POLICE COMPLAINT TO BE REACTIVATED

According to The Guardian, former Morrison government staffer Brittany Higgins plans to reactivate a police complaint about her alleged rape by a colleague in the ministerial wing of Parliament House in March 2019.

Higgins, who also plans to lodge a separate complaint with the finance department and is seeking CCTV footage from ACT police she says she was not able to access, yesterday spoke openly with news.com.au and then The Project about the alleged sexual assault in the office of then-Defence Industry Minister Linda Reynolds.

She also spoke of feeling pressure to keep her job when she asked police to suspend the investigation two days after Scott Morrison called the 2019 election and, separately, when she accepted a request to relocate to WA.

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LET'S ROLLOUT

Following Health Minister Greg Hunt’s announcement that the first 142,000 doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine have arrived in Australia ahead of an expected rollout next Monday, Nine papers report that Victoria and NSW — and likely other states — will initially focus on quarantine workers and then those in front-line health roles.

Of the 142,000 initial doses, the federal government will keep 62,000 for second vaccinations and 30,000 for aged care and disability care residents and workers, with the remaining 50,000 to be divided between states and territories according to population. Victoria, for example, will receive 11,000 doses a week to vaccinate 170,000 frontline workers, while about 678,000 people have been identified under phase 1a of the national rollout.

Elsewhere, The Australian ($) reports that billionaires Lindsay Fox and John Wagner are hoping to house up to up to 2000 returned travellers at separate camps ­outside capitals in Victoria and Queensland, with Avalon Airport, owned by Fox’s Linfox, negotiating with the commonwealth and Victorian governments over a “low-risk rural setting” near Geelong, and Wagner reportedly pushing for a quarantine facility next to Toowoomba’s Wellcamp Airport.

PS: In other positive news, CNN reports that preliminary research at Israel’s Clalit Research Institute suggests that the Pfizer vaccine reduces symptomatic infections by more than 90% in the real world, demonstrating an apparent success of a mass vaccination campaign as opposed to the controlled conditions of a clinical trial.

WE GET LOCKED DOWN BUT WE GET UP AGAIN?

News of Australia’s rollout comes after Victoria yesterday recorded just one new locally-acquired case, with the ABC noting that Dan Andrews declared it still too early to confirm the state’s lockdown will end after Wednesday night.

Three Melbourne hospital psychiatric wards were locked down and more than 100 staff told to quarantine after a worker received “unclear” results, while exposure sites grew to include three Broadmeadows Central sites on Tuesday 9 February:

• BonBon Bakery from 12:30-12:45pm (Tier 1)
• Sacca’s Fruit World from 12:30-1pm (Tier 1)
• Broadmeadows Central (West side of shopping centre, fresh fruit and meat section), from 12:15-1:15pm (Tier 3).

PS: In apparent fallout from the city’s deadly second wave, The Age reports that St Basil’s Homes for the Aged has lost its federal funding after the aged care regulator published a notice in December declaring the home was “not eligible to receive Commonwealth subsidies for any new care recipients” for six months.