Australia news live update: NSW flooding; NT reports nine new Covid cases; Victoria debates pandemic laws

Evacuation order given as floods approach Forbes; Katherine lockdown extended as nine Indigenous Northern Territory residents test positive to Covid; Victorian pandemic bill declared ‘urgent’ as debate continues; MPs demand Victorian opposition leader condemn party members who appeared at protest overnight; Victoria records 797 new Covid-19 cases and eight deaths; NSW records 212 cases and two deaths – follow all the day’s news

• NSW floods: Forbes residents ordered to evacuate before water closes roads
• Victorian government agrees to amend controversial pandemic legislation
• Queensland moves to cancel hundreds of Covid travel exemption requests amid long delays
• Barnaby Joyce says Nationals did not sign Cop26 pact and Australia is ‘happy with targets’
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Hundreds of New South Wales police officers will descend on the area where missing boy William Tyrrell disappeared seven years ago in “high intensity” searches following new evidence in the investigation.

Detective chief superintendent Darren Bennett says the searches will last two to three weeks and some would be “subterranean”.

Boris Johnson said that the Glasgow deal, quote, “sounded the death knell for coal worldwide”. Your colleague Matt Canavan says it’s a big green light for us to build more coalmines. That’s what he said the communique was. Who’s right, the British prime minister or the senator from Queensland?

I think Matt’s pretty smart.

Look what he’s clearly saying is, if I look at Newcastle harbour and there are coal ships, taking away coal, and there are. If I got to Gladstone and there are coal ships taking away coal, and there are. If I got to Hay Point and there are coal ships taking away coal, and there are, then the world is still demanding coal. In fact they are demanding more of it at a high price, thermal coal, because of coal-fired power stations.

But that’s gonna change though, isn’t it? The government’s own modelling to net zero indicates that changes. Demand for coal cuts, I think it’s by 50% within two or three decades, so it’s changing.

Well, that will be determined by the global market. If people don’t want to buy it, they don’t want to buy it, but they’re now buying it, and we are lucky they are, because the money that we get from that is how we pay for hospitals and schools, your police force, your pharmaceutical benefits scheme, your ABC and on and on and on again.

You can’t say ‘I’m going to reduce the money I get but I still want all the services that it pays for’. It is just blatantly childish.

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