Good morning. Scott Morrison hints at a digital vaccine passport, Israel’s prime minister has appeared to disregard US calls for de-escalation in Gaza, and fracking furore in rural Queensland. Those headlines, and more, in Thursday’s morning mail.
The Morrison government is in talks to fast-track a digital vaccination passport to allow quarantine-free overseas travel for vaccinated Australians, as well as flagging a potential travel bubble with Singapore. The federal government’s efforts to encourage vaccination continues to be criticised, with its facts-led official ad campaign contrasting greatly with the strong emotive appeals put forward by other nations around the world. Doctors have warned Australians are “sitting ducks” unless the Covid vaccine rollout can rapidly expand to cover a larger percentage of the population, with the current rate of vaccination not tipped to fully vaccinate Australia’s adult population until November 2022. It comes as a third Australian has died from Covid-19 in India while caring for his elderly parents.
President Joe Biden has told Benjamin Netanyahu that he expects “a significant de-escalation today on the path to a ceasefire”, as international pressure for an end to violence in and around Gaza intensifies. The nine-day conflict, in which over 200 Palestinians and 12 Israelis have been killed – including at least 63 children – appears no closer to concluding however, with the Israeli prime minister swiftly issuing a statement following his conversation with the US president, saying his government was “determined to continue this operation until its objective is achieved”.
Major energy companies appear set for a significant battle with locals over plans to hydraulically fracture in Queensland’s Channel Country. Graham Redfearn presents this special feature as part of Guardian Australia’s Modern Outback series, as he tours a station in Windorah, held in the Kidd family for over 115 years, and talks to Angus Emmott, a part-grazier/part-naturalist, about an area they call “the living heart of Australia” and the importance of the underground water basin that pastoralists and communities have depended upon for generations.
Australia
Some 130 Australians diagnosed with a terminal illness died before they were deemed eligible for support payments, new data revealed. Greens senator Rachel Siewert described the figures as “unacceptable”.
Australia’s private health system is in a “death spiral”, according to the Grattan Institute, whose new report documents how rising healthcare costs and an ageing population have made premiums nearly inaccessible to the young and healthy.
Openness and trust become more important attributes in a partner as we get older, a major survey of Australian online dating users has found. While physical build and attractiveness score highly for men aged 18-25, “personality” comes to trump “aesthetics” for older Australians of both sexes.
The world
China has prompted a 30% slump in the price of Bitcoin, after its announcement that it would not allow its banks to accept cryptocurrencies as payment. It follows Elon Musk’s apparent cooling on the cryptocurrency, based on environmental grounds, prompting some analysts to posit that “the tide has turned on bitcoin”.
A 107-year-old survivor of the 1921 massacre at Oklahoma’s “Black Wall Street” has finally had her testimony heard, putting the case for reparations to a House of Representatives subcommittee, on the 100th anniversary of the killing of an estimated 300 African Americans by a white mob.
Vaccine programs across Africa and many parts of the developing world are set to suffer major delays, after the world’s biggest vaccine producer announced it would not be exporting the AstraZeneca vaccine until the end of the year.
Spanish researchers are promising to finally bury an age-old dispute over the true origins of Christopher Columbus, with advancements in DNA analysis now enabling the team to determine whether the explorer was Genoese, as commonly believed, or in fact Spanish or Portuguese.
Recommended reads
Ed Kuepper and Jim White are a collaboration nearly three decades in the making. And 45 years after releasing a track that would go on to be voted as one of Australia’s top 30 songs, the Saints’ Kuepper, is finally ready to tour with a guy he’s never even jammed with. “It basically confirmed what I thought from having watched Jim play over the years: that it wouldn’t be a struggle,” Kuepper tells Andrew Stafford. The Dirty Three are hardly a rock band, but the unique drumming style of White had beguiled Kuepper from afar. And one silver lining of a global pandemic is that these two talented Australian musicians have finally been thrown together and are now taking their two-manner on the road.
One budget prediction that already looks as though it will hold true is the federal government’s forecasting for wage growth. It makes for depressing reading for workers, despite the marginal improvements over the past six months, Greg Jericho explains. But the “decade-long collapse of annual wages growth” is not set to be arrested anytime soon: “The big worry is that not only do we now need unemployment to be lower than ever before to get decent wages growth, so too might we need underemployment to fall to near record lows just to achieve previously average increases in wages.”
It’s Thursday, which means it’s time for the funniest things on the internet. This week’s guest curator is Alex Lee, and if you came for animated bears, Aussie lifestyle shows gone very wrong, or just a pure and simple homage to what it means to be an alto, this is your list.
Listen
Fortnite v Apple. It’s the legal test case that pits a hyper-popular online game against a near-hegemonically powerful tech giant. But what will it mean for the app industry, or even iPhone users, if Apple wins? On this episode of Full Story, tech editor Alex Hern explains the potential fallout from a landmark litigation.
Full Story is Guardian Australia’s daily news podcast. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or any other podcasting app.
Sport
After 17 years on the books of Tottenham, England captain and striking talisman Harry Kane could be set to depart, amid interest from Manchester City. It’s a prospect set to send shivers through the spines of Spurs’ fans, and it could even prompt a boardroom shuffle.
The narrow streets of Monte Carlo are almost synonymous with F1, but Lewis Hamilton has set the cat among the pigeons, criticising the hallowed track at the Monaco Grand Prix, suggesting the format was stale, and “in need of change”.
Media roundup
The federal government and the ACTU are on a collision course over wages, claims the Australian, after government staff advised the Fair Work Commission to “adopt a cautious approach” to minimum wage increases in the context of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. Australia’s high commissioner to the UK, former senator George Brandis, has condemned a “scare campaign” against Australian beef and lamb that could threaten to scuttle a UK-Australian free trade agreement, the Sydney Morning Herald reports. And the so-called Somerton Man has been exhumed from his resting place in Adelaide’s West Terrace Cemetery, according to the ABC, with police optimistic about the prospects of recovering DNA.
Coming up
The Victorian state budget will be handed down today.
The inquiry into NDIS independent assessments continues.
And if you’ve read this far …
Billions of cicadas are about to go on a really bad trip. A fungal spore with the same chemical compound as psychedelic mushrooms is turbocharging the sex drives of Brood X cicadas. The only catch is, it’s also causing castration in male cicadas and dissolving their abdomens. And according to an associate professor of forest pathology, humans eating these cicadas to achieve a cheap high is a really, really bad idea.
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