Australia news live update: Victoria records 80 new cases as Coalition says targeted lockdowns may continue – live

Happy last sitting day for the week.

Not that it matters too much, with the focus rightly on everything which is happening outside of the parliament.

Gladys Berejiklian is doing all she can to convince people to start looking at vaccination and hospitalisation rates rather than the daily case numbers (which she calls an emotional rollercoaster) after another record day in NSW yesterday.

But with the health system under increasing pressure (Blacktown hospital joined Westmead in emergency measures late yesterday, as it struggled to cope with Covid patients), questions are arising about how much more the health system can take.

Still, some areas of NSW’s statewide lockdown may be released from the harshest restrictions by the end of the week and Berejiklian remains set on an “additional freedom” for people who are double vaccinated in areas which are still locked down.

Berejiklian is one of the most vocal supporters of the “national plan”, which Scott Morrison is now happily claiming as his own, as he too pushes for an end to lockdowns.

But a lot of nuance has been missed in the rhetoric. Morrison has been pushing the plan all week as Australia’s way out, talking of an end to lockdowns as the nation “comes out of the cave”. But late yesterday, the finance minister, Simon Birmingham, admitted that the Doherty Institute analysis the plan is based on does include “targeted lockdowns” for when test, trace, isolate and quarantine fails. With NSW’s contact tracing system under immense pressure, test results not coming back for days, and the mystery cases in the hundreds each day, the NSW test-trace-isolate-quarantine system has not held up in this outbreak. Under the Doherty Institute modelling that could still result in a targeted lockdown.

Morrison is also keen to start shifting the blame for Australia’s pandemic handling back to the states as he gears up for the coming election. He has set Christmas as his goal for “everyone to be around the table” (minus those overseas, with no plans to throw open the international border anytime soon) but the Doherty report sets out all states and territories hitting the 70-80% eligible population vaccination target, as well as the national average. With states which have been largely immune from mass outbreaks not seeing the same vaccination push as Victoria and NSW, that means not everyone will hit those marks at the same time.

Not surprisingly, not a lot of that is being spoken about as yet by the federal government. But it is coming.

We’ll cover everything that happens and more, with Mike Bowers, Katharine Murphy, Sarah Martin, Daniel Hurst and Paul Karp at your service, backed, as always, by the entire Guardian brains trust. Amy Remeikis is with you for the day. I have had just the one coffee so far after waking up a little later than usual, so I have a bit to catch up on. Still, it’s shaping up as at least another five-coffee day.

Ready?

source: theguardian.com