The Informer: Peter Dutton falls into the trap of eating in front of a photographer

Perhaps the smart thing for politicians, a class of people notoriously tailed by photographers, is to avoid eating in public. At all costs.

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton very innocently ate a dagwood dog at Brisbane's Ekka agricultural show yesterday.

A flurry of pictures of the Liberal leader eating the battered sausage - a mainstay of Australian show food - have been met with a mixed reception. Cheers and jeers.

"Most of my mates actually were pretty rapid-fire texting me like, 'WTF', but anyway, what do you do?" Mr Dutton told a Sydney radio station today after the pictures spread online.

"With the cameras there, I mean you can't eat it from the side because the sauce drips off and you do a Bill Shorten ... so it leaves one angle and it's not a great one," Mr Dutton said.

Mr Shorten, then Labor leader, infamously ate a sausage sandwich sideways during the 2016 election campaign, for which he was widely criticised.

But the sausage-eating incident is not the only trouble facing the Liberal Party.

Former minister Linda Reynolds has called for a temporary quota to boost the number of women in the party, warning it faces a revolving door for women if it cannot improve its culture.

An internal review reportedly showed almost three in four female voters under the age of 34 in marginal seats preferenced Labor over the Liberals.

Meanwhile, pharmacists and general practitioners are at loggerheads over a push to offer COVID-19 treatments over the counter at pharmacies.

Australia's pharmacy body wants the federal government to allow them to be supplied over the counter to speed up access upon infection.

Pharmacy Guild president Trent Twomey says wait times to see GPs are getting longer, which is a problem considering the window to use the medications.

However, the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners believes patient safety should be prioritised.

While treatments need to be provided more quickly, issuing them over-the-counter is not the answer, says college president Karen Price.

"Allowing pharmacists to prescribe and dispense antivirals will not improve access and there are significant risks to patients," Professor Price said.

Australia recorded more than 27,000 COVID-19 cases and 133 deaths yesterday, with nearly 4500 people in hospital.

Looking south now, and a satellite analysis has shown Antarctica's coastal glaciers are shedding icebergs more rapidly than nature can replenish the crumbling ice.

The analysis has doubled previous estimates of losses from the world's largest ice sheet over the past quarter of a century.

The first-of-its-kind study, led by researchers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory near Los Angeles and published in the journal Nature, raises new concerns about how fast climate change is weakening Antarctica's floating ice shelves and accelerating the rise of global sea levels.

Finally, researchers in the United Kingdom have found women who follow a vegetarian diet have a higher risk of breaking their hips in later life.

Researchers - who tracked more than 26,000 women aged 35 to 69 - said vegetarian diets "often have lower intakes of nutrients that are linked with bone and muscle health" after their study found female vegetarians had a 33 per cent increased risk of hip fracture compared to regular meat eaters.

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