As it happened: Scott Morrison resists calls to resign amid minister portfolio saga; governor-general’s role questioned by MPs

NSW will overhaul its handling of natural disasters following a scathing independent flood inquiry, which urged a major reset of emergency management in the face of increasing extreme weather events.

The Perrottet government will set up a permanent emergency operations centre, led by a new deputy police commissioner, while a new Cabinet committee of senior ministers branded Task Force Hawk will respond to any future major disasters.

In flood-hit Lismore on Wednesday, NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet said the report by former police commissioner Mick Fuller and Professor Mary O’Kane made for “hard reading”, with critical assessments of the NSW State Emergency Service and Resilience NSW.

The report also urged the creation of a land swap and buyback scheme for Northern Rivers residents and others on NSW floodplains.

Reason Party leader Fiona Patten and a moderate Liberal fear a group of new religious conservative candidates likely to be elected at the November state election could block expanded reproductive rights for women and wind back euthanasia laws.

Patten’s bill to cut funding to religious public hospitals that refuse to offer abortion and euthanasia was voted down by Labor on Wednesday, but the upper house MP told The Age she would pursue a broader abortion reform package at the next election.

Patten – who played a key role in left-wing reforms allowing sick people to choose to die and drug users to inject heroin in safe locations – worries a new religious bloc in the Liberal Party and a larger group of Labor MPs from the traditionally conservative shop workers union could prevent future changes.

“We will see a more conservative Labor side and definitely a more conservative Liberal side,” she said.

The number of temporary teachers working in NSW public schools has almost doubled in a decade as experts warn surging insecure and short-term contracts are driving graduates away from the profession.

A NSW government submission to a parliamentary inquiry into teacher shortages has revealed that 37 per cent of the full-time equivalent workforce are in temporary or casual jobs, meaning almost 26,000 are in non-permanent positions.

The figures come as the expert leading the sweeping reforms in NSW teaching salaries, University of Melbourne academic John Hattie, said teachers are abandoning the classroom because they are “not getting promoted and not getting recognised” for their expertise.

“Most [teachers] in the first five years are on short-term contracts, which is not a great incentive for them to stay in the profession,” Hattie told an inquiry hearing on Wednesday.

Nairobi: Kenyan politician Raila Odinga has rejected Tuesday’s result of the presidential election he was declared to have lost to Deputy President William Ruto and warned of a long legal crisis facing the country’s democracy.

His first comments on the result came after four of the seven election commissioners said they stood by their decision a day earlier to disown figures announced by electoral commission chairman Wafula Chebukati.

There have been fears of violence similar to what followed the disputed polls in East Africa’s richest country in 2007, when more than 1200 people were killed, and again in 2017, when more than 100 people died.

Overnight, Odinga’s supporters battled police and burnt tyres in the western city of Kisumu and the capital Nairobi’s huge Kibera slum, but calm had returned to the streets by morning.

An audit of Australia’s coronavirus vaccination rollout has criticised the slow speed at which early doses were administered, blaming poor planning for low levels of community protection when the virus locked down most of the country last year.

In a report released on Wednesday, the Australian National Audit Office found planning and implementation of the COVID-19 vaccine rollout was “partly effective”, noting it became increasingly successful over time.

Overall, early targets for vaccination were missed, the audit found. Despite then-prime minister Scott Morrison’s promise to have completed the vaccine rollout by October 2021, only 55 per cent of Australians aged 16 and over had received two doses of a vaccine by then, and NSW and Victoria were in the process of exiting four months of continuous lockdown restrictions.

Governor-General David Hurley says questions about former prime minister Scott Morrison’s secret ministry appointments are not his to answer and has deflected them to the previous government.

In a statement, Hurley said he is “content for the process that the prime minister [Anthony Albanese] has put in place to be completed” and will not comment further.

“The governor-general acted on the advice of the government of the day, consistent with the principle of responsible government (in which ministers are responsible to the parliament, and through them to the Australian people, for the advice that they provide to the governor-general),” he said.

“Any questions around secrecy after the governor-general had acted on the advice of the government of the day are a matter for the previous government.