Virgin and other companies in the aviation sector have joined hands with unions to plead for the Morrison government to extend jobkeeper support for the stricken industry to be extended beyond the end of September. Jobkeeper is due to expire then and, despite warnings from the Reserve Bank that the economy could fall off a cliff if it is not extended in some way, the government has yet to announce any concrete plans for October and beyond. In a statement, the Transport Workers Union said the closure of the border between Victoria and NSW was piling pressure on the already besieged aviation sector. The union said it, the Australian Services Union and Virgin, Dnata, Menzies, Cabin Services Australia, Gate Gourmet, Swissport and SNP wrote to prime minister Scott Morrison seeking an extension of jobkeeper for the sector (something they’ve dubbed aviationkeeper). TWU national secretary Michael Kaine said that “the Federal Government needs to urgently decide if it will risk mass redundancies in aviation and the knock-on effect of impeding a bounce-back from the pandemic”. More from the statement: ASU Assistant National Secretary Linda White said workers were being left in limbo about their future income and job security. “Our aviation industry is in freefall,” she said. “Millions of businesses, jobs and livelihoods depend on this critical industry,” she said. “We cannot allow this once-in-a-lifetime pandemic to completely demolish an industry which is so central to our community and businesses. If the Morrison Government cuts JobKeeper, the planes won’t be there when we need them, grounding the whole economy. As my colleague Calla Wahlquist points out, given the border ban, this is not surprising news Greg Hunt told the ABC the ‘ring fencing’ strategy, which is a nice way of saying ‘police lockdown of residents’ was part of the national cabinet plan to contain localised outbreaks. Of the “sadly necessary steps” he says: What we’ve done is follow the medical advice, both at state level and at federal level. As a country, one of the things we’ve been able to do is to flatten the curve, to stop that spread, and, in light of the number of cases in Victoria, the decision was taken between the Prime Minister and the Victorian and New South Wales Premiers, often the back of medical advice, to do this now. It represents a ring of containment for Victoria, which fits in with what we’ve also been doing at the local levels, so these are the steps that we always in the case of outbreaks, and now is the time to enact them in order to contain that spread. At the same time, to provide the support. Contain the spread, provide the support. They’re the things that we’re doing. And we’ve been through this, sadly, as a country, before. We are now going through it in particular as one state. Right from the start, in February, we’ve talked about the concept of rings of containment, whether it’s been suburbs, broader areas such as north-west Tasmania, or when it’s required to take that step. Now is the moment when we believe that step, for the first time, is required, and necessary and it relates specifically and exclusively to the challenges that Victoria is facing. And so the concept of rings of containment, of isolating areas, has always been part of it. This is the first time that we believe that the triggers have been met and the challenges are such, with numbers, that it’s appropriate, required and necessary Federal Labor MP Peter Khalil, who represents Wills in Melbourne’s north, says residents in the nine public housing towers in “hard” lockdown “deserve to know what pre-emptive actions were taken to avoid these extreme steps from being necessary”. Khalil, who noted he grew up in public housing, said he understood the need for a health response from the Victorian Labor government and the difficulty of policing suburban lock-down areas. “However, I also understand the anger and fear being expressed by residents,” he said. Khalil said residents were already disadvantaged and were now facing “another layer of disadvantage based on their residence being high-density housing”. He said they have a right to question the government’s response, including why elders and community leaders weren’t consulted and asked to channel relevant health information. “While I have no doubt that residents want to do the right thing for their health, the health of their family and that of the broader community, they also deserve to have their questions answered,” he said. “This is what I have clearly heard from community leaders. “What, if any, other responses could have been pursued by government to mitigate the pandemic risks to high-density public housing? Stuart Robert will be delivering a speech at the national press club today on ‘Government Services in the digital age: the challenges, the plan and the delivery’ Anyone who has ever had anything to do with Centrelink, particularly robo-debt, is well aware of the ‘challenges’. You can follow along with what is happening with the pandemic, internationally, with Helen Sullivan, here: Doing it for the ’gram … We have a bit more information on the three A-League teams from Melbourne who were turned away from the NSW border yesterday: Following yesterday’s announcement by the NSW Government to close the NSW border to Victoria, Football Federation Australia (FFA) today confirmed that they will be applying for exemptions to allow the Players and High Performance coaching staff from Melbourne City FC, Melbourne Victory and Western United FC to enter NSW for the remainder of Hyundai A-League 2019/20 Season. FFA Head of Leagues, Greg O’Rourke, said that every effort was made to relocate the clubs out of Victoria before the closing of the borders, but unfortunately, despite all the players boarding a plane to the ACT, weather closed Canberra Airport which then made it impossible to leave Victoria before the borders closed. “As a result, we will now begin the process to seek exemptions from the NSW Government to allow the teams to enter NSW for them to continue their season,” said O’Rourke. “If we find it necessary to revise the match schedule we will do so accordingly and will announce once confirmed, however at this time the schedule remains the same,” concluded O’Rourke. There has been some talk of removing residents who have tested positive for Covid-19 from the locked-down Melbourne towers to help limit the spread of the virus. Dr Nick Coatsworth says that is one option under discussion, but that the forced isolation of the residents may mean it is not necessary: So all options will be on the table for the Victorian public health officials. What I might say in response to that, though, is that people are within their homes, they’re within their flats, and the virus isn’t going to travel from flat to flat if people are remaining within there, as hard as that is. Then the issue of outbreaks within households is critical, but in vulnerable situations, separating households has its own negative effects that need to be considered above and beyond the virus. So, the most important thing, is that medical care is available to those with Covid-19 who become unwell and need hospitalisation. And we heard that there is a pop-up hospital there down in Victoria, near the public housing towers, to provide exactly that sort of urgent assessment, primary care, and then if necessary hospitalisation. My view is that that’s the most important aspect of that treatment. One of Australia’s deputy chief medical officers, Nick Coatsworth, was asked how troubling the Victorian situation was. He told the ABC: It’s deeply concerning. The numbers are obviously in three figures now, and there’s a significant amount of community transmission. In fact, now the vast majority of cases are occurring within the Victorian community, the Melbourne community, rather than from overseas travellers. And obviously we just heard from one of the residents of the public housing towers, and it’s so important for us to hear those voices, that this is a real partnership between people in those towers, between Victorians and the rest of Australia and its government to get this under control. This is an issue that we all share. Three Melbourne A-League teams were unable to get across the NSW border, where they were to play games overnight. The entirety of Melbourne was declared a hotspot by NSW authorities, who banned anyone from the city crossing the border from midnight last night. Seven staff at Northern hospital Epping in Melbourne test positive to Covid-19 AAP reports a Melbourne hospital has closed its emergency department for deep cleaning after seven of its staff tested positive for Covid-19: Seven emergency department staff at Northern hospital Epping tested positive to Covid-19 over the past five days, a spokeswoman said. Contact tracing is under way and the emergency department is undergoing a deep clean, with all its staff being tested as a precaution. While the emergency department remains open, there is a temporary reduction in non-urgent elective surgery and outpatient appointments to free up resources to keep the ED operating. Visitors to the hospital have also been restricted as a precaution. Residents within the towers are also mobilising themselves to help their neighbours where they can, as Melissa Davey reports: Residents inside the nine public housing towers under lockdown translated an information sheet about the restrictions and public health measures needed to contain Covid-19 into 10 different languages. This information was distributed within the affected buildings via social media and text messaging in just 24 hours. An infectious disease physician, Dr Chris Lemoh, who works with culturally and linguistically diverse communities at a Melbourne public hospital, said he had been in contact with several people inside the tower blocks in Flemington and North Melbourne which are now being surveilled by police to ensure residents do not leave while they undergo Covid-19 testing after a cluster of cases in the buildings. “Some residents put together an information sheet and they translated that into 10 written and five oral languages within 24 hours and distributed it among their networks in order to help get government messaging across,” Lemoh said. “I’ve been involved in public health projects like this and if the government had to do this on their own, it would have taken them at least six months to get that kind of translation work done.” A reminder that residents were given barely half an hour’s notice of the lockdown – and many found out from the media.