Australia news live update: Daniel Andrews ‘won’t be deterred’ by Victoria protests; NT records six new Covid cases; flood warnings for NSW | Australia news

Back to the NT – five of the new cases are in Robinson River and one is a three-week-old baby girl.

Former federal Labor MP Craig Thomson has been arrested and charged over alleged involvement in a multi-million-dollar migration fraud.

Australian Federal Police (AFP) officers arrested Thomson, 57, at his home on the NSW Central Coast this morning.

The former Labor parliamentarian was sentenced in 2014 for stealing from the Health Services Union.

There are new exposure sites and time:

https://coronavirus.nt.gov.au/stay-safe/case-location-alerts-and-close-contacts

Gunner said people did not check-in properly at one of the key exposure sites

“We know about 66 close contacts at Kirby’sPub.

“However, our contact tracer sare have not been able to capture everyone checked in because of missing or illegible information.

“It’s legitimate to write details down rather than using your phone but they must be legible. The hardcopy register is illegible and we’re behind the 8 ball.

“Instead of using our time to get in contact with close contact, we have to go through CCTV and identify everyone who walked into the pub.”

Gunner:

“I’m again making another call for anyone in the Northern Territory who is not vaccinated to get the jab. If you waited because you didn’t think COVID would get here, it’s here. If you waited because you didn’t think COVID was serious, you’re wrong.

“It’s killed 5.1 million people in the world. I fear it will take lives in the territory before the year is out.

“Please, please don’t let it be your life, the vaccine is your best defence.”

Gunner:

“The situation in Robinson River and Katherine is serious. We know how quickly Delta can spread in households and cannot be sure it hasn’t spread further in the Robinson River and Katherine communities.

“Today we have two new testing requirements. We are asking anyone who has been to Robinson River since 11 November to come forward, to come forward whether you are symptomatic or not and isolate until you get a negative result.

“We’re asking anyone who left Katherine since 7 November to come forward whether you are symptomatic or not, get tested and isolate until you get a negative result. I need everyone in the territory to treat this seriously and I believe you are.”

We are going to stop there because Chief Officer Micheal Gunner is talking in the NT. There are six new cases

Wren:

“To around 34% of people on JobSeeker now actually have a disability or an impairment. We have also got a lot of older women and men who have been laid off late in their working lives and, frankly, they are just waiting to claim the higher aged pension. And, of course, we have got single parents.

“Predominantly mothers, because, as we know, poverty is gendered, like violence, in this country, with children, with a child of the age of eight years. There is no parenting payment for those mothers, those families. It is JobSeeker.”

Wren said we would also see the number of people who need unemployment payments is going to rise.

“It is about 27% more now than before we had the bushfires and the pandemic.

“But we’ve also got 2 million people who have, this year, for this lockdown, these avoidable lockdowns, have needed to claim another payment called the COVID disaster payment.

“That’s gone. 2 million Australians have needed that. That payment, we still don’t know how many of them, but I don’t think all 2 million of them are going to be able to automatically snap back to their jobs or find a new job.”

Wren:

“We in Australia have been cushioned, really, buy a decent age pension level, but also predominantly most people who retire in Australia up until now have owned their own home.

“So that is the cushioning effect of poverty in retirement. As we see this rental crisis and buying crisis go forward, we would expect to see many more people retiring without owning their own home.”

Wren is now talking about the yearly data up until October:

“So we still saw 30% increases in the SunshineCoast, Gold Coast, but also in places that weren’t affected as much by lockdowns, in WA some 27% increases, 21% in Far North Queensland.

“Sydney, 15%, Melbourne is the outlier, only 3%. But those percentages translate into higher rents that people simply can’t afford to pay.”

Wren is about to go through the key three reasons why poverty will increase as we come out of the first, lockdown-y stage of the pandemic.

And first up is housing affordability.

“We’ve had a failure to invest in social housing over decades and increased house prices have been driving those two things, a big increase in reliance on private rental. The pandemic, despite many predictions, actually has supercharged these factors.

“Prices are going up, whether you are buying or renting. In the year to June, regional rents across Australia went up by 11%. And in some parts of coastal Queensland, it was 30%.”