As it happened: National cabinet meets to debate end of mandatory COVID-19 isolation

Arthur Sinodinos’s three-year term as ambassador to Washington will end in February, opening up a highly sought after position for a Labor luminary.

There has been talk former prime minister Kevin Rudd, currently based in New York as president of the Asia Society, could be a contender for the role.

Former Labor cabinet ministers Stephen Conroy and Greg Combet have been discussed as contenders, while Bill Shorten wanted to send former NSW premier Kristina Keneally to fill the role if he had won the 2019 election.

Opposition foreign affairs spokesman Simon Birmingham congratulated Smith on his appointment, saying he was well-qualified for the role.

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“The Aboriginal community in this area called for us to rename Ben Boyd National Park because of Boyd’s shocking legacy of blackbirding,” he said.

Griffin said the new name of the park was chosen after consultations with more than 60 representatives from Aboriginal and South Sea Islander communities, including Faye Campbell, who said the name Beowa represented a connection to whaling and ancestors.

“We are saltwater people and our ancestors were the best whalers going,” Campbell said. “My ancestor Budgenbro used to communicate with the killer whales and there are a lot of stories to share, now we can.”

Griffin said the park’s new name celebrated the connection between the coastline and the spiritual lives of its first inhabitants.

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The Kooyong MP, a paediatric neurologist who was the Director of Neurology at the Royal Melbourne Children’s Hospital, said parents did not want “their very young children cared for by early childhood educators forced to work with this illness, or their older kids to sit in classrooms next to COVID positive kids, taught by COVID positive teachers”.

“The reality is that without mandatory isolation, many people will return to work while they are sick and infectious ... either because employers force their staff to attend work or because workers are unable to take sick leave,” she said.

“Removing COVID-19 isolation will have significant impacts on our local and national economies and on workforces that are already struggling with absenteeism, both from COVID infection and reinfection and from the emerging public health crisis of Long COVID.”

It’s impossible to tell at this point how many individual documents Optus would have to pay to replace, especially given some people would have only had a passport or a licence exposed and not both, and some of the data will likely be out of date. But let’s assume an extreme outcome where the telco had to pay to replace 3 million passports, 3 million drivers licences and 15,000 Medicare cards (22,000 of the exposed numbers were expired).

Licences are easy to calculate, as they cost an average of around $27 to replace depending on your state, assuming it wouldn’t cost extra to change the numbers and assuming Optus couldn’t arrange some kind of bulk discount, the final price tag lands at $81 million.

Passports are a bit trickier. They usually cost $193 to replace, but can be free in certain situations, so it’s unclear what the actual cost of replacement would be in this scenario. So at maximum that’s $580 million, but in all likelihood it would be much lower after Optus works the issue out with the relevant department, and you subtract the customers whose passport information was not included or was out of date.

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They want to ensure Australia’s exporters can honour long-term contracts and send all available gas onto the spot market ahead of the Northern Hemisphere winter.

The competition watchdog last month forecast a shortage of 56 petajoules in 2023 and under the new deal LNG companies will offer the 157 petajoules that won’t be tied up in export contracts to the domestic market.

But critics say the extra supply wouldn’t stop businesses from folding because it allows exporters to charge local gas buyers soaring international prices.

Since 2019 several major manufacturers including Qenos and Dow Chemical in Melbourne and Incitec Pivot in Brisbane have blamed energy costs for their closure.

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The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age revealed in August that the Chinese state-backed mining firm had been embroiled in a dispute with Cassius after the Australian miner alleged it had dug underneath its concession to steal millions of dollars worth of gold.

Earl International is also facing claims that it has killed dozens of local miners to stop them from entering its mining area since 2013. Earl International has denied the allegations.

The Ghanaian government has launched an inquiry into the claims as Australian miner Cassius prepares to begin action in the London International Court of Arbitration to recover $395 million in losses from the Gban project. The case has put growing scrutiny on China’s global investment strategies, its ties to government officials and the impact on local communities as it ramps up its push to expand its influence abroad.

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