Good morning, this is Helen Sullivan bringing you the main stories and must-reads on Wednesday 27 November.
Top stories
A government push to expand the cashless welfare card faces a Senate roadblock, with key crossbenchers saying they will not consider supporting the legislation until they have completed a “fact-finding mission” over summer. Labor has said it will oppose the card without amendments to make the scheme voluntary, meaning that the government will be forced to rely on crossbench support for the expansion to come into effect.
There is no written record of the advice that led to the Biloela family’s detention on Christmas Island. The family haved been held their on their own since the end of August after a court ordered an injunction against the government removing them from Australia back to Sri Lanka. The court will decide if the government has properly considered whether the youngest child, Tharunicaa, is owed protection. The rest of the family have had their claims rejected.
China has ambitions to rival the US as the world’s diplomatic superpower with Beijing’s foreign affairs ministry running more embassies and consulates around the world than Washington’s State Department, which still has a quarter of its key positions unfilled. The 2019 Lowy global diplomatic index maps the size and reach of 61 diplomatic networks around the world by embassies, consulates, permanent missions and other diplomatic posts. Tracking all G20 and OECD countries, and most Asian nations, it showed an emerging China rivalling and, numerically at least, surpassing the US, caught “in a period of limbo”.
Australia
Nineteen South Australian prison guards are attempting to have a coroner removed from investigating the death in custody of an Indigenous man after seven guards lost a bid to avoid giving evidence at the inquest.
A controversial Chinese-backed multimillion-dollar tourist development in Tasmania has been blocked by the state’s planning commission, which found the application to rezone 3,000 hectares of agricultural land was not supported by the necessary paperwork.
Angus Taylor should stand aside as minister because it’s the right thing to do, writes Katharine Murphy. Taylor, whether innocent or guilty, should have stepped aside from his portfolio, temporarily, as soon as it was confirmed he was facing a police inquiry.
Westpac’s chairman, Lindsay Maxsted, has rejected the idea more heads need to be lopped from the bank’s board after he, the chief executive Brian Hartzer and a senior non-executive director announced their resignations in the wake of a money laundering and child exploitation scandal.
The world
Jeremy Corbyn has reiterated his belief that there is no place in Labour for antisemitism and vowed it would not be tolerated after claims from the UK chief rabbi that the UK opposition leader has allowed his party to become poisoned with antisemitism.
An influential US senator has told the Guardian he is examining the possible hacking of US citizens with technology sold by the NSO Group and other foreign surveillance companies, an issue he said raised “serious national security issues”.
The Maltese prime minister’s chief of staff and the country’s tourism minister have resigned in an escalation of the political turmoil surrounding the investigation into the murder of the prominent anti-corruption journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia in 2017.
Police in Germany have released dramatic CCTV footage of one of two suspects in the Dresden jewellery heist, seen using an axe to smash a display case in the state museum’s Green Vault.
Recommended reads
Tim Minchin has a lot of emotional investment in Upright, and that’s understandable, writes Steph Harmon. “The eight-episode TV series, which launches in the UK and Australia this month, is the first project he has led after two major professional heartbreaks (the collapse of a $100m film, and the early closure of a Broadway show) brought him back home from the US, tail between his legs.”
Many of us want to refuse urgent medical care for traumatised refugees because we think they might be laughing at us, writes Barri Phatarfod: “We turn on our televisions at night and see wretched images of grown men crying in a rubble that was once their home, having watched their wives brutalised by soldiers and their infant child smashed beyond recognition. The same empathetic part in all of us that quickly rallies to help bushfire victims cries for the anguish these men must feel and the terror of the women and children. Until they dare to turn up on Australian shores and miraculously become conniving gamers.”
Listen
How did Westpac wind up in a child exploitation scandal? Last week the financial intelligence agency revealed Westpac had committed 23m breaches of the law by failing to monitor and report suspicious transactions. Ben Butler joins the Full Story podcast to discuss how the scandal unfolded and whether it will finally force Australia’s big four banks to change.
Sport
Why do so many of New Zealand’s top rugby people not want to coach the All Blacks? asks Matt McIlraith. “In a word, trust.”
The International Olympic Committee has demanded the “toughest sanctions” against those responsible for deleting positive doping tests held by the Moscow laboratory – calling the behaviour “an attack on the credibility of sport itself and an insult to the sporting movement worldwide”.
Media roundup
The Sydney Morning Herald reports that a man has been charged with spiking a woman’s drink at a Newtown hotel. Scott Morrison has written a letter to Pamela Anderson “rejecting her passionate plea for Australia to help Julian Assange”, the ABC reveals. The Australian details the defence force’s “strategy to develop hi-tech soldiers and weaponised robots under a new program to ‘modernise levels of protection and lethality’ for frontline troops”.
Coming up
Anthony Albanese will address the Australian Council of Social Service conference in Canberra.
It’s also the aria Awards tonight. So do you know who Tones and I is?
And if you’ve read this far …
The “world’s best sushi restaurant” has been stripped of its three Michelin stars. But the decision, which was announced in Tokyo on Tuesday, has nothing to do with the quality of the restaurant’s tuna belly. It is because it is no longer open to the public. Jiro, a famously exclusive restaurant where Barack Obama dined with Shinzo Abe in 2014, had received three Michelin stars every year since the culinary guide’s first Tokyo edition in 2007, and was the subject of the 2011 documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi.
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