The arts, cultural and creative industries are among the most adversely affected sectors of the economy in the wake of COVID-19 social distancing measures, travel restrictions and prohibition of large gatherings of people. Focusing on Cairns, the Gold Coast, Central West and the Sunshine Coast – four regional areas of Queensland, Australia – this article provides an overview of impacts on cultural tourism and considers the prospects for regional cultural tourism as part of a ‘creative economy’ revival. © The Author(s) 2020.

This brief contribution explores how the 2020 COVID-19 crisis has been exploited by Australian populist radical right politician, Pauline Hanson. In particular, I discuss how Hanson, through her political communication on Facebook, has used the COVID-19 crisis to prosecute her longstanding nativist policies on issues like immigration. I further discuss how Hanson’s anti-Asian and Sinophobic rhetoric has occurred alongside an increase in anti-Asian racism in Australia throughout the COVID-19 crisis.

This article explores the impact of COVID-19 on the Australian higher education system. It analyses how the contradictions of Australian higher education, driven by expanding participation in the higher education system within the context of contained public funding, have been politically managed through regulatory regimes that link the public university with the neoliberal capitalist economy. Such modes of state intervention have been dependent on financialized instruments such as income contingent loans, the education–migration nexus, and precarious work.

Significant restrictions on movement outside the home due to the global COVID-19 pandemic have intensified the importance of everyday digital technologies for communicating remotely with intimate others. In this article, we draw on findings from a home-based video ethnography project in Sydney to identify the ways that digital devices and software served to support and enhance intimacy and sociality in this period of crisis and isolation. Digital communication technologies had an increased presence in people’s domestic lives during lockdown.

Objectives: To describe the first isolation and sequencing of SARS-CoV-2 in Australia and rapid sharing of the isolate. Setting: SARS-CoV-2 was isolated from a 58-year-old man from Wuhan, China who arrived in Melbourne on 19 January 2020 and was admitted to the Monash Medical Centre, Melbourne from the emergency department on 24 January 2020 with fever, cough, and progressive dyspnoea.

Objective: Following the outbreak of novel Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2), and the disease named COVID-19, in Wuhan, China in late 2019, countries have implemented different interventions such as travel bans to slow the spread of this novel virus. This brief report evaluates the effect of travel bans imposed to prevent COVID-19 importation in the Australian context. Methods: We developed a stochastic meta-population model to capture the global dynamics and spread of COVID-19.

Objectives: At the beginning of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, some countries imposed entry bans against Chinese visitors. We sought to identify the effects of border shutdowns on the spread of the COVID-19 outbreak. Methods: We used the synthetic control method to measure the effects of entry bans against Chinese visitors on the cumulative number of confirmed cases using World Health Organization situation reports as the data source. The synthetic control method constructs a synthetic country that did not shut down its borders, but is similar in all other aspects.

The policy induced decline of human mobility has been recognised as effective in controlling the spread of COVID-19, especially in the initial stage of the outbreak, although the relationship among mobility, policy implementation, and virus spread remains contentious.

[No abstract available]

[No abstract available]