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The Federal Government is planning to ease COVID-19 international border restrictions to bring in thousands of doctors and nurses to bolster health systems in New South Wales and Victoria.

The plan would see 2000 overseas medical workers – largely from the UK and Ireland – enter the country.

Health Minister Greg Hunt said the Federal Government was working with states and territories to launch the "one-off boost" for Australia's health system.

READ MORE: Premier Daniel Andrews fined $400 for failing to wear face mask on two occasions

"This will be a one-off boost to provide additional support. The Commonwealth is committed to it and the states are working constructively with us on it," Mr Hunt said.

Doctors and nurses who had already applied to come to Australia would be able to sidestep travel restrictions to book flights and take up jobs.

"They are all people who have applied. We don't have to find them, they are people who are already looking to come to Australia,'' Mr Hunt said.

 "These are people coming from all around the world. That free flow of people is very important. Some may be joining families, some may be moving for a new life. That is an ordinary part of life and it is up to individuals to be able to choose, subject to a nation's needs.''

Mr Hunt said the Federal Government's proposal would not compromise quality of health skills.

"Safety remains, as always, the number one priority," he said.

They government plans to fly the health workers here over the next six months and deployed to bolster outer suburban and regional hospitals and GP clinics.

British and Irish health staff are the focus of the plan because their qualifications are recognised here enabling them to start work immediately.

The Australian College of Nursing and health service employers previously raised concerns that the strict closure of international borders had isolated Australia from overseas medical workers during the pandemic.

Details of the plan emerged as health systems in Victoria and New South Wales strain under the impact of the Delta outbreak.

In the past two weeks, Ambulance Victoria had reported four of its five busiest days in history.

Victoria's Triple Zero call system was also experiencing near-record levels of demand.

From next week, for the first time in Ambulance Victoria's history, two paramedics will no longer be deployed to each ambulance.

Instead, a paramedic will be joined by a driver from the Australian Defence Force, St John Ambulance Australia, State Emergency Service, or a student paramedic.

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Police in North Port, Florida, were surveilling Brian Laundrie, Gabby Petito's fiancé, as best as they could legally before he vanished, police spokesperson Josh Taylor told CNN.

Laundrie had returned alone to his family's North Port home September 1 following a trip the two were taking across the American West. Petito's parents, unable to make contact with either her or Laundrie, reported her missing 10 days later. Roughly two weeks after his return, Laundrie disappeared, his parents told police.

CNN also learned that authorities never spoke with Laundrie before he went missing, even though they had eyes on him. When police went to the North Port home September 11, he was not seen and there was no opportunity to speak with him, Taylor told CNN.

READ MORE: Brian Laundrie's sister says she does not know where he is'

On September 19, Petito's remains were recovered in Wyoming, near where the couple had last been seen together, and a coroner determined she died by homicide, the FBI said. Laundrie has not been charged in her death, though he is the subject of a federal arrest warrant for unauthorised use of another person's debit card in the days after Petito last spoke with her family.

Authorities do not have the phone Laundrie had with him on the couple's trip, nor do they have Petito's phone. Neither phone was in Petito's van, which Laundrie drove back to Florida, Taylor told CNN.

As the search continues for Laundrie in a sprawling Florida nature reserve, Taylor also confirmed investigators did not find a campsite during those efforts. That confirmation came after a source close to the Laundrie family told CNN's Chris Cuomo they were informed by investigators that police had made a discovery in Florida's Carlton Reserve.

The source on Thursday insisted that the Laundrie family had been told a campsite had been found.

READ MORE: Hiker claims he spoke with Gabby Petito's missing partner in US

"Is it possible that they thought that there might be a campsite out there or something they may have seen from the air but when they got on the ground that's not what it turned out to be? Sure, I think that's a possibility," Taylor said. "Bottom line, is that investigators are telling me that no campsite was found out there."

Also on Thursday, Laundrie's father, Chris Laundrie, visited the reserve, a 24,565-acre wilderness near Laundrie's family home, for several hours to help in the search, family attorney Steven Bertolino told CNN. The father showed police the trails and locations where he and Laundrie have hiked and frequented, Bertolino said.

"There were no discoveries but the effort was helpful to all," Bertolino said. "It seems the water in the Preserve is receding and certain areas are more accessible to search. The entire Laundrie family is grateful for the hard work of the dedicated members of law enforcement that have been searching the Preserve for Brian over the last few weeks. Hopefully Brian will be located soon."

Abandoned vehicle was retrieved near reserve

In recent days, investigators have uncovered new details about Laundrie's earlier movements at the reserve.

North Port police confirmed that a notice was placed on an abandoned Ford Mustang belonging to the Laundrie family outside the Myakkahatchee Creek Environmental Park on September 14. The park acts as an entrance to Carlton Reserve.

Bertolino, the family attorney, told CNN that upon further communication with the FBI, "we now believe the day Brian left to hike in the preserve was Monday September 13." His parents had previously told authorities he had left on September 14.

Chris Laundrie went to look for his son on the night of September 13 when he didn't return from the park, Bertolino told CNN on Wednesday.

The next day, Brian's parents returned to the area to look for Brian and saw the citation on the car, Bertolino said. The parents returned again the next day, September 15, to retrieve the vehicle.

"The Laundries were basing the date Brian left on their recollection of certain events. Upon further communication with the FBI and confirmation of the Mustang being at the Laundrie residence on Wednesday September 15, we now believe the day Brian left to hike in the preserve was Monday September 13," Bertolino said.

CNN asked Bertolino whether Brian's parents believe he's in the reserve or another area. "No, they don't believe he's in another area. They believe he is in the preserve," he said.

'I want to see him in a jail cell for the rest of his life'

Petito's body was found about a five-to-10-minute walk from where her van was last seen near the entrance to the Grand Tetons, on the border of Bridger-Teton National Forest, according to her mother, Nichole Schmidt, and stepfather, Jim Schmidt, during the second installment of an exclusive interview with the "Dr. Phil" show that aired Wednesday.

Gabby's body was in a clearing and was just in front of the remnants of a fire ring, Jim Schmidt said. "You could see where the rocks had been moved to make the fire ring," he said.

"It's definitely not an area that was heavily trafficked," he added.

Jim Schmidt left a memorial and sunflowers at the site, CNN has previously reported.

The Schmidts were joined by Gabby's father, Joe Petito, and his wife, Tara Petito, along with their attorney Richard Stafford, for the interview with host Phil McGraw.

Joe Petito said he wants Laundrie found alive so he can spend his life behind bars.

"I want to see him in a jail cell for the rest of his life where — he's an outdoorsman — being in that concrete cell and he can't go see those trees and hug — and smell the fresh air like that," Petito said.

"I want to look him in the eyes," Nichole Schmidt said.

Bertolino declined to comment on Wednesday on the "Dr. Phil" interview.

In late September, Laundrie's parents released a statement through their attorney, saying, "Chris and Roberta Laundrie do not know where Brian is. They are concerned about Brian and hope the FBI can locate him. The speculation by the public and some in the press that the parents assisted Brian in leaving the family home or in avoiding arrest on a warrant that was issued after Brian had already been missing for several days is just wrong."

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The old music box factory had been abandoned for years on the outskirts of the Swiss mountain town, with paint curling at the edges of its dingy grey and yellow walls.

It was the perfect hiding place for the young French mother and her eight-year-old daughter at the heart of Operation Lima, an international child abduction plot planned and funded by a French group with echoes of the far-right extremist movement QAnon.

Lola Montemaggi had lost custody of her daughter, Mia, to her own mother months earlier because French government child protective services feared the young woman was unstable.

Ms Montemaggi found people online who shared the QAnon belief that government workers themselves were running a child trafficking ring. Then she turned to her network to do what she needed to do: extract Mia.

The April 13 kidnapping of the girl from her grandmother's home marked what is believed to be the first time that conspiracy theorists in Europe have committed a crime linked to the QAnon-style web of false beliefs that sent hundreds to storm the US Capitol on January 6.

It shows how what was once a strictly US movement has metastasised around the world, with Europol, the European umbrella policing agency, adding QAnon to its list of threats in June.

QAnon influence has now been tracked to 85 countries, and its beliefs have been adapted to local contexts and languages from Hindi to Hebrew.

A California father this summer took his two children to Mexico and killed them under the influence of "QAnon and Illuminati conspiracy theories", federal authorities say.

QAnon supporters also have been linked to at least six attempted kidnappings in the United States, convinced that children are falling victim to paedophiles, according to Mia Bloom, who documented the abductions for her book on QAnon published this summer.

"If someone is trying to get back their child and says they're with this cabal, there's now a support network where before QAnon it would not have existed," Bloom said.

Part of QAnon's loose collection of beliefs is specific to the United States, where the conspiracy theory began. But the conviction that there is a deep state conspiracy and cabals of government-sponsored child traffickers crosses borders, as does anti-vaccine rhetoric since the start of the pandemic.

The abduction of Mia was inspired by a former politician who promised to save child trafficking victims and lead France back to its former greatness. The AP pieced the story together from interviews with investigators and lawyers, as well as thousands of online messages, showing how QAnon-style beliefs draw in the vulnerable and connect them in often dangerous ways.

Two men charged in the abduction were also charged last week in an unrelated far-right plot against vaccine centres. Ms Montemaggi was freed Monday after nearly six months in jail, but remains under judicial supervision until her trial.

What led a mother to abduct her own daughter

Ms Montemaggi is a 28-year-old woman with glossy chestnut hair and pale eyes, a lilting voice and a smile whose very edges curved upwards. Two stars are tattooed on the fragile skin inside her wrist.

She had Mia when she was 20, but she and the baby's father turned her over to his parents days after the birth, according to their lawyer, who publicly described "social, professional, financial precariousness; maybe too much immaturity." Ms Montemaggi would drop in for an afternoon from time to time.

One day, when Mia was five, her mother took her out to play. The two never returned, said the lawyer, Guillaume Fort. It was a year before Ms Montemaggi sent word about the child, Me Fort said.

By then, Ms Montemaggi had joined France's 2018 anti-government Yellow Vest movement, according to people who spent time with her in protests, all wearing the group's iconic fluorescent safety vests.

In November 2019, Ms Montemaggi turned 27. She was not celebrating.

"Today, on my birthday, I am disgusted," she wrote in a Facebook post on November 12, 2019.

"Since I awoke, this famous 'awakening' is hard, digesting all that I have learned, all that the TV and the politicians hide from us, all these lies, it's not easy."

Over the course of the next year, as France entered one of the world's strictest coronavirus lockdowns, Ms Montemaggi's world grew progressively darker.

She believed 5G towers were concealing population control devices, Bill Gates was plotting to spread the coronavirus, and governments everywhere were trafficking children either to molest them or to extract an essence for eternal youth. She pulled Mia out of school.

The month of her 28th birthday, she concluded the French government was illegitimate and its laws no longer applied to her, beliefs central to what is known as the sovereign citizen movement.

Like QAnon, the sovereign citizen movement started in the US, and its followers are anti-government extremists who believe that they don't have to answer to government authorities, including courts and law enforcement.

She urged others to join her and enlisted in a Telegram group for sovereign citizens in the Lorraine region. Ms Montemaggi tended to leave short voice messages punctuated by a gentle laugh, trying to set up meetings, wishing people a happy new year, or admonishing those she thought were insufficiently dedicated to the cause.

She told those around her she was going to empty her apartment, sell her furniture and "go under the radar with her daughter."

Ms Montemaggi had been losing weight for months, arguing so violently with her boyfriend that her family feared Mia was in danger.

To her new acquaintances on Telegram, she casually mentioned a January 11 court summons that would prevent her from joining a proposed meeting, "a personal thing." She rejected the judge's authority to interfere in her life or her child's.

The judge thought otherwise. Ms Montemaggi lost custody of her daughter to her own mother.

She could see Mia twice a month, never alone, at the grandmother's house in Les Poulières, a village about a 30-minute drive from Ms Montemaggi's apartment. And she could not speak to her by phone.

Ms Montemaggi had no plan, but her beliefs were hardening.

"There are no laws above us except for universal law," she said in one message over the winter to a Telegram correspondent.

"There are no government laws. You have to understand that."

Tipping point in Europe

While the Capitol insurrection in the United States is the best-known example of violence tied to QAnon, it is far from the only one. Twenty-seven people in the US have been linked to QAnon violence unrelated to the riot, eight of whom also had ties to the sovereign citizen movement, according to recent research from the University of Maryland's National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism.

A quarter of the QAnon offenders were women — an unusually high percentage for alleged crimes.

In March 2020, a Kentucky mother who adhered to QAnon as well as an American sovereign citizen movement kidnapped her children from her grandmother, who was their guardian. In November the same year, a woman who had lost custody of her children shot her legal adviser in the head in Florida after deciding he had joined a cabal of child-stealing Satanists.

By the time the mob stormed the US Capitol on January 6 this year, QAnon already had a solid foothold in Europe. At first, it was on the margins of protests against coronavirus lockdowns in Germany and Britain.

But during the lockdowns, QAnon accommodated a range of other conspiracies and turned darker, first in the United States and then across the Atlantic.

It was around this time that the name of a disgraced French politician started circulating in French QAnon chats on Telegram.

Rémy Daillet-Wiedemann was finding new audiences for his previously obscure calls to overthrow France's government, resist the "medical dictatorship" of coronavirus restrictions and protect children from the government-linked paedophiles in their midst.

"In Europe, a tipping point came when everything got wrapped under the banner of 'Save our Children,'" said Andreas Önnerfors, a Swedish researcher who studies the history of conspiracy theories.

Mr Daillet-Wiedemann's name appeared 271 times in a QAnon Telegram group from October until April, when its chat history was scrubbed.

Most of those mentions came amid a debate among the "digital soldiers" about whether his movement to overthrow the government was authentic, according to data shared with the AP by Jordan Wildon, an extremism researcher who archived the material before the chat history was erased.

The more Mr Daillet-Wiedemann's theories aligned with the QAnon conspiracy, the more his audience grew.

In early spring, a group of his supporters fell under surveillance by French anti-terrorism investigators. Around the same time, one of Ms Montemaggi's Telegram friends advised her to contact Daillet-Wiedemann about her custody troubles.

Mr Daillet-Wiedemann, who had been living in self-imposed exile in Malaysia for years, had a network of a few hundred supporters, with a much smaller "hard core," according to François Pérain, the prosecutor in the region's main city of Nancy.

He instructed one of his supporters to make a plan for Mia and for another French child in a similar situation, and wired €3000 ($4772 for transportation and equipment, Pérain said.

Five men, ages 23 to 60, came together in the plot they dubbed "Operation Lima" – an anagram of Lola and Mia's names. They gave themselves code names as well: Jeannot, Pitchoun, the Crow, Bruno, Bouga. A sixth man, a retired lieutenant-general from the French military, forged government paperwork for the mission in France's Vosges region, near Switzerland.

The main planner went by the nickname Bouga and was an educator, according to his lawyer, Randall Schwerdorffer. He vetted Ms Montemaggi with an online questionnaire before organising what he considered "a legitimate intervention," the lawyer said. He declined to release his client's real name for reasons of privacy.

Concluding that Mia was in psychological danger, the men drew up a script for their roles in extracting her. Anti-terrorism investigators listening in on Mr Daillet-Wiedemann's supporters overheard troubling discussions about "a camping trip" in the eastern borderlands but could make little sense of it.

On April 13, an anthracite grey Volkswagen van pulled into Les Poulières. Flashing official-looking paperwork, the two men inside claimed to be carrying out a welfare check on Mia for the government. The girl's grandmother agreed to their request to take her briefly away for an interview.

A quick call to the real child protective services revealed her mistake. By then Mia was long gone, on her way to a neighbouring village.

There, Ms Montemaggi waited in a black Peugeot with the other men. They caravaned to the Swiss border, then Ms Montemaggi and two of the men entered the woods.

Over several hours, Ms Montemaggi and the men hiked eastward, taking turns carrying Mia. When they reached Switzerland, another member of the network met them in his Porsche Cayenne. He took them not to a safehouse as expected but to a hotel.

As they were settling in for the night, the kidnapping alert flashed on television screens across France, one of only two dozen the nation has authorised in the past 15 years. The photos of Mia and her mother were beamed to millions of screens simultaneously.

That's when Mr Daillet-Wiedemann stepped in again from Malaysia, Mr Pérain said. He sent out a call for shelter that only one person answered — and only for one night.

By then, the anti-terrorism investigators had connected the van from Les Poulières with the anti-government clique of Daillet-Wiedemann supporters under surveillance. They figured out that the coded language of the "camping trip" referred to the abduction in the Vosges region.

Most of the men were arrested in France the next day. None bothered to hide their role or their conviction that the kidnapping was actually a restitution. One 58-year-old man compared himself to Arsène Lupin, the fictional French gentleman thief.

"They passed from conspiratorial beliefs to very serious acts, and those who went into action didn't necessarily realise that they were on the wrong side of the law," Mr Pérain said.

Mia and Ms Montemaggi were still missing, but investigators now knew that they had crossed the border and were headed east.

How Mia was reunited with her grandmother

On April 15, Ms Montemaggi and Mia were driven to the decommissioned music box factory. It lacked electricity, running water and beds, but had something the young mother turned kidnapper needed more — isolation.

With no alternatives, Ms Montemaggi spent three nights at the factory, chatting briefly with the artists and hikers who passed through during the day and trying to keep Mia amused. Witnesses said the pair baked a cake, played games and explored the surrounding clearing.

She told one woman she was going to take the girl to Saint Petersburg, Russia, but had no clear idea how. That period in the factory gave investigators the time they needed to find Mia and her mother before they left Switzerland.

The police arrived on Sunday morning. They spotted Mia first, checking her photo against the kidnap alert. Then her mother walked outside, and the game was up.

Ms Montemaggi was taken into custody on kidnapping charges. Her family declined comment, as did her lawyer. Mia was reunited with her grandmother.

Mr Daillet-Wiedemann posted a video praising the kidnappers.

"These are heroes. They are re-establishing the law. I congratulate them and will do everything to free them," he said in a YouTube video viewed 30,000 times.

He would not get the chance. Malaysia expelled him in June.

Now he himself is jailed on charges of conspiring in the organised abduction of a child. At his first court hearing, Mr Dailet-Wiedemann declared himself a candidate for president, maintaining that the charges against him are political.

His YouTube channel went offline soon after Mia was returned to her grandmother's village home.

"Let them arrest me," he said at the time.

"People will see that I'm on the front lines and that's how I will lead my revolution."

Judges on Monday finally agreed to Ms Montemaggi's requests to be freed until trial, after months of insistence from her family and lawyer that she poses no danger to her daughter or anyone else.

"I've begun to put down in black and white my natural rights," she wrote to a Telegram acquaintance, weeks before she was arrested.

"With this text, I'll ensure my rights are respected."

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