1 month ago
Four separate lithium-ion battery fires in NSW yesterday
Fire and Rescue NSW has expressed concerns about the rising rate of lithium-ion battery fires after responding to four separate incidents across the state yesterday.
FRNSW has recorded 63 lithium-ion battery fires this year, subject to review, at a rate of 5.7 blazes a week. Seven people have been injured in the fires.
There were 272 lithium-ion battery related fires in 2023, at a rate of 5.2 a week. 38 people were injured last year.
The four incidents FRNSW responded to yesterday include:
An electric vehicle charging station caught alight just after 5pm at Berkeley. Firefighters established a perimeter around a business, fearing multiple batteries were at risk of catching fire, but the blaze was extinguished without further incident.
A tradesman’s toolbox caught alight around 4pm at Lake Macquarie. The worker told fire crews he was driving when he noticed smoke in the rear view mirror, and stopped to find an unattached battery ablaze. He covered it in dirt and drove to a nearby fire station, where it was submerged in water.
About 12.45pm a fire broke out in the rear of a garbage truck travelling along in Silverwater. The driver stopped and tipped the burning rubbish on to the roadway. Crews arrived and found one battery on fire, and submerged it in water.
An e-bike caught fire on the third floor of a 10-storey apartment at Bankstown in Sydney’s south-west. Residents were evacuated and sprinklers activated.
Key events
Paul Karp
More on the direct aged care workers pay rise
The Fair Work Commission expert panel found that the work of aged care sector employees has historically been undervalued because of assumptions based on gender.
Minimum pay rates for nurses failed to properly recognise the addition to work value effected by the transformation of nursing into a profession, it found.
As a result of today’s decision, personal care workers will receive an increase of between 18.2% and 28.5%, depending on their skill and qualification level, and inclusive of the 15% already ordered.
Assistants in nursing will get between 17.9% and 24.5%. Home care workers will get between 13.3% and 26.1%.
The expert panel found that indirect care employees, such as administrative workers and those providing food services, “do not perform work of equivalent value to direct care employees” justifying equal rates of pay.
Indirect care workers were awarded a 3% pay increase reflecting some higher duties such as infection prevention and control. Laundry hands, cleaners and food services assistants who interact with residents significantly more regularly were awarded 6.96%.
Direct aged care workers receive pay rise of up to 28.5%
Paul Karp
Aged care workers will receive a pay rise of up to 28.5%, after the Fair Work Commission delivered the final ruling in a long-running work value case.
The commission’s expert panel said those involved in direct care including nurses, aged care, home care workers deserved pay rises “substantially” higher than the interim 15% pay rise ordered in November 2022.
It adopted a new benchmark pay rate of $1,223.90 a week – or $63,6642.8 a year – for certificate III qualified employees.
The decision will trigger billions of greater investment in aged care, on top of the $11.3bn allocated over four years in the 2023 budget for a 15% pay increase.
Restoring UNRWA funding ‘the bare minimum’, Mehreen Faruqi says
Greens deputy leader and spokesperson for international aid, Mehreen Faruqi, has released a statement after Penny Wong announced UNRWA funding has been reinstated.
Faruqi said the funding was “inexcusably cut off” 48 days ago, and has been reinstated following “intense pressure from the Greens and the community”.
Faruqi said in a statement:
Without humanitarian aid, children are being starved in the ruins of Gaza and are dying of malnutrition. Restoring UNRWA funding is the bare minimum, the Labor government should publicly pressure Israel to allow aid into all parts of Gaza.
Starvation is a weapon of war and Israel continues to block humanitarian aid from reaching people in Gaza, in brazen violation of the ICJ ruling.
I hope this is the start of the Labor government breaking away from their unquestioning and immoral support of Israel. Now, Labor must call for an immediate and permanent ceasefire, and an end to the occupation and apartheid.
Reactions flow after Australia reinstates UNRWA funding
Reactions have been flowing after the foreign minister, Penny Wong, announced that Australia would reinstate its funding to UNRWA.
The Executive Council of Australian Jewry president Daniel Aghion said the decision was “wrong”, and the Australian government “needs to find another way to feed the Gazans”.
Our community favours the provision of aid to civilians in Gaza who are in desperate need, but we are totally opposed to the use of UNRWA as an agency for delivering that aid … It remains our view that delivering aid through UNRWA poses an insurmountable risk of Australian taxpayers’ money being wasted or, worse still, being used in part to support Hamas’s terrorist activities.
At her earlier press conference, Wong stated the “best available current advice” from agencies and government lawyers was that UNRWA “is not a terrorist organisation” and that existing safeguards “sufficiently protect Australian taxpayer funding.”
Greens senator David Shoebridge, meanwhile, said the government shouldn’t expect “gratitude” after its decision to pause funding in the first place. He wrote on X:
Imagine basically stealing food from starving people, then months later giving it back and expecting gratitude. Imagine being the Albanese government.
Eden Gillespie
Queensland LNP acknowledges ‘mountainous’ task ahead of dual weekend byelections
The Queensland opposition leader, David Crisafulli, has acknowledged the “mountainous” climb ahead of the party in two byelections held in Labor heartland this weekend.
Crisafulli, the Liberal party leader, has told reporters it won’t be an easy task to defeat Labor in the state seats of Inala and Ipswich West:
We’re dealing with seats in the Labor party heartland, so we understand the mountainous task ahead.
Labor is expecting a swing to the LNP in Inala, the seat of former premier Annastacia Palaszczuk. However, the party still expects to win the seat, which sits on a margin of 28.2%.
The LNP is predicting greater success in the nearby electorate of Ipswich West, another safe Labor seat that has a margin of about 14.3%.
Darren Zanow, the LNP candidate for Ipswich West, said it was time for the community to send Labor a message that “they have been taken for granted” for way too long.
Make no mistake, I’m the underdog and I am working hard to get every single vote I possibly can.
Emergency centre established in NT ahead of weather system
Daniel Sheehan from the emergency operations centre said the centre was established on Monday afternoon to manage any response required as the wet weather system moved across the Northern Territory.
Communities across the Top End have adequate food supplies, critical goods, and essential services to last through this weather event …
The Bureau has put out several warnings and several messages, alerts and so forth, to communities advising the communities that this weather system is coming, and police in the communities have been working with residents to ensure resilience and ensure that they are in a state of preparedness.
BoM on tropical cyclone watch near Gulf of Carpentaria
Emergency services in Darwin have been providing an update on a developing tropical low developing in the Gulf of Carpentaria:
It has moved quite quickly overnight across the northern coast of the Top End, and it is expected to move into the Gulf of Carpentaria over the next 24 hours.
With that low-pressure system, we have already seen some heavy rain – over 100mm – across northern Arnhem communities, as well as some damaging wind gusts getting up to over 100km/h.
As that low moves further into the Gulf of Carpentaria, there is a chance that it develops into a tropical cyclone tomorrow morning.
Natasha May
‘Long Covid’ term misleading and harmful: Queensland chief health officer
Queensland’s chief health officer Dr John Gerrard, has given a press conference in Brisbane explaining why he believes the term long Covid should no longer be used:
Using this term long Covid implies that this virus has some unique, exceptional and sinister property that differentiates it from other viruses and makes it far worse.
New research he has led found no difference between the symptoms and impairment of Covid and influenza patients a year after they tested positive:
Gerrard said:
A major problem with many of the scientific studies which have been published on this subject is that they failed to identify an appropriate comparator or control group which is always required in a basic scientific study.
The bottom line is we could identify no difference in the outcomes of patients with Covid or other respiratory infections at 12 months, no matter how we looked at it.
I want to make it clear that the symptoms that some patients described after having Covid 19 are real, and we believe they are real. What we are saying is that the incidence of these symptoms is no greater in Covid-19 than it is with other respiratory viruses, and that to use this term long Covid is misleading and I believe harmful.
Catie McLeod
Chris Minns takes another swipe at Victoria over GST
The New South Wales premier, Chris Minns, has taken another swipe at the Victorian treasurer, Tim Pallas, over the Goods and Services Tax.
The NSW and Victorian Labor governments are locked in a disagreement about the coming financial year’s GST carve up.
Victoria’s GST revenue will soar by $3.7bn compared with 2023-24, while NSW will receive $310m less.
At a press conference in Sydney this morning, Minns was asked about Pallas’ accusation that he didn’t “understand the GST system”.
Minns said:
The only thing worse than Victoria taking our money is them crying about it afterwards.
And this is exactly why we have to fix the system and move to a per capita system, where the states, based on population headcount, can get the resources they need to run major metropolises.
This idea that literally hundreds of billions of dollars is sent to the commonwealth government, it goes into a black box, and a computer spits out a formula – those days have to come to an end. This is public money.
(We had Pallas’ comments earlier in the blog here, here and here)
More on CSIRO’s response to Dutton comments
Earlier we brought you news that the chief executive of the CSIRO, Douglas Hilton, said he will “staunchly defend” the organisation and its scientists against “unfounded criticism”, after comments made by the opposition leader, Peter Dutton.
My colleagues Paul Karp and Graham Readfearn have more on this story here:
Daniel Hurst has all the details on the foreign minister, Penny Wong’s announcement just before that Australia is reinstating its funding for UNRWA:
