These changes will come into effect at 11:59pm tonight: 127,000 workers to return to onsite work with a COVID-safe plan Students in primary school, special school students and VCAL will return to on-site learning in the week beginning 12 October Outdoor exercise is allowed within 5km of your home or workplace with a 2-hour limit. If you are exercising near …

More Australians stranded overseas will be able to return home each week after state governments agreed to a staggered rise in hotel quarantine caps. The overall cap will rise from 4000 to 6000 after all states reach new limits over the next two weeks, under a deal struck at Friday’s national cabinet meeting. On Thursday Prime Minister Scott Morrison said …

Australian taxpayers have spent nearly $55 billion so far on the JobKeeper program during the coronavirus pandemic as the Federal Government prepares to reduce payments from September 29. While the national unemployment rate fell to 6.8 per cent in August, millions of Australians remain dependent on the JobKeeper safety net. A total of 3.6 million Australian employees and businesses have …

Victoria Police say they plan to charge a Melbourne woman with assaulting police after she posted a video of her arrest to social media showing her being dragged from a car by officers. Police arrested 29-year-old Natalie Bonner after she allegedly refused to provide her details and driver’s licence at a checkpoint in Kalkallo just before 6pm on Saturday. Ms …

Victoria has reported 41 new cases of COVID-19 and seven further deaths, with the latest figures supporting the state’s planned easing of lockdown restrictions. Sunday’s statistics for the past 24 hours take the state’s death toll to 723 and the national count to 810 since the start of the pandemic. As parts of Victoria’s move towards eased restrictions, tensions are …

Late-stage trials for a leading coronavirus vaccine have been suspended after a study participant suffered a “potentially unexplained illness”. AstraZeneca has put on hold phase three trials of a vaccine being developed in collaboration with the University of Oxford. The Australian Government last month signed an agreement with the UK-based company to secure the potential COVID-19 vaccine, if its trials prove successful. …

The NSW state government has announced its guidelines for the HSC exams at the end of the year. Exam rooms will be cleaned and sanitised after each use and one person will collect papers at the end of each day. NSW Education Minister Sarah Mitchell said masks will be optional during tests, just as they are in classrooms. Temperature checks for students …

Premier Daniel Andrews says one of the first lockdown restrictions to be eased up is the isolation of single-person and single-parents households. Under Victoria’s roadmap out of current restrictions, single-person and single-parent households throughout the state will be allowed to create a “social bubble” with one other person from September 14. And from October 26, if daily cases continue to decline enough, all Melbourne households will be able …

Free vaccinations for COVID-19 will be made available next year in Australia, depending on the outcome of “promising” drug trials, the Australian Government is expected to announce on Monday. In a statement released late on Sunday, the Federal Government said that contingent on the outcome of ongoing trials, vaccines would be made available “progressively” throughout 2021, following a $1.7 billion …

A landmark study of television news and current affairs has found that presenters, commentators and reporters on Australian television are overwhelmingly of an Anglo-Celtic background. In terms of the number of appearances during the survey period, almost 76 per cent of those on Australian screens were found to have an Anglo-Celtic background. Just 6 per cent were from an Indigenous …