Good morning, this is Helen Sullivan bringing you the main stories and must-reads on Tuesday 4 December.
Top stories
The Liberal party has resolved that sitting prime ministers can in future only be removed by a two-thirds party room majority. The newly adopted convention does not apply to Scott Morrison now, because he has not yet won an election as prime minister. Federal Liberal MPs voted to change the rules over the selection of party leaders in a snap party room meeting on Monday night, even though Morrison has previously argued that “regulating for culture is never effective”. The PM told reporters he understood the “frustration and disappointment” felt by voters about recurrent leadership coups in Canberra, or “coup culture” as he called it. The latest Guardian Essential Poll figures show Labor’s two-party-preferred lead over the government has blown out again to 54% to 46%. A fortnight ago Labor was ahead 52% to 48%, which suggested a tightening in the contest.
The coup culture change comes as the Morrison government is revising key components of its much-vaunted “big stick” divestiture power in the wake of internal objections from more than 20 backbenchers, with MPs arguing breaking up private energy companies offends core liberal values. Sources have told Guardian Australia ministers are now in the process of refining the original government proposal to ensure that divesture happens only after a recommendation by Australia’s competition watchdog and that the courts would also be the ultimate decision-makers, rather than a government minister.
The collapse of civilisation is on the horizon, says David Attenborough. The naturalist told the UN Climate Summit in Poland on Monday: “If we don’t take action, the collapse of our civilisations and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the horizon.” Attenborough was chosen to represent the world’s people in addressing delegates of almost 200 nations who are in Katowice to negotiate how to turn pledges made in the 2015 Paris climate deal into reality. Attenborough continued: “Leaders of the world, you must lead. The continuation of civilisations and the natural world upon which we depend is in your hands.” The World Bank, meanwhile, has announced it will invest $200bn to combat climate change.
Students are blockading about 100 schools across France as protests spread. The gilets jaunes (yellow vests) citizens’ protest movement continued on Monday with peaceful anti-government demonstrations at barricades on roads and at fuel depots across France, as high-school students – who have been protesting against changes to colleges and the university system – seized on the mood and stepped up their blockades. About 100 high schools were fully or partially blockaded around the country, including in the southern city of Toulouse and in Créteil in the Paris area. Seven teenagers were arrested after riot police were called to the Jean-Pierre Timbaud high school in Aubervilliers in the northern Paris suburbs where a car was overturned and bins were set alight. Read our guide to who gilets jaunes are and what they want.
Australia has not lost faith in immigration, writes David Marr. That is the verdict of the Scanlon Foundation’s 2018 Mapping Social Cohesion Report. Monash University’s Professor Andrew Markus is one of Australia’s leading authorities on the politics of race. Year in year out his reports (this is the 11th he has written for the foundation) show about 80% of us believe immigrants are “generally good” for Australia’s economy and that ours is a better society for the “new ideas and cultures” that immigrants bring to this country. Support for multiculturalism in 2018 stands almost as high as ever at 85%.
In Madagascar, beekeeping is offering an unlikely alternative to fishing. Few countries are more vulnerable to climate change than the island nation, the location of which – in the Indian Ocean, off the south-east coast of Africa – leaves it hugely exposed. The country’s pervasive poverty and lack of economic development also severely restrict its capacity to adapt to climatic shifts. But in Kivalo, where cyclones, overfishing and rising seas threaten livelihoods, some fishermen are turning to beekeeping.
Sport
Australia’s chances against India aren’t as bad as the seers say. The niceness or otherwise of Australia on the field is going to have nothing to with it.
Paul Sherwen gained a reputation for his willingness to suffer on gruelling climbs when he rode for French team La Redoute in the 1980s. It was no surprise, then, that he relished another kind of challenge upon picking up the microphone in the late 1980s: teaching the world to love cycling as much as he did.
Thinking time
Lubaina Himid won the Turner prize with artwork accusing the Guardian of racial bias, so we invited her into the London office to see the paper get made – and have it out with the editors. If Himid’s mission was to find out how the print edition came out looking as it did, the Guardian’s was to investigate how her opinions, as a newspaper traditionalist, might change when confronted with the realities of a global news operation reporting 24 hours a day on stories from all over the world, only a fraction of which make it into the paper she says is not merely her favourite but the only one she cares about. Things didn’t begin well.
Stillbirth is one tragedy many people assume has been consigned to history. But, writes Phillippa McGuinness, “the conversation I’m about to have in a lovely old building with the Centre for Research Excellence in Stillbirth’s director, Professor Vicki Flenady, and her colleague, Dr Fran Boyle, demolishes that assumption. My own son, Daniel, was stillborn at 39 weeks in 2001 after a normal pregnancy. No one could identify a reason for his death. The tragedy of stillbirth is that everything happens in the wrong order; death comes just as everyone is expecting a new life. And very often it is avoidable. These two Queensland women are like crusaders on a mission.”
There is no way Australia will meet its Paris targets, and the government couldn’t care less, writes Greg Jericho. Government released the latest quarterly greenhouse gas emissions figures on Friday. “Choosing to release figures showing record levels of greenhouse gas emissions on the day students were protesting the government’s lack of action on climate change is either a lovely self-troll or a sign this government really has no clue.”
What’s he done now?
“Nice to know that some people still have ‘guts!’,” he’s tweeted, hailing his former aide Roger Stone’s repeated pledge not to testify against the president. But the Mueller investigation is closing in on Trump anyway, writes Jill Abramson.
Media roundup
“Sydney’s property downturn is set to eclipse that of the early 1990s recession – and it’s likely to claim that record before Christmas,” reports the Sydney Morning Herald. Malcolm Turnbull is “scorned” and “isolated” following his failed attempt “to embarrass the prime minister”, writes the Australian. The Australian Financial Review leads with the news that the ASX has had its best session since 2016 as a result of the US and China agreeing to put their trade war on ice.
Coming up
Malcolm Turnbull will speak at the Smart Energy Summit in Sydney on Tuesday morning.
Asic will appear in the high court on Tuesday in an attempt to overturn a recent court ruling on an illegal credit scheme operating in South Australia, one it says would leave Indigenous communities vulnerable to exploitation from predatory businesses.
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