Good morning, this is Helen Sullivan bringing you the main stories and must-reads on Tuesday 29 January.
Top stories
The Coalition faces a fresh electoral challenge with the former Liberal member Oliver Yates preparing to stand as an independent in Josh Frydenberg’s seat of Kooyong. Scott Morrison will give a speech in Brisbane today promising the Coalition will create 1.25m jobs in the next five years, boosted by the first Newspoll of the year, which shows the Coalition has improved its position from December’s grim showing. There is also speculation that the former Liberal Julia Banks, who quit the government for the crossbench last year, will run against the health minister, Greg Hunt, in the Victorian seat of Flinders.
Child abuse survivors and advocates will today stage a protest at the “Red Mass”, an annual church service held in Catholic cathedrals in Sydney and Melbourne to mark the start of the legal year. Leonie Sheedy, the chief executive of the Care Leavers Australasia Network, said the church and state should be separate and, given how many abuse cases involved the Catholic church, the services represented a potential conflict. “If legal professions want to go to church, they can go in their own time – not on the taxpayers’ time,” Sheedy said. “We want to know that the people hearing abuse cases involving Catholic institutions and Catholic clergy are fair and impartial.”
Transparency advocates have criticised Facebook for changes that make it harder to monitor political advertising on the platform just months out from the federal election. One of the affected groups, the US-based not-for-profit investigative journalism outfit ProPublica, developed a tool used by organisations in Australia – including Guardian Australia – to monitor the way political advertising is being deployed. In 2017 Guardian Australia used the ProPublica tool to reveal how political parties, unions and not-for-profits had paid Facebook to push content into users’ feeds. Such ads would have otherwise been visible only to those who had been deliberately targeted.
World
The risk of the UK accidentally crashing out of the EU without a deal has been described as “very high” by a key EU architect of the Brexit deal, with any parliamentary backing for changes to the backstop likely to be met by a brick wall in Brussels.
US and Taliban officials have agreed in principle to the framework of a deal that could pave the way for peace talks in Kabul and ultimately the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan, raising hopes of a breakthrough in the country’s 17-year conflict.
Greece’s prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, has announced the first increase to the country’s minimum wage in nearly a decade as his government took the first tangible step towards ending the austerity imposed during the euro crisis.
Pope Francis has said he fears bloodshed in Venezuela as the South American country braces for a week of fresh protests against its embattled president, Nicolás Maduro.
Authorities in the United Arab Emirates have been ridiculed after it emerged that all the winners of an initiative designed to foster gender equality in the workplace were men.
Opinion and analysis
Brisbane is not yet drought-declared but residents around Breakfast Creek worry about the drying creek bed near an area colloquially known as the “turtle bridge”. The turtles and ducks that people are used to watching from the position are dwindling in number. “From my point of view, it’s grim,” says Leo Lee, a former president of Save Our Waterways Now, who has lived in the area for more than 60 years. Lee estimates the native fish stocks in the catchment are about 5% of those when he was a child. The loss, he says, is mainly due to environmental factors, pollution and disease.
Gary Nunn was 17, gay and closeted, living in a small town in the UK. In a small, dimly lit basement club he discovered voguing and fell in love with its colour, gloss and fabulosity. “It became my gay awakening, and my party trick. I loved how it was unapologetically queer – both non-masculine but also comprising strong shapes and tough attitudes. It was choreographed cognitive dissonance.”
Food served in aged care facilities is likely to be the subject of the royal commission into aged care being held this year. It’s an issue the celebrity cook Maggie Beer has been campaigning on since she was named 2010 senior Australian of the year. Beer’s foundation has been conducting masterclasses with aged care chefs since 2014 in an effort to improve meals. Being an aged care chef requires much more skill than working in cafes and restaurants because people need to understand the frailties and complex medical needs of residents, says Beer – and a lack of education is the biggest barrier to nursing homes changing their menus.
Sport
Georgia Nanscawen was 16 when she found out she was going to become a Hockeyroo. Now the North Melbourne recruit has become the second former Hockeyroo to join the AFLW – and she believes more are likely to follow.
Premier League heavyweights Chelsea and Manchester United have been drawn against each other in the FA Cup fifth round, leaving several clubs from outside the elite with every chance of reaching the final stages of the competition.
Thinking time: Where is Australia’s recycling going?
It’s a year since China severely curtailed its imports of material for recycling under its National Sword policy and the question remains: where is Australia’s industry going? The news is not good: councils say a lack of funding and rock-bottom recycling prices are hampering efforts to build better infrastructure and reinvigorate a dying market. China’s new 0.5% contamination threshold for recycling caused a glut of plastics and other recyclables in Australia as the nation’s facilities, which were already poor at sorting material, failed to meet the new standard. The resulting sudden surplus, combined with limited domestic market capability, crashed the value of discarded plastic and paper.
Some councils are stockpiling material with dangerous results, and others are shipping it off to landfill. “You can only recycle something or a product if there is a market for it. If there is no market for it, then of course you have to send it to landfill,” says Tony Khoury, the executive director of the waste contractors and recyclers association of NSW. In 2017 it was revealed that waste recycling companies were stockpiling glass after the cost of creating bottles in Australia became more expensive than importing the product from overseas.
But stockpiling paper and plastic is a dangerous game. In July last year stockpiled recycling bales in suburban Melbourne caught fire, causing evacuations and prompting inspections that uncovered more stockpiles across Victoria. “Urgent action is needed, as ministers themselves have acknowledged,” says the Australian Local Government Association president, David O’Loughlin.
Media roundup
The Australian leads with its Newspoll results, the best for the Coalition since Malcolm Turnbull was ousted as Liberal leader, with Labor’s primary vote at 38%, a fall of three points, and the Coalition’s at 37%, a gain of two points. The ABC reports that Bill Shorten has signalled he won’t take Rupert Murdoch up on an invitation to meet whenever Shorten is in the US, instead choosing to deal with News Corp’s Australian representatives. On the Canberra Times front page: the ACT is losing 3,000 trees a year, according to the Greens, who say urgent action is needed to prevent the urban forest from thinning out.
Coming up
The report from South Australia’s royal commission into the Murray-Darling basin will be handed to the state government.
Donald Trump’s State of the Union address, scheduled for Tuesday, has been postponed. But the White House press secretary, Sarah Sanders, is due to give an on-camera press briefing, the first since 18 December.
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