Australia news live: Sydney on Boxing Day alert after premier’s Covid warning – latest updates

If you’re just joining us, my colleague Michael McGowan has summarised the key points from Gladys Berejiklian’s announement on restrictions in New South Wales from earlier today.

“Our strategy is to nip this in the bud,” she said.

Here’s the latest from the MCG:

Severe winds are forecast in Victoria towards the end of the Boxing Day weekend, AAP reports.

The Bureau of Meteorology has issued a severe wind warning for parts of the state including Melbourne, with strong and gusty winds of up to 100 km/hr in elevated areas.

Meteorologist Callum Stuart said the damaging winds would hit far western parts of Victoria from late Sunday morning before reaching Melbourne around 4pm or 5pm.

“These are the kind of winds that could blow away outdoor furniture or cause weaker tree limbs to come down,” he said. “But it’s looking like a transient event confined to Sunday. By late Sunday it will be off to the east and things will settle down quite nicely.”

Stuart said a sharp drop in temperature would follow with the arrival of a cool southwesterly change bringing the risk of storms, although little rain was expected.

No new cases in South Australia today. In fact one of the two new overseas-acquired cases recorded yesterday was found to have been previously diagnosed overseas and so was removed from the state’s total, now 569 notified cases. Only four are active presently, all overseas acquired; and nearly 810,000 tests have been carried out.

Council of Small Business Organisations Australia chief executive Peter Strong is calling for employers to be granted the right to stand down workers without pay if they refuse to take the coronavirus vaccine, the Australian reports.

We have got to have black-and-white law here so if someone declines the vaccine we can stand them down. That’s good because that ­protects the rest of the workforce and the business can continue on.

Otherwise it’s going to create too many dilemmas that we can’t ­resolve.

On Christmas Eve the federal government signed contracts with distribution, logistics and tracking companies to distribute Covid-19 vaccines throughout Australia from March.

South Korea has reported another new 1,132 cases of the coronavirus as its resurgence worsened over Christmas week – putting greater pressure on the government to enforce stricter physical distancing controls.

The figures released by the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency on Saturday brought the country’s caseload to 55,902, AAP reports. The country had added 1,241 cases on Christmas Day – its largest daily increase since the emergence of the pandemic.

Gladys Berejiklian heaped praise on those individuals implicated in the northern beaches cluster for having cooperated so fully with authorities, noting that the first interview with a contact tracer could take as long as two hours.

“I think many of us know how hard it is recalling where you have been in the 14 days you are infectious and I’d really appreciate the cooperation of those individuals,” she said.

Not everyone has been so forthcoming. In Queensland, the 14 passengers and six crew of the Lady E superyacht that returned two positive infections have “not been very cooperative at all”, state health minister Yvette D’Ath said on Thursday.

Queensland Police are investigating.

As mentioned, Australian golfing great Greg Norman tested positive for Covid-19 on Christmas Day. Here’s our story:

Norman had discussed his symptoms (and an earlier negative test) in a video posted to Instagram on Christmas Eve:

Only last week Norman played in the father-son PNC Championship in Florida with his son Greg Norman Jr.