Daily News Roundup

 FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 18

Queensland will lift ACT border restrictions on September 25.        

This means that travellers from the ACT will not have to complete mandatory quarantine in Queensland.  

New South Wales and Victoria remain declared hotspots.  

People coming from the ACT will have to declare they haven’t been to a hotspot and will need to fly to Queensland — they’re not allowed to drive via NSW. 

Queensland Health Minister Steven Miles said:“We have been saying for some time with that Queensland is good to go and now for people from Canberra, Queensland is good to come to, and now is the time, and we urge them to start thinking to come up to Queensland for a holiday.

“This is in time to coincide with the school holidays in the ACT. A great chance to come and visit friends and relatives, go to the reef, go to one of our wonderful tourism hotspots. This is great news for the ACT and recognition for the fact that they have been sometime without any cases.”

There were no new cases in Queenslandovernight.

Victoria has recorded 45 new cases of COVID-19 and five more fatalities overnight, taking the state’s coronavirus death toll to 750.

A man in his 50s was among those who died. The others were a man in his 70s, a man in his 80s, and two women in their 90s.

All of the deaths were linked to aged care settings.

It is the eighth-consecutive day the state has recorded a daily infections increase below 50, but an increase on yesterday’s tally of 28.

Only one new case was recorded in regional Victoria overnight, Mr Andrews said.

Deputy Chief Health Officer Allen Cheng said while the number of new cases today looked high, 19 were reported in the Brimbank area and many were linked to aged care homes.

NSW has recorded six new cases of COVID-19 in the last 24 hours and the only case of local transmission was already in isolation.

Five of the new cases are returned travellers in hotel quarantine.

One was a household contact of a previous case who attended Liverpool Hospital and they were already self-isolating.

There are now 21 cases linked to the hospital in Sydney’s west.

######

A cargo ship has come to the rescue of eight people, four of them children, whose recreational boat sank in waters off Gladstone, in Central Queensland.

Queensland water police, a helicopter and a rescue jet had been searching for the group after an EPIRB was activated from the 8-metre vessel before 10:00am.

The aircraft were circling above the group as they were being rescued by sailors aboard the bulk carrier RTM Twarra, after the merchant vessel was diverted to the scene by the Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA).

The ship will now head to Gladstone.

“AMSA wishes to thank the crew of the RTM Twarra for their help in this successful rescue,” the organisation said in a statement.

######

A former stock trader who drunkenly robbed Sydney banks more than four decades ago has been sentenced to three-and-a-half years in jail.

Ross McCarty, now 71, admitted to police he had a double life in which he would “get boozed at lunch time” for the hold ups in 1977 and 1978.

Using a water pistol and disguises including fake moustaches and sunglasses, McCarty wrote his demands for cash on withdrawal slips handed to tellers.

He wasn’t arrested until 2018 when the case was reopened and fingerprint analysis on the notes turned up a match in the police database.

District Court Judge Sarah Huggett today said McCarty committed the crimes as an “intelligent and educated” man in his late 20s, with both planning and purpose.

“They were deliberate, intended and motivated by financial gain.”

She sentenced McCarty to a total term of three-and-a-half years with a non-parole period of one year and nine months.

McCarty pleaded guilty to four robberies and another four hold ups were taken into account for the sentence.

His targets included ANZ, Commercial, the Bank of NSW, National Bank and the Rural Bank, and he would usually get away with $1,000 or $2,000 at a time.

Last week, McCarty read a letter addressed to the victims during a sentence hearing, apologising for the “terror inflicted” on them.

“My circumstances at the time made it easy to delude myself into thinking my appalling actions were justified,” he said.

“I wrongly thought that being polite and using words like ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ would let you know that I didn’t mean harm.”

McCarty owed significant debts to illegal gambling clubs in Sydney at the time and when he failed to pay up, thugs visited his office, threatened him with violence and warned him they knew where his wife lived.

“While his gambling may well explain his offending, his moral culpability is not reduced to any quantifiable extent by his gambling or alcohol use,” Judge Huggett said today.

ENDS