As it happened: Victoria records five new COVID-19 cases as state's case average continues to fall; Bathurst 1000 attendees urged testing as Australian death toll stands at 905

And we've made it to the end of another day on the live blog.

We'll be back on Friday morning (despite the public holiday in Melbourne!) as usual. Here's what you need to know in the day of news from around the country:

• Victoria
  Victoria's coronavirus contact tracing system will switch to a new "whole household" approach

  after a misunderstanding led to an infectious year five student going to school, amid an outbreak that has put at least 500 people into self-isolation.

  Two schools are closed and five suburbs in Melbourne's north – Dallas, Roxburgh Park, Broadmeadows, Preston and West Heidelberg – are on high alert with residents urged to get tested and isolate immediately if they develop mild symptoms.

  Victoria recorded five new cases, all linked to the northern suburbs outbreak. in the lead-up to announcements of more eased restrictions on Sunday.

  Meanwhile, the Department of Health and Human Services has referred one of its employees to police for investigation over .

• NSW
  

  New South Wales recorded just one new local case in the latest reporting period, and six in hotel quarantine. The state has no coronavirus cases in ICU.

  Premier Gladys Berejiklian threw barbs at her Queensland and West Australian counterparts over their decisions to keep hard borders up, telling them to "cough up" costs for running hotel quarantine.

  Ms Berejiklian accused Queensland of shirking up to $35 million worth of hotel quarantine fees because NSW has been "doing the heavy lifting" for international arrivals.

  "I want them to pay their bill, especially given they keep their border shut when they really don't need to," she said.

  Queensland Premier Annnastacia Palaszczuk hit back, telling the NSW Premier to focus on her own problems (a thinly veiled reference ), while WA Premier Mark McGowan .

• National
  Millions of Australians on JobSeeker benefits won't know how much income support they'll receive next year until December, sparking concerns this will be too late for a Christmas spending recovery.

  And the nation's human rights chief has called on federal and state leaders to justify the emergency measures that curtail personal freedom amid a push to ease coronavirus restrictions.

  Australian Human Rights Commission president Rosalind Croucher .

The health department expects more coronavirus cases to be detected in a growing outbreak in Melbourne’s northern suburbs that has resulted in more than 500 people being told to self-isolate.

All of the state's five extra cases recorded on Thursday were connected to the cluster, identified just days before Premier Daniel Andrews was due to announce a further easing of the city's lockdown restrictions.

The cluster includes 16 active cases across six households, one of whom was a primary school student who attended school for two days while infected with COVID-19 this week.

The Department of Health and Human services said in an update on Thursday that it was expecting more cases to emerge from 10 testing sites and contact tracing across several northern suburbs.

The tiny Victorian town of Little River, which has been split in half by the government's enforced metropolitan-regional border, will be re-united when the clock strikes 12 on Thursday night.

After a campaign by locals, the state government on Thursday night announced that the whole town would be reclassified as regional Victoria with the boundary to be adjusted to go around the community instead of through it.

Little River is the only town on the metropolitan border which is divided by the boundary, which was drawn up based on Local Government Area (LGA) boundaries rather than postcodes. The LGA boundary ran along the river in town itself, essentially splitting the town in two.

Australian property owners have rushed to refinance loans in unprecedented numbers during the pandemic as the turmoil unleashed by the coronavirus caused a sharp plunge in house values in NSW and Victoria, new real time data shows.

Property transactions processed on e-conveyancing platform PEXA show that for the first nine months of this year residential values slumped 9 per cent in NSW and 14 per cent in Victoria.

While NSW's values showed a small improvement in the September quarter, in Victoria they fell another 5 per cent as the state suffered through a second wave of the pandemic, the data shows.

The electronic property exchange platform processes about 20,000 sales a week and tracks mortgage and refinancing changes, giving it a real time edge in identifying key trends across the sector.

A leading civil liberties group has raised significant privacy concerns over Victoria Police’s flagged plans to use surveillance drones this weekend to monitor AFL Grand Final gatherings in public places.

As we reported earlier in the blog today, police will use drones to crowd across Geelong and Melbourne in places such as St Kilda Beach, parks, or Swan Street in Richmond if the Tigers win the flag on Saturday.

Julia Kretzenbacher, Vice President of Liberty Victoria, said although police had clarified they wouldn’t be flying drones over private residences, her organisation was still alarmed by the plan

"That’s in our view still concerning, it’s quite a significant incursion on people’s privacy," she told radio station 3AW’s Tom Elliot this afternoon.

There was a moment of levity at the end of Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews' press conference today regarding the all important issue of whether Halloween will go ahead this year or not.

With Halloween just nine days away now, plenty parents are keen to know whether their little ones will be able to trick or treat or not.

"I've never directed the Chief Health Officer, but I'm simply going to direct the Chief Health Officer to come up with a Halloween plan," Premier Daniel Andrews laughed.

"Alex, you could have joint sign off," he joked, responding to a journalist in the room who brought up the topic.