What we learned: Thursday 21 July
With that, we will wrap up the blog for the evening. Here are today’s major developments:
- Agriculture minister Murray Watt has urged travellers to be wary of foot-and-mouth disease as opposition figures criticised the government for its approach.
- The former NSW deputy premier John Barilaro told a staff member to seek changes that would have made the lucrative $500,000-a-year New York trade job a ministerial appointment, telling him to get it done “ASAP”, the inquiry heard today.
- The prime minister, Anthony Albanese, said he found Scott Morrison’s comments during a church sermon on the weekend “astonishing” and unworthy of someone who led Australia.
- The Qantas plane that landed at Perth airport on Monday declared a fuel mayday but there was no safety issue, the airline’s chief pilot has said.
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Josh Frydenberg has moved into the private sector, joining investment bank Goldman Sachs.
- A day after he was found to have engaged in serious corrupt conduct, John Sidoti is refusing to quit NSW parliament, saying he will take the fight to clear his name.
- Childcare workers have voted to strike in September after years of poor pay and conditions.
- A case of meningococcal disease has been identified in a twenty-eight-year-old in Adelaide. NT Health has identified one case of monkeypox in the Northern Territory, but says the person presents “no transmission risk to the community”.
- 89 people died from Covid-19 across the country today.
Updated
Western Australia Police have provided a short update on the house fire in Port Hedland, saying the mother of the children has been flown to Perth for specialist treatment, and that no charges have been laid:
The mother of the three children who perished in the fire is now being flown to Perth for further specialist treatment.
No charges have been laid, and investigations are continuing.
There is no further comment at this stage.
The former head of the Prime Minister’s Department, Phil Gaetjens, has hit back at claims he was a political actor in his role, saying he was a “public service plant” not a “political plant.”
Gaetjens was giving his valedictory address at an Institute of Public Administration Australia event in Canberra earlier today, and said accusations he had made his role political was one of the biggest misunderstandings of his role:
What I did was try and connect the public service to the treasurers and ministers that I worked with, to achieve that point where when cabinet, the ministry and the public service, do things in sync, the machine of government hums, and you get good outcomes.
I regard myself sometimes as a bit of a public service plant up in Parliament House rather than now a political plant in the public service.
That comment – all of what I said in the speech – is contested. So for those people who know me, those people who want to say something about me, if they think something different, then they can say that and I’m quite happy for them to have that view.
But certainly from the discussions that I’ve had with people who know me and how I work, it’s that understanding of the process that means you can understand the policy inception to delivery, because unless your policy is delivered as government policy or government statute, it doesn’t go anywhere.
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