Australia news live update: no rapid test stockpiling, PM says; 60 Covid deaths nationally; federal court reveals reasons for Djokovic visa decision | Australia news

Sydney’s Wayside Chapel, which serves the homeless and others in the Kings Cross and Bondi areas of eastern Sydney, is among the not-for-profit groups struggling to secure rapid antigen tests.

The chapel’s pastor and chief executive, Jon Owen, says:

We’re in the process of having to beg, borrow and steal to secure any rapid antigen tests so we can maintain just basic minimum staffing levels to keep our operations going.

On his first day back after contracting Covid himself, Owen said getting RATs would likely be a significant investment, “easily” running into the thousands of dollars, with more costs to come.

“We’re doing everything we can to keep our doors open,” he said. He added that they “need to make sure that our staff are negative” as they work with people who often have co-morbidities and other vulnerabilities.

Previously, people would just get a PCR test and isolate, and now the staff of about 140 people have to take RATs, and also offer them to the “few hundred people a day” that they serve.

The problem is common across the not-for-profit sector, Owen said.

We’re all in the same boat, trying … to do the best that we can for our people, racking up the debts along the way.

Securing those RATs, though, is not easy even if there’s money found.

We’re going to hospitals, we’re going to pharmacies … We’re hearing rumours ‘this shops got some’, or ‘that shops got time’ … it’s a bit of a mad scramble.

Surfing great Kelly Slater could be the next big name in sport to be refused the right to compete in Australia, with the federal health minister saying the 11-time champion will not be allowed into the country if he is not vaccinated against Covid.

Slater, who has not publicly disclosed his Covid vaccination status, has aired some controversial views on Covid vaccines, including an Instagram comment in October that claimed he knew “more about being healthy than 99% of doctors”.

The American tour veteran, who has no medical qualifications, has previously said he is not anti-vaccine but opposed to making vaccination mandatory. Slater has also been critical of the visa process that ended with the recent deportation of tennis world No 1 Novak Djokovic.

Read the full story here:

A Sydney woman who worked as a medical intern at a Sydney hospital despite not being qualified or registered to practise was today convicted in the Local Court of NSW and sentenced to two years imprisonment to be served by intensive corrections order in the community.

The woman, Zhi Sin Lee, was also fined $10,000 and ordered to pay legal costs of $3,400. This is the first time a term of imprisonment has been imposed under the Health Practitioner Regulation National Law.

Lee is not qualified as a medical practitioner and is not registered.

In 2020, she was part-way through completing a Doctor of Medicine qualification at the University of New South Wales but failed a number of disciplines and was advised she would not be eligible to graduate. Despite this, she accepted a position as a medical intern at Bankstown-Lidcombe Hospital for the 2021 intake of intern medical practitioners and worked 126 shifts between 18 January and 9 August. Her employment was immediately terminated when the hospital discovered that she was not registered.

The Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency charged Lee with one count of falsely claiming to be qualified to practise in breach of section 116 of the National Law. She pleaded guilty to the charge on 18 November 2021 and was sentenced today.

Magistrate Bartley said Lee “put her own interests ahead of the risk to patients … and knew she was risking the welfare of her patients,” noting it was concerning that her offending took place in a public hospital in the middle of a pandemic with “repeated, calculated dishonesty”. However, Bartley accepted that Lee had demonstrated remorse.

Health authorities are, as you can imagine, watching like wedge-tailed eagles a few metrics to gauge how big a strain Omicron will place on hospitals.

The ACT estimated a week ago that average hospitalisation rates of patients with the Omicron variant was about two to three days, compared with seven days for Delta.

That ratio is holding steady, with the greater churn of patients helping to give the hospitals some leeway to cope with the extra cases presenting.

Governments’ continuous call for people to get vaccinated sounds monotonous, but the latest NSW data from the Health Department’s critical intelligence unit helps to explain why they keep repeating the mantra.

In the week to 16 January, the percentage of unvaccinated Covid patients in ICU represented 43.8%, or far higher than their share of the population. About 4.7% of those over 16 have not had at least one vaccination shot, while 6.2% are not double vaccinated.

Covid patients, meanwhile, occupied 40.4% of the state’s ICU beds as of 16 January, up about 7.4％ in a week, the data shows.

The full federal court has just published its reasons for dismissing Novak Djokovic’s challenge seeking to restore his visa.

In their judgment, the three justices set out the test for minister Alex Hawke to cancel the visa:

It is not the fact of Mr Djokovic being a risk to the health, safety or good order of the Australian community; rather it is whether the minister was satisfied that his presence is or may be or would or might be such a risk.

The judges concluded that it was open to Hawke to find that “Mr Djokovic had a stance that was well-known on vaccination and that he was opposed to it”.

They noted:

Mr Djokovic was not, by January 2022, vaccinated. It was plainly open to the Minister to infer that Mr Djokovic had for over a year chosen not to be vaccinated since vaccines became available … It was plainly open to the Minister to infer that Mr Djokovic had chosen not to be vaccinated because he was opposed to vaccination or did not wish to be vaccinated.”

Ash from Saturday’s volcano eruption in Tonga is moving away from continental Australia and over the Indian Ocean, according to the latest Darwin Volcanic Ash Advisories.

The ash cloud initially had an altitude of approximately 40,000 feet – 12km – and higher, a Bureau of Meteorology spokesperson said. It has since moved to between 42,000 and 63,000 feet (12.8 to 19.2km).

According to the BoM:

The ash cloud continues to influence the sunrise over western parts of Australia. As the sun rises, it reflects off the particles, resulting in colourful hues.

The ash cloud has caused minimal impacts to Australian aviation services, as most commercial airlines fly at 36,000 feet or lower.

The Australian and British governments have vowed to coordinate sanctions over state-backed hacking attacks, saying they want to “raise the costs” for countries that conduct hostile activity in cyber space.

The foreign minister, Marise Payne, met with her British counterpart, Liz Truss, in Sydney today. They will be joined by the defence minister, Peter Dutton, and the British defence secretary, Ben Wallace, for a broader 2+2 meeting tomorrow.

Payne said they had agreed today to launch a Cyber and Critical Technology Partnership to “help shape a positive technology environment and maintain an internet that is open, free, peaceful and secure”. Without naming any particular country, Payne said they wanted to impose “greater costs on malign actors who would undermine the region’s prosperity and security for their own ends”.

She said in a statement issued this afternoon:

“Australia is committed to working with partners such as the UK to challenge malign actors who use technology to undermine freedom and democracy. We will work with allies to maintain an internet environment that is open, free, peaceful and secure, consistent with international law, and which maximises opportunities for economic growth. Australia and the UK share the goal that technology is used to uphold and protect liberal democratic values, and to benefit our societies, economies and national security.”

Describing the first initiatives under the partnership, Payne’s statement says the UK and Australia will:

• Increase deterrence by raising the costs for hostile state activity in cyberspace – including through strategic coordination of our cyber sanctions regimes;
• Strengthen the resilience and response capabilities of countries in the Indo-Pacific region to malicious cyber activity via joint capacity building activity. This will include tackling the increasing threat from ransomware through a joint initiative delivered in partnership with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime – a valuable step in helping the region to bring an end to criminal activity in cyberspace;
• Develop an action plan on global standard setting to ensure global standards deliver on our security priorities, economic interests and reflect our values;
• Advance the Women in Cyber agenda, including through our Women and International Security in Cyber Fellowship.

Scott Morrison has backed down on his plan to allow children to drive forklifts as part of plans to ease the staff shortage currently crippling supply chains.

“We agreed to proceed no further with the issue of 16-year-old forklift drivers,” he said this afternoon after a national cabinet meeting with state and territory leaders.

The PM floated the idea, described by unions as a “brain fart” that would lead to tragedy, yesterday. Morrison took the idea to national cabinet today, just as Guardian Australia revealed earlier (on this very blog) that he would do.

“We had a good discussion about it today and it is not something that we believe, collectively, that is something we should be pursuing at this time,” Morrison said this afternoon.