expectation of vaccinating 80 per cent of Australians before moving out of lockdowns is too high.
“We need to consider what are the consequences of locking down on younger Australians’ jobs in the gig economy and mental health,” Dr Coatsworth said.
Australia cannot “have your cake and eat it too”, however — and must accept that zero deaths from Covid-19 is unrealistic if the goal is to eventually treat the virus like the seasonal flu, he said.
“You can’t say no Covid death is acceptable, while saying it is going to be treated like influenza,” he said.
“If you say you’re going to treat it like influenza and get a jab every year, influenza kills people.”
Australia will continue to push for answers the world “deserves” over the origins of Covid-19 despite pushback from China, the Prime Minister says.
Scott Morrison held firm on Australia’s probing approach to China despite significant backlash from the global power.
“Those who have lost their lives and their livelihoods, they deserve answers, and Australia will continue to ask to get those answers,” Mr Morrison said after national cabinet on Friday.
World Health Organisation director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus backflipped on Thursday, saying the organisation was premature to rule out that a leak from a lab in Wuhan could have caused Covid-19 pandemic.
Read more here.
NSW Health has issued more exposure sites, including a Coles at Hurstville, a butcher at Lakemba and a Woolworths at Emu Plains.
Customers who visited Ikea at Marsden Park on Monday 12 July between midday and 7.30pm or Tuesday, 13 July between 12pm and 4pm need to get tested and isolate for two weeks.
⚠️PUBLIC HEALTH ALERT – NEW VENUES OF CONCERN⚠️
NSW Health has been notified of a number of new venues of concern attended by confirmed cases of #COVID19, as well as additional days and extended times for previously announced venues visited by cases. pic.twitter.com/GMik5UqnVy
— NSW Health (@NSWHealth) July 16, 2021
Professor Brendan Crabb from the Burnet Institute has made a case for stricter rules in Sydney “without delay”.
On Twitter, he wrote that “the only option for NSW (and all of Australia) is to get back to #COVIDZero while we get the country vaccinated”.
He wrote that Victoria’s second wave, in which cases rose as high as 725 cases a day, “is the only example in Australia of controlling a large community metro outbreak using lockdown measures”.
A thread on our case @BurnetInstitute for why Sydney should move to Stage 4 restrictions without delay 1/18
— Prof Brendan Crabb (@CrabbBrendan) July 16, 2021
NSW and Victoria entered their respective lockdowns in very different ways.
NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian was very reluctant to impede on the freedoms enjoyed by Sydneysiders despite labelling the emergence of the Delta variant “the scariest time for NSW in the pandemic”.
Eventually, as infections climbed, she locked down. But cases are still growing by the day.
Victoria entered a snap five-day lockdown at midnight on Thursday after 11 new cases recorded.
Speaking to the ABC’s Patricia Karvelas on Friday afternoon, the SMH’s state political editor said the next five days will be telling for both states’ leaders.
“I think it will be diabolical for Gladys Berejiklian and the NSW Government if Victoria comes out of lockdown before us.”
The Australian comedian behind three accurate daily Covid case predictions claims he has been contacted by NSW Health and told to stop posting his “calculations” on TikTok.
Jon-Bernard Kairouz told news.com.au this afternoon that he received a rather terse call from a NSW Health representative telling him not post any more videos.
“He said we would have to cease giving out the numbers because we’re compromising the public health system,” he said.
Mr Kairouz said he told the worker he didn’t have a source at NSW Health and had been using maths to guide his predictions.
The Sydney man has for three days correctly predicted the following day’s Covid cases for NSW, leaving many to speculate he is in cahoots with someone on the inside.
– Brooke Rolfe
Mr Morrison is asked for his take on the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) backflip on its previous stance that there was "no evidence" Covid-19 leaked from a lab in Wuhan.
The Federal Government has been vocal in its support of an investigation into the origins of the virus, with the PM saying there were “no politics” behind finding out what really happened.
“What happened and how can we prevent it from happening again? That is just an Australian question. Asking in good faith and seeking the good faith of working with everyone, we have to get those answers,” he said.
“Now, we don’t know about the lab and whether that was the initiation of this or not. It may well have been, it may not have been. I don’t have a view either way and I’m not in a position to make that judgement but what Australia has always sought to have achieved is that we get to a point where we do understand those things, so we can do better to protect the world against a pandemic that has destroyed the lives of millions, and destroyed the livelihoods of even more, and has devastated the world.”
The PM said the nation is “on track” to get advice on how the states are tracking in terms of getting data back to advise the Doherty Institute on Australia’s four-step plan out of lockdown.
“It was important today to get an update on the four step plan that I announced around a month ago, working together with the states and territories we are on track to get the advice back from the secretaries and directors general of all the premiers and prime minister’s department across the country that pulls in the Doherty Institute advice that will inform each of those steps of the plan,” he said.
“The vaccination rates that sit against each of those steps of the plan and be able to get an understanding of how we are tracking against those.
“I want to assure people that the path out of this and the four step plan that National Cabinet agreed some weeks ago is very much on our agenda despite the challenges we are currently facing in New South Wales and Victoria.”
