Australia news live updates: Scott Morrison visits NSW flood areas; government still spending $100,000 a month on Covidsafe app | Australia news

The Queensland police union has called for the state’s Crime and Corruption Commission to be stripped of its responsibilities for investigating major and organised crime, claiming the current situation has become “dangerous”.

Ben Smee has the story:

An important story from Anne Davies on the allegations aired in NSW parliament this week.

On Wednesday, the NSW state MP Trish Doyle used parliamentary privilege to allege that a government MP raped a sex worker at a “secluded lookout” in the Blue Mountains in 2019.

Michael Johnsen, the Nationals MP for the Upper Hunter, later that night identified himself as the subject of the allegations – which he denies.

The matter was reported to police in September 2020. But Johnsen was only due to be formally interviewed by police for the first time on Friday.

Here at the Guardian we are now running a global suggestions page for your ideas for how the ship in the Suez Canal can be freed.

Please click through and submit your idea below.

The form asks for your opinion “particularly if you are a salvage expert, an engineer or you have significant experience in shipping”, but I’ll go ahead and say anyone can have a crack.

Three men have admitted to planning to gun down members of the public in a terrorist attack in Victoria.

Ertunc Eriklioglu, his brother Samed and another man, Hanifi Halis, on Friday pleaded guilty to one charge each of conspiring between 9 and 19 November 2018 to buy a firearm in preparation for an attack, AAP reports.

Documents released by Victoria’s county court show an attack against members of the public was planned for the “advancement of Islam through violence”.

The trio are next due in court on 15 June for a pre-sentence hearing.

The anonymous whistleblower who first shared details of a Coalition staffer who allegedly masturbated on the desk of a female MP, has said he will be named “against his wishes” in a news story tomorrow.

The man, who goes by Tom the Whistleblower on Twitter, had revealed the details of a group of staffers who allegedly shared pictures of the incident.

A mother accused of injecting her son with faecal matter will be acquitted after the crown prosecutor admitted there was not enough evidence to prove the charges.

The woman’s lawyer told the NSW district court today that it was only brought to trial because of “wild speculation”, AAP reports.

The concession means the Blue Mountains mother, now 39, will be acquitted more than six years after being accused of administering faecal matter to her young son while he was in Sydney’s Westmead hospital.

The paediatrician and infectious diseases specialist Prof David Isaacs sounded the alarm that something might have been injected into the boy’s bloodstream, after a blood sample on 27 September 2014 tested positive for E coli and one other bowel organism.

It came after a number of sterile blood cultures and urine cultures were performed following his admission to hospital on 2 September.

Isaacs said it was unusual that the organisms would grow despite the son receiving antibiotics, and other explanations for the presence of E coli did not make sense.

Giving evidence to the court, Isaacs admitted that there were other scientific explanations for the sample result, including contamination of the sample.

An expert infectious diseases doctor, Bernie Hudson, later told the court that contamination of blood cultures can occur and there was not evidence to rule it out.

“The accused is here today only … because of the speculation of one person, namely Dr Isaacs,” said the defence barrister, Pauline David, in her closing submissions on Friday.

Scott Morrison is asked about Brittany Higgins, and whether he “misjudged the mood of the nation”.

He says he addressed this in the morning.

“This is a very serious, important issue,” he says. “I am doing everything I can to ensure we do the things we need to do to get this right.

“I was simply saying this is a very deep and difficult issue, which has many different dimensions. We have an understanding at one level.”

Morrison is now taking questions.

He tells reporters: “Let’s please focus the questions at first on the matters that obviously have been the subject of the announcements today. Happy to deal with other things, I suppose.”

But he adds that he and Berejiklian “are on a schedule”.

The NSW premier, Gladys Berejiklian, is speaking now.

She says the deputy premier, John Barilaro, will be responsible for flood cleanup and recovery.

Morrison says that the federal government and state government will fund the flood recovery “50/50”.

“We will carry this load together,” he says.

He announces “small business grants for those directly impacted” up to $50,000 and primary producer grants of up to $75,000.

Scott Morrison is speaking now in Wauchope in NSW about the recent floods.

“The premier and I have stood here in this very spot, not that long ago, as fired ripped through the area,” he says.

“David [Littleproud] and I have been here through drought. Now we are here for floods. And we have been dealing with Covid.”

Two Victorian women have been sentenced to community service for not complying with Queensland’s previous public health directions.

The two women had their photos and names plastered on the front page of the Courier-Mail and branded “Enemies of the state” earlier in the pandemic. They had failed to declare that they had been in Victoria before entering Queensland, and one later tested positive to Covid-19.

They were initially charged with fraud, but these charges were dropped and they were eventually only charged with failing to comply with a public health direction.

The had previously been fined in Victoria as well.