Good morning, this is Eleanor Ainge Roy bringing you the main stories and must-reads on Wednesday 7 August.
Top stories
Alcohol industry lobbying has undermined Australia’s key plan to tackle alcohol-related harm, a new report suggests. Experts have consistently urged the Australian government to exclude the alcohol industry from any role in developing a national alcohol strategy, which remains one of the major contributors to the burden of illness and death. But, after releasing an initial draft for public consultation in 2017, the government approached a range of stakeholders in 2018, including the alcohol industry. The newly revised draft, leaked to the ABC last month, watered the strategy down to such an extent that the ACT government – fearing meddling from the alcohol industry – has declined to endorse it, and the Foundation for Alcohol Research and Education says the difference in the drafts have “alcohol industry fingerprints all over” them.
The historically low rate of Newstart is making Australia’s homelessness problem worse, a charity says, with the number of people on the dole forced to seek help from shelters and support services soaring over five years. National figures show that 54,000 people who sought help in 2017-18 were on Newstart – a 57% increase from five years earlier in 2012-13. “If we don’t address levels of things like Newstart, and the consequences of living on such low-income levels, then we’re only going to see the problems continue to deteriorate,” Sue Cattermole, the St Vincent de Paul Society’s Victorian chief executive, told Guardian Australia. Prime minister Scott Morrison has remained steadfast in his opposition to an increase to the $277.85-a-week payment, despite support from Labor, the Greens, John Howard, the Business Council of Australia and the nation’s welfare groups.
Toni Morrison, who chronicled the African American experience in fiction over five decades, has died aged 88 in New York after a short illness. Born in an Ohio steel town in the depths of the Great Depression, Morrison carved out a literary home for the voices of African Americans, first as an acclaimed editor and then with novels such as The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon and Beloved. Over the course of a career that garnered honours including the Pulitzer prize, the Nobel prize, the Légion d’honneur and a Presidential Medal of Freedom presented to her in 2012 by her friend Barack Obama, her work became part of the fabric of American life as it was woven into high school syllabuses across the United States.
Australians are overwhelmingly concerned about the power of Google and Facebook and want them held to account for the proliferation of fake news online, according to the latest Guardian Essential poll. The survey has also found strong support for tighter regulation of the digital media giants, as the government prepares to crack down on the sector following an 18-month digital platforms inquiry undertaken by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission. 80% of those surveyed reported they were concerned about how Facebook and Google collected and used personal information, while 75% agreed the platforms were responsible for distributing deliberately misleading and harmful news stories.
World
Photograph: Arshad Arbab/EPA
Pakistan has vowed to take any measure necessary to “stand by” people in Kashmir, where an unprecedented communications blackout continues a day after the Indian government said it would revoke the territory’s special status and divide it in two.
Britain’s most senior counter-terrorism officer has said the police and security services are no longer enough to win the fight against violent extremism. 80% of those who wanted to attack the UK were British-born or raised, he said, which strongly indicated domestic social issues were among the root causes.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has condemned Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, after a picture on social media showed seven men in “Team Mitch” shirts appearing to grope and choke a cardboard cutout of the Democratic congresswoman, with the caption: “Break me off a piece of that.”
Tardigrades may have survived a spacecraft crashing on the moon, scientists believe, and the Israeli Beresheet probe’s unusual cargo – a few thousand tiny tardigrades, the toughest animals on Earth – may be alive and well in space.
Brexit negotiator Michael Gove has accused the EU of intransigence over Brexit talks, calling it “wrong and sad”, as divisions between the UK and Brussels became further entrenched with the government seemingly intent on a no-deal departure.
Opinion and analysis
“Rest, Toni Morrison. You were magnificent.” After the death of the Nobel-prize-winning author, Ben Okri, Alice Walker, Elif Shafak and others offer their personal tributes. “She burst into the world of literature at a time that needed her supremely wrought perspective,” writes Ben Okri. “She gave the impression of coming into her literary life fully formed, with all the inflections of her style and the unique jazz-tinged poetry of her tone that encompassed the inward textures of black life, seen from the vantage point of wounded women who nevertheless have the strength to be witnesses to the brutalities of history on black lives and the unexpected redemptions, hard-won and ambiguous.
Many experts are now telling us that today’s children are less resilient and less able to self-regulate because of overparenting. This impacts a child’s ability to develop skills they need to be successful adults, writes Daisy Turnbull Brown: “Children not knowing how to tie shoelaces, or pack their school bag or open a yoghurt tube, are because parents have not given kids the opportunity to fail multiple times before conquering a new skill. It is really stressful and takes time, but once they can do it, your job just got a bit easier.”
Sport
Following the first Test rout of England at Edgbaston, Australia now have a “clear plan” how to wrap up the Ashes series, according to coach Justin Langer. “I go back to 2004, India, when we finally beat India in India – we had a very, very clear plan … we’ll stick to that.”
There can be no disputing the World Cup is rugby’s showpiece event, but the obsession with winning the Webb Ellis Cup is having a detrimental effect on other important competitions, such as the Bledisloe Cup, which begins this weekend when the Wallabies meet the All Blacks in Perth.
Thinking time: Australia’s long-running rail fail
Ambitious high-speed links between Australian capital cities have been proposed for decades, but never built. Are shorter regional routes a better way forward? “Australia is the only continent on the planet, other than Antarctica, that does not have high-speed rail,” former managing director of Hitachi Consulting, Gary Fisher, tells Guardian Australia’s Anne Davies. Australian politicians have been talking about it for decades, yet high-speed rail (above 250km/h) or even fast rail (above 200km/h) still seem a distant pipe dream. The University of Wollongong academic Philip Laird calculates $125m in today’s dollars has been spent on high-speed rail investigations, but not one kilometre of corridor has been reserved. “High-speed rail has often been promised, often before elections (a Melbourne-Geelong service is the latest one) only to vanish afterwards,” he says.
A lack of vision and political will, short-termism, genuine concerns about viability and vested interests have all played a part in creating stumbling blocks. But now there is a renewed push, this time by state governments as well as by a few in federal parliament. It’s driven by a new concern that congestion and the cost of retrofitting major cities with mass transport is crippling Australia’s competitiveness and making cities unliveable.
Media roundup
A mining research group is launching an advertising blitz designed to make Australians “feel proud” about coal, the ABC reports.Papua New Guinea has asked China to refinance its entire government debt of more than $11bn billion dollars, the Australian reports, in a deal that could give Beijing huge leverage in the region. Shoplifting crime in Perth has surged by more than 30% in the last year, with some major retailers contemplating introducing facial recognition technology, the West Australian reports.
Coming up
Nato secretary general Jens Stoltenberg will meet with prime minister Scott Morrison, the foreign and defence ministers, and visit defence facilities.
NSW parliament will continue to debate a bill to decriminalise abortion.
