Australia news live update: new Covid rules in NSW as medical chief says ‘missing link’ in cases still unknown
Mask-wearing mandatory for all indoor public venues, including public transport, as health authorities brace for more coronavirus cases due to the level of activity of a man in his 50s while infectious. Follow latest updates
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New Zealand has announced that quarantine-free travel from New South Wales will pause at midnight tonight, after two community Covid cases were detected in Sydney.
The Covid response minister, Chris Hipkins, told reporters that quarantine-free travel from NSW to New Zealand would stop while the source of infection of the two cases announced in Sydney in the past two days was investigated.
Back in the federal court, the solicitor general, Stephen Donaghue, defended Australia’s outbound travel ban after lunch by invoking the commonwealth’s recent win in the high court against Clive Palmer’s challenge against Western Australia’s travel ban.
Donaghue said that in both case, the court would have to consider not just the steps the government took but whether they were “proportionate” to the threat (of Covid-19), and that the federal court should decide in the same way: that once the minister’s powers are enlivened by such a crisis, they have wide-ranging powers to respond.
The powers and uses of section 477 are still ample and very wide. They are still of significant utility even with the limitation for which we contend.
Read the original article at The Guardian