Good morning. We have all the latest updates on Australia’s ongoing Covid crisis with with rolling updates for you throughout the day.
Perth and the Peel region will head into a four-day lockdown after a third Covid case was recorded in Western Australia. On Monday the number of locally acquired cases in New South Wales grew to 130, with 124 of those linked to the Bondi cluster. In Queensland, premier Annastacia Palaszczuk said the next 48 hours would prove crucial, as the number of local cases grew to 10. The Northern Territory health minister, Natasha Fyles, said authorities expected more cases, with the total there at six.
All Australian adults will finally be allowed to get vaccinated with the AstraZeneca vaccine if they want it, while aged care workers will have to get at least one vaccine dose by mid-September. The announcement comes after months of revisions of recommendations about who should get the AstraZeneca jab because there aren’t yet enough doses of alternative vaccines. Why is that the case? “There aren’t enough alternatives because the Morrison government lost the supply race in the middle of last year,” writes Katharine Murphy. Australia currently has one of the lowest vaccination rates of any developed country, with less than 5% of the population fully vaccinated.
The spread of the more infectious Delta variant of Covid-19 throughout Australia can be contained with a combination of strong adherence to public health guidelines and good luck, infectious diseases and virology experts say, forecasting “dicey” times ahead. “This is about 40% more infectious than the Alpha strain, and about twice as infectious as the strains Australians dealt with last year,” says James Wood, a mathematical modelling expert. Meanwhile doctors are bracing for a tsunami of long Covid, which can affect nearly every organ system in the body, with sometimes debilitating effects. Research suggests one in three people who contract Covid will have symptoms that last longer than two two weeks, while about 10% of people have symptoms that persist for 12 weeks or longer. Online, support groups for Covid-19 “long haulers” have swelled to tens of thousands of members.
Australia
Animal rights activists have launched a landmark high court bid to overturn laws suppressing secretly recorded vision of abuse in slaughterhouses, arguing that they breach Australia’s implied right to freedom of political communication.
Private schools likely reaped hundreds of millions of dollars from jobkeeper and other schemes during the Covid crisis, despite few recording any significant impact on their revenues. In some cases the schools’ surpluses increased by the same amount as the jobkeeper payment received.
The Hazelwood coalmine fire in 2014 has had lasting health effects on Latrobe valley residents. Researchers say exposure to fine particle matter in the smoke could lead to lung damage equivalent to four years of ageing.
The world
Two more Catholic churches on First Nations reserves in Canada have been destroyed by fires that investigators are treating as suspicious. The fires come nearly a week after two other churches were destroyed, and amid growing anger over the church’s role in Canada’s campaign to forcibly assimilate Indigenous people.
Twenty people, including two children, have been found dead on a boat drifting in the Turks and Caicos Islands. Investigators have ruled out foul play but are still trying to determine what happened.
Several hundred people took to the streets across the West Bank for the fifth consecutive day to protest against the treatment of activist Nizar Banat, who died during an arrest on 24 June.
Authorities in southern Italy have prohibited outdoor farm work during the hottest hours of the day after the death of a Malian farm worker, but critics question if the ban will be respected.
Recommended reads
The Trust in Australian Wool campaign was launched in March to reassure consumers wool is a sustainable product in anticipation of the European Union’s Sustainable Products Initiative. Farmers are concerned that wool (and other natural fibres) might fare badly under the new legislation because of the methodology used, which ranks wool as worse for the planet than polyester. Wool Producers Australia’s president, Edward Storey, says this calculation “doesn’t pass the pub test” and more than one expert on sustainable fashion agrees with him. But wool’s poor score does not come out of nowhere.
Did Gladys Berejiklian wait too long to lock down Sydney? Health experts Peter Collignon, Zoë Hyde and Hassan Vally discuss whether the NSW premier acted quickly enough against the Delta variant. “The decision to go into lockdown is one that shouldn’t be taken lightly. Lockdowns are brutal and costly, both personally and economically. So there’s no doubt that trying to avoid a lockdown is a worthwhile aspiration. They are a sledgehammer, which may be necessary sometimes, but it’s better for everyone if we can achieve the same result by using a scalpel,” says Vally.
As Australians near the end of the financial year, eyes wander to sales and minds flicker to the subject of tax deductions. June is traditionally a time when many make charitable donations. But how has the way we give – and think about giving – changed, and how can we do it better? Here, professionals in the field suggest how to make donations that count. “The evidence is that most people don’t do much web searching or research before giving. We’d like people to think more about that and find the right charities to give to,” says Australian philosopher Peter Singer.
Listen
In 2018 Melbourne tenant Orlando Skeete was told he would have to start paying rent via a company that planned to charge him a series of fees. Real estate agencies are increasingly outsourcing rent collecting to companies that charge tenants just for paying their rent. Reporter Michael McGowan explores this confusing system and Skeete explains how he fought back, using nothing but a bike, an ATM and relentless determination.
Why are tenants being charged just for paying their rent?
Full Story is Guardian Australia’s daily news podcast. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or any other podcasting app.
Sport
After years of infighting behind the scenes the administration of the professional A-League game has been resolved – for now. The clubs, under the auspices of the Australian Professional Leagues, are now masters of their own domain.
Super Netball has been caught napping with a slow and opaque response to a cancelled match. It is a pity that when the biggest controversy to hit Super Netball in its five-year history began bubbling to the surface last week, the league’s administrators failed to broker a compromise.
Media roundup
The Courier Mail says Queensland is “on the verge of being plunged into lockdown”, which would be triggered if there are any cases of unlinked community transmission. Northern Territory tourism operators are preparing to write off another year and lose hundreds of thousands of dollars due to border closures, says the NT News. In some more positive Covid news, mRNA vaccines made by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna may provide “years long” protection against Covid-19, as reported in the Australian Financial Review.
Coming up
The NSW government is expected to announce a support package for lockdown-affected businesses.
And if you’ve read this far …
The owner of a controversial Flintstones-themed house has settled a lawsuit with a town in San Francisco, which alleged she violated local codes when she put dinosaur sculptures in the back yard. The agreement will allow Fred Flintstone and his friends to remain.
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