Good morning, this is Eleanor Ainge Roy bringing you the main stories and must-reads on Friday 8 March.
Top stories
Malcolm Turnbull has again dumped on his former Liberal colleagues for ousting him as prime minister. Speaking to the BBC in London overnight, he described the August coup as a “peculiarly Australian form of madness” and accused his party colleagues of sabotaging its election chances for the sake of destroying his leadership. “You could argue that their concern was not that I would lose the election but rather that I would win it,” he said.
Environmentalists and transparency advocates have called for integrity reforms after revelations that Glencore used a covert multimillion-dollar project to bolster support for coal power around the world. The former prime minister Kevin Rudd described Project Caesar as a “national disgrace” in a tweet, while the chief executive of Transparency International Australia, Serena Lillywhite, said the existence of the campaign revealed by Guardian Australia reinforced the need for the routine publication of federal ministers’ diaries, a practice already employed in NSW. Greenpeace Australia Pacific’s head of campaigns, Jamie Hanson, said the project – run by the company founded by Sir Lynton Crosby and Mark Textor – was an “affront to democracy”.
Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islanders remain dramatically overrepresented within the child protection system, according to a study that shows the overall number of children in care is increasing. The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare study reveals that 159,000 children across the country – or one in 35 – received child protection services in 2017-18, up 15,000 in the past five years. Indigenous children were eight times more likely to be in the system than non-Indigenous children and 11 times more likely to be living in out-of-home care, considered an “intervention of last resort”.
World
Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort is due to be sentenced by a US district judge in Virginia for bank and tax fraud uncovered during special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russia’s role in the 2016 election. Follow our live blog for the outcome.
The Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, has expressed regret for his handling of a political scandal that has cost him two cabinet ministers and a close adviser, but stopped short of apologising.
A rapid and alarming deterioration of the security situation in Burkina Faso is threatening to spread to its three southern neighbours, a senior US military figure has warned.
Representatives of the far-right League in southern Italy have provoked fury after producing an explicitly sexist leaflet to mark International Women’s Day.
Britain’s attorney general, Geoffrey Cox, faces a backlash in Brussels and Dublin after claiming the Irish backstop posed a risk to the human rights of people in Northern Ireland, as Brexit talks founder.
Opinion and analysis
The once-revered colonialist Angus McMillan earned the epithet the “butcher of Gippsland” for his role in Indigenous massacres. This reversal of his reputation – from virtuous Presbyterian to cold-blooded killer – is the work not just of the people he wronged, but of his own relations and the descendants of his closest friends, writes Ciaran O’Mahony. Cal Flyn, a distant relative of McMillan who discovered her link by chance, turned that revelation into a book about the events in Warrigal Creek in 1843, when McMillan and his men shot dead as many as 150 Gunaikurnai people.
The 1990s was a grim time for Melbourne, when the recession seemed never-ending and the city was awash with heroin addicts and gaming arcades, writes Brigid Delaney. But the then-unknown cast of characters who joined Brigid during her university and early working years would go on to be some of the most prominent people in Australia. Who was the now-infamous woman who was Brigid’s supervisor selling pies at the MCG? And who was the politics nerd whose animating passion was the Labor party?
Sport
Fifa’s president, Gianni Infantino, thinks a North Korean bid to host the Women’s World Cup in 2023 in conjunction with South Korea “would be great”. Our cartoonist David Squires isn’t quite so sure.
Italy’s head coach, Conor O’Shea, has come out in support of World Rugby’s controversial proposal for a new global league, despite the obvious threat it poses to his side’s place in the Six Nations. ‘‘If the rich kids just win everything we don’t have a game’ O’Shea said.
Thinking time: How Australia’s compulsory voting curbs Trumpism
Australia has had six prime ministers in eight years, and is suffering from an increasing mistrust in politicians, in parties, even in democracy itself. As the country gears up for a federal election, politics is set to become even more dispiriting. But it’s not all bad. According to historian and academic Judith Brett, Australia has a degree of inoculation from the polarisation infecting politics in the US, the UK and much of Europe. Gay Alcorn analyses how Brett’s new book, From Secret Ballot to Democracy Sausage, teases out the reasons, above all our unusual electoral system, which makes voting compulsory.
“All of a sudden people were realising what an advantage for us in Australia that we had compulsory voting,” says Brett, referring to Donald Trump having been elected with only a quarter of eligible voters supporting him, and just 37% of eligible Britons voting to leave the EU. Australia is one of only 19 countries out of 166 electoral democracies where voting is compulsory, and one of only nine that enforce it. It is the only English-speaking country that compels its citizens to vote. The impact is hard to overstate. In 2015 Barack Obama praised Australia’s system, saying it would be “transformative” if everyone voted in the US. Compulsory voting keeps politics focused on the centre rather than the fringe of politics. To win elections, political parties have to appeal not just to their base but to the majority of people. “It keeps the emotional temper of the conflict down,” Brett writes.
Media roundup
The Daily Telegraph covers its front page with the story of James Packer’s alleged involvement in Hollywood sex scandal after the publication of texts by his former girlfriend, the actor Charlotte Kirk. The West Australian reports that the state’s premier is under increasing pressure to quash a move by the environmental watchdog to charge mining companies for their carbon emissions – a move supporters of the industry say will be a “job-killing”. Labor’s plan to take an additional 32,000 refugees each year could cost the Australian taxpayer $6bn over 10 years, the Australian claims.
Coming up
The inquest into the death of the Indigenous man David Dungay concludes in Sydney today.
Australia must win the third one-day international in India to stay in the series, in which they trail 2-0. Join our live blog from 6.30pm AEDT.
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