Good morning, this is Helen Sullivan bringing you the main stories and must-reads on Tuesday 2 July.
Top stories
Hong Kong police have fired teargas at demonstrators and moved to disperse crowds after protesters stormed the legislative council building and raised the territory’s former colonial flag on the 22nd anniversary of its handover to China. The Hong Kong hospital authority said it had treated 54 people after Monday’s protests. Three people are reportedly in a serious condition. The dramatic scenes came after a peaceful march of half a million people made its way through other parts of the city as its deepest political crisis in two decades showed no sign of abating.
New analysis suggests Australia cannot meet the target it set at the Paris climate summit without policies to address areas where emissions are rising substantially. Australia’s total emissions are now estimated to be 12.7% less than they were in 2005 but they have increased each year since 2015, when they were 14.5% below the benchmark year. The Coalition’s target is a 26% to 28% cut by 2030. The energy consultant Hugh Saddler, who conducted the analysis, said the government “absolutely don’t have any policy to stop emissions rising from transport, and in the other areas, such as LNG and coal exports, the policy is to actually encourage them to grow”.
Proposed laws could give the Australian government greater powers to block websites as the internet industry deals with hastily passed legislation designed to prevent another livestream of a terrorist massacre being shared widely. A report released on Sunday to coincide with the G20 leaders’ statement on cracking down on sharing extremist material came up with a short-term solution to fix the legally murky issue of blocking websites hosting the Christchurch shooter video and manifesto. But the proposal raises the spectre of mandatory internet filtering – something the Coalition government, and Labor before it, have considered but shied away from.
World
Antarctica lost as much sea ice in four years as the Arctic has lost in 34 years. The cause of the sharp losses is unknown but researchers said it showed ice could disappear much more rapidly than previously thought.
European leaders have resisted calls to start reimposing sanctions on Iran after the country said it had for the first time broken the terms of the nuclear deal it signed with foreign powers in 2015.
Donald Trump’s nepotism has been attacked after he gave his daughter Ivanka a prominent role in meetings with the G20 and Kim Jong-un. The brazenly dynastic displays caused concern among foreign policy experts who, noting Ivanka’s complete lack of diplomatic experience or training, warned of lasting damage to America’s credibility.
The body of a suspected stowaway, believed to have fallen from a Kenya Airways plane arriving from Nairobi, has been found in a south London garden.
The Democratic presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg has said he took in US$24.8m (A$35.6m) during the second fundraising quarter, eclipsing Bernie Sanders, as the candidate cull looms.
Opinion and analysis
When Ingrid Johanson decided to help organise a trip to France for five Aboriginal artists to exhibit their textile work, she did not expect the process to take years. It would be the first time most of the artists had left the Northern Territory, let alone Australia. First, they had to travel from West Arnhem Land to Darwin, on a road only six months of the year, in a four-wheel drive able to handle 31 river crossings. And that was just to get passports. Obtaining valid residential addresses was also an issue: there are no street names in Maningrida. “It shows the institutionalised complexity for Indigenous people,” Johanson says. Red tape “affects remote Indigenous people every day in different ways – whether it’s registering a car, whether it’s booking transport”.
‘The boats are coming’ is one of the greatest lies told to the Australian people, writes Behrouz Boochani. “For six years the political strategy of the Australian government has been to exile and incarcerate refugees on Manus Island and Nauru. Obviously, the government’s intention has never been to close these prisons. Dutton says he would like to free everyone overnight if he could but cannot because the boats would start coming again. This is an outright lie. The question remains, however, if this policy has no relationship with boats arriving in Australia then why does the government insist on keeping people imprisoned on these islands over these years?”
Sport
The 15-year-old American Cori Gauff produced one of the biggest opening-day upsets in Wimbledon history on Monday as she upended the five-times champion Venus Williams 6-4, 6-4 in the first round. The teenager, the youngest player to qualify for the main draw, kept her nerve as she ousted the 39-year-old on Court No 1 in what was her debut performance in a grand slam event.
Sri Lanka held their nerve against the West Indies in the Cricket World Cup, winning by 23 runs. Nicholas Pooran’s 118 was in vain as the West Indies came up just short.
Thinking time: ‘So much that will be lost’
Kazan Brown’s father helped build Warragamba Dam – under a kind of duress – after he was forced off his land by it. The first walls went up in 1948, 138 metres high, flooding the Burragorang Valley, which the Gundungurra people had known for more than 50,000 years. It took 12 years to trap all that water, a greater volume than in Sydney Harbour, and the toil of 1,800 workers – 15 of whom died. And they lost the valley. The government evicted some of the Indigenous occupants, acquired land, and put it under water. Brown’s great-grandmother refused to leave, and her sons had to walk in and carry her out, leaving all the furniture behind. “My mother was born there,” she says. “My grandfather was born there. We go back before settlement in this area.”
The dam now provides water to the 4.5 million people of greater Sydney and surrounding areas. In the 1980s they raised the wall by five metres. Now the state government is planning to raise the wall again by about 15 metres, creating an extra 995 gigalitres to store floodwater and mitigate the flood risk to houses on the Hawkesbury-Nepean floodplain. But a leaked report said this would also “permanently” change the Blue Mountains – which are world heritage-listed for their beauty, biodiversity and Indigenous sacred sites.
Media roundup
Australia has been urged by new US ambassador Arthur Culvahouse to play “a great power leadership role” in the Pacific, the Australian reports. The ANU professor Hugh White has argued that Australia should consider developing its own nuclear weapons, as it can no longer reply on the US to protect it in Asia, the Sydney Morning Herald reports. And the Daily Telegraph’s front page asks Labor to “give us what we voted for” as Labor ponders whether to back the government’s $158bn tax cut plan in full, with the paper saying Anthony Albanese “continues to stand between voters and his own divided party”.
Coming up
The Reserve Bank board will meet to decide whether to cut interest rates. Traders estimate a 77% chance of another cut.
The shortlist for the Miles Franklin literary award to be announced.
