What we learned: Friday, 15 July
We’ve made it through another week, just in time for a healthy burst of frost, blizzards and damaging winds. Enjoy your weekends, we’ll be back first thing tomorrow morning with all the latest.
Here were today’s major developments.
- The AMA has called for paid pandemic leave for casual workers with Covid to be reinstated ahead of the national cabinet meeting on Monday. Its president, Omar Khorshid, said now wasn’t the time to end mandatory isolation as an alternative to ceasing the $750 payments.
- Calls are also growing across the parliament for the Labor government to reinstate the leave, with the Coalition, Greens and crossbench all urging prime minister Anthony Albanese to change tack. New South Wales premier, Dominic Perrottet, said he would “absolutely” push for the payments to be reinstated on Monday.
- It comes as Victoria’s daily Covid update said there’d been an 83% increase in hospitalisation in Covid hospitalisations in the state in the past three weeks ahead of an expected third wave of the virus. There were 66 Covid deaths reported on Friday across the nation.
- In other news, Murray Watt announced a $14m funding package to help combat foot and mouth disease in Indonesia and stop it getting into Australia today, after returning from Jakarta. It will also stop lumpy-skin disease entering the nation.
- And Perrottet said he didn’t know about a note signed by his predecessor Gladys Berejiklian confirming a public servant had been hired for a plum New York City trade role 10 months before John Barilaro landed the position.
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Western Sydney nurses to stage walkout due to “chronic understaffing”
At 7.30am Monday, NSW Nurses and Midwives’ Association (NSWNMA) members at Westmead and Blacktown hospitals will stage a simultaneous walkout in their own time, citing understaffing across western Sydney emergency departments.
The union said they would be supported by nursing staff from ICU, operating theatres and general wards and emergency department nurses from both western Sydney hospitals as the night shift concludes:
With the recent influx of influenza cases and Covid-19 presentations on the rise, overcrowding in emergency department waiting rooms is rife, and nurses are concerned suspected Covid-19 patients are waiting long periods for treatment, alongside non-Covid-19 patients.
It comes following fine increases announced by the state government in response to months of industrial disputes.
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