The Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation has now recommended extending eligibility for the Pfizer booster to about 120,000 children starting on June 14.

Australian children aged 12 to 15 who are at risk of severe disease will be eligible for a COVID-19 booster vaccine from next week.

But, however bad the situation might appear in Australia, China seems to be having it worse.

One of the central districts of Shanghai is going into further lockdown.

Minhang is home to more than two million people. All of them are to be tested on Saturday.

The city only emerged from a strict two-month lockdown last week, but some residential compounds have been sealed off again as authorities continue to pursue a "dynamic zero-COVID" policy aimed at shutting down transmission chains as soon as possible.

This means that authorities quickly enforce curbs on movement, and impose tough testing requirements in areas where positive cases and their close contacts live or have visited.

You might say it never rains but it pours in China.

At least 10 people have been killed and three are missing in flooding in the central Chinese province of Hunan, state media reported.

Storms have pummelled the region since the beginning of the month, with some monitoring stations reporting rainfall at historic levels, the Xinhua News Agency said.

Back home, the new Labor government continues to wrestle with how to keep energy prices down but also turn the economy greener.

Australia's energy market operator is set to be handed new powers to purchase and store gas to help avoid shortages, under a plan agreed last night.

Regulators have also been instructed to fast-track the design of a so-called "capacity mechanism", which would use incentives to keep the energy system reliable amid the transition to renewables.

And if you want a good read, you might like one of Australia's best writers who remains largely unknown.

Charmian Clift was born 99 years ago in Kiama, NSW. As a journalist, she had an affair with a colleague who also happened to be one of Australia's best-known Second World War correspondents.

Their affair got her - but not him - sacked from the Melbourne Argus. Children and a period in London followed for both of them, before the family went off the beaten track to Greece, calling the islands home for a decade.

They then returned to Sydney and Clift wrote a weekly column for the Sydney Morning Herald.

It hit the period exactly as Australia changed. She wrote about matters great and small: family life, society, immigration, white-painted bricks, coming home from the city in peak hour while wondering what the point of a five-day working week was, social drinking, the differences (and similarities) between men and women.

Her essays were a fascinating evocation, and still read well today. A collection of the best of them has now come out.

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