Australia news LIVE Extra Pfizer doses arrive as COVID cases climb in Victoria NSW and ACT

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News Corp Australia, an influential player in Australia’s decade-long climate wars, will end its long-standing editorial hostility towards carbon reduction policies and advocate for the world’s leading economies to hit net zero emissions by 2050.

The owner of some of the nation’s most-read newspapers, including the Herald Sun, The Daily Telegraph, The Australian and 24-hour news channel Sky News Australia will from mid-October begin a company-wide campaign promoting the benefits of a carbon-neutral economy as the world’s leaders prepare for a critical climate summit in Glasgow later this year.

News Corp is preparing a company-wide campaign focused on reducing carbon net emissions.Credit:Dominic Lorrimer

Rupert Murdoch’s global media empire has faced growing international condemnation and pressure from advertisers over its editorial stance on climate change, which has long cast doubt over the science behind global warming and has since 2007 attacked various federal government efforts to reduce emissions.

More on this story here.

Australia’s COVID-19 taskforce commander, Lieutenant-General John Frewen, is doing the media rounds this morning.

Sunrise co-host David Koch asked what role the AstraZeneca vaccine will play moving forward given Moderna will soon be rolled out and AstraZeneca’s brand has “been trashed” due to the extremely rare risk of blood clots.

Lieutenant General John Frewen. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen

Here’s what General Frewen had to say:

[AstraZeneca] is a fantastic vaccine and has been a fantastic vaccine throughout.

It was unfortunate that the reputation took some hits but ... there has been more than 6 million doses administered here in Australia and since the Prime Minister opened up AstraZeneca to the under 40s, more than 600,000 of them have taken AstraZeneca’s first dose.

There are still a range of people who are yet to get their second dose of AstraZeneca, which I encourage them to do.

There will still people who come forward to have AstraZeneca as opportunities permit â€" remembering that the best vaccine is the one you can get today.

There are now 1047 venues on Victoria’s ballooning list of COVID-19 exposure sites.

No tier-1 sites have been added overnight, but a Woolworths supermarket and an apartment building are among the new tier-2 sites.

In Victoria, “tier 2” means people need to immediately get tested and isolate until returning a negative result.

The Greenvale Lakes Woolworths in Roxburgh Park, in Melbourne’s northern suburbs, is among the new areas of concern. A positive case visited the supermarket twice in the last fortnight for several hours.

The Victoria Point Apartments in Docklands, on the Harbour Esplanade, is also listed as an exposure site for every day since last Monday.

And the Ernst & Young office on Exhibition Street, in Melbourne’s CBD, has also been listed as a tier-2 site for parts of last Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.

Visit the Department of Health’s website for further details.

Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce was on Sunrise earlier this morning.

He said the Morrison government is looking forward to some state Labor leaders changing their “haphazard approach” to Australia’s reopening plan when vaccination rates hit 70 to 80 per cent.

“We have to have one plan and go forward because the nation can’t operate as this parochial little kingdom,” Mr Joyce said.

“It has to operate as a nation. We will open up after 80 per cent. If people have another plan, that is a plan to isolate themselves to some kind of hermit kingdom and that will come unstuck because it won’t work and people will not accept it.”

WA Premier Mark McGowan has previously suggested his state will be a “few months” behind the rest of the country when it comes to opening its borders, arguing it would be “complete madness” to let coronavirus into a COVID-free state.

And Queensland’s Annastacia Palaszczuk attracted criticism last week after tapping into community concerns about COVID-19 and children (there is currently no approved coronavirus vaccine for people under the age of 12).

Victorians could be rewarded with extra freedoms in less than a fortnight when the state is expected to hit its first vaccination milestone sooner than the government initially anticipated.

Announcing 183 new coronavirus cases yesterday, Premier Daniel Andrews flagged a further easing of restrictions â€" beyond what he had outlined last Tuesday â€" when 70 per cent of the eligible Victorian population has received at least one dose of a vaccine.

Premier Daniel Andrews has urged Victorians not to wait to get vaccinated.Credit:Darrian Traynor

Government sources have said any further relaxation would be focused on permitting social activity, rather than allowing more industries to trade. Public health experts say if cases continue to stabilise, Victorians should be allowed greater freedoms outdoors, in recognition of the cumulative mental toll of successive lockdowns.

Under initial modelling, the state was set to hit 70 per cent single-dose vaccination targets on September 23, but Mr Andrews on Sunday said Victoria was on track to reach the milestone sooner.

Read more about the situation in Victoria here.

More than one in 10 people in NSW with COVID-19 now end up in hospital, although health authorities warn the figure is likely higher given the lag between infection and becoming sick enough to need hospitalisation.

As Sydney braces for case numbers to spike in the coming weeks, the latest NSW Health figures for the Delta outbreak, released on the weekend, show the hospitalisation rate of people with COVID-19 is 11 per cent.

NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian will this week release modelling showing how stretched hospitals will become in October.Credit:Edwina Pickles

Premier Gladys Berejiklian will this week release modelling which she says will show “what is foreshadowed to be a peak in cases but also the peak hospitalisation, the peak in intensive care”.

Read the full story here.

Around 500,000 additional Pfizer vaccines arrived at Sydney International Airport overnight from London.

The shipment is part of a 4 million “dose swap” with the United Kingdom. The additional supplies come as Australia prepares to vaccinate 12- to 15-year-olds as early as next week.

This snap is thanks to Getty photographer James Morgan.

The extra Pfizer doses are unloaded from a Qantas plane last night. Credit:Getty

Good morning and thanks for your company.

It’s Monday, September 6. I’m Broede Carmody and I’ll be anchoring our live coverage for the first half of the day.

Here’s everything you need to know before we get started.

Victorians could have additional freedoms in less than a fortnight. Premier Dan Andrews has flagged easing more coronavirus restrictions when the state hits its 70 per cent first dose vaccine target. Victorians have already been told their 5km travel bubble will be expanded. Further relaxations are expected to relate to social activity outdoors. Yesterday, Victoria recorded 183 new cases of coronavirus.

More than one in 10 people in NSW with COVID-19 are now ending up in hospital, according to data from the state health department. There are more than 1000 coronavirus patients in NSW hospitals. Of those, 175 in intensive care. Yesterday, the state recorded 1485 new cases of COVID-19.

The ACT reported 15 new cases of coronavirus yesterday. The overwhelming majority of the territory’s cases are in people under the age of 45.

Queensland is on high alert after authorities learnt dozens of people didn’t check-in to a shopping centre visited by a COVID-positive truck driver. Meanwhile, hundreds of people gathered along NSW-Qld border communities yesterday to mark Father’s Day.

And half a million doses of Pfizer have landed in Sydney overnight. The additional doses are part fof a deal with the UK to provide 4 million doses by the end of this month.

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