Good morning, this is Eleanor Ainge Roy bringing you the main stories and must-reads on Tuesday 6 March.
Top stories
The Australian defence department plans to spend almost $400,000 on English lessons, event attendances and training courses for members of the Myanmar military in 2017-18, documents released under freedom of information laws show. Myanmar’s armed forces have faced international condemnation and accusations of ethnic cleansing in recent months for perpetrating a fresh wave of attacks against the country’s minority Rohingya population. About 688,000 Rohingya refugees have fled over the border to Bangladesh since August 2017. Yanghee Lee, a UN human rights investigator, has said the situation bears “the hallmarks of a genocide”.
While an arms embargo, introduced in 1991, remains in place, Australia has so far diverged from its allies and resisted calls from groups such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch to suspend military cooperation with Myanmar. Diana Sayed, Amnesty International’s crisis campaigns coordinator, said the Australian government’s strategy of continued engagement and careful diplomacy could not be justified given the extent and extremity of the crisis – and that it would further damage Australia’s international reputation.
There are currently more than 1,800 threatened species in Australia and the main driver of species extinction is habitat loss – yet there are just five locations currently recorded on the federal critical habitat register, with not a single piece of critical habitat listed since 2005, writes Lisa Cox in the latest instalment of Our wide brown land series. Environment groups are calling for the critical habitat register to be strengthened so that the penalty for harming this habitat applies to state and privately owned land as much as it does to commonwealth land.
Preliminary election results point to a hung parliament in Italy, and a majority of Italian voters have supported Eurosceptic candidates, in what is being viewed as a warning to Europe. Whatever the outcome it will represent a repudiation of Brussels by Italian voters, less than two years after the UK narrowly voted to leave the European Union. Unlike British voters, Italians would not support an exit from Europe or a referendum on leaving the eurozone, but their backing of populist parties who have previously been open to a referendum on the Euro – which would legally be exceedingly difficult to do – was an important barometer of the mood of the country.
More than half of chronically homeless people have a psychotic illness and a fifth of chronically homeless people have left psychiatric facilities, the Medical Journal of Australia has revealed. The study also found that one in five chronically homeless people were living on the street after leaving public housing. “What was surprising was the number of people who had exited straight from a government institution into homelessness,” the chief executive of Homelessness NSW, Katherine McKernan, said. The findings have prompted renewed calls for Australian jurisdictions to adopt the housing first model, a policy of quickly getting those experiencing homelessness into a home and then wrapping support services around them.
Nick Xenophon was visibly nervous as he took to the stage on a floating platform on the Torrens river on Monday night for the leader’s debate, with just under a fortnight to go until polling day in the South Australian election, writes Guardian Australia political editor Katharine Murphy. “In Canberra, we are entirely used to Xenophon being stressed out and strung out, that’s his modus vivendi, revving himself into a frenzy. But this was a different politician than the familiar kingmaker of the Senate, this was a politician forced to stump on his merits, to present as a change-maker rather than as a last-ditch shaper of second chamber legislative outcomes. Xenophonia: The Homecoming, wasn’t a sell-out at the fringe, this was now a main stage act, with all the unreasonable expectations, and all the punitive judgments.”
Tanya Plibersek says Labor will restore the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ time use survey to measure unpaid and domestic work, saying the move would increase the value society places on caring work and could lead to men taking greater responsibility for domestic work. The shadow minister for women will announce today that if elected Labor would give the ABS $15.2m over 10 years to conduct the survey in 2020 and 2027, more than a decade after the last survey in 2006. The typical Australian woman spends up to 14 hours a week cooking, cleaning and organising her family, Plibersek said, while the typical man does fewer than five hours.
Sport
Australia should have been reflecting on an impressive win in South Africa, but once again all the talk is of an unsavoury spat between players. That David Warner was front and centre was all the spice the tale required.
The 2018 NRL season kicks off on Thursday night with high anticipation, but the league may have opened up a can of worms with a clampdown on the play-the-ball rule, which threatens to slow the game down and prompt further accusations of refereeing inconsistency.
Thinking time
It was hardly a vintage year for Australia at the Academy Awards this year, but hey, at least we got one run on the board. While Queensland-born Margot Robbie, resplendent in Chanel, missed out on the best actress Oscar (she lost to Frances McDormand), the Sydney-born editor Lee Smith was the sole Aussie winner, taking best editing for Dunkirk, Christopher Nolan’s superb second world war drama. If you missed it, you can read Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw’s five-star review here.
The Labor MP and shadow assistant treasurer Andrew Leigh argues in his new book, Randomistas – How Radical Researchers Changed Our World, that radical researchers are myth-busting in everything from medicine to law and order. In this extract, Leigh looks at the case of a nine-year-old boy caught with a pillowcase full of Lego after breaking into a house in suburban Canberra and how “restorative justice conferencing” changed the course of his life.
Is home ownership in Australia a matter of income and how wealthy your parents are? Greg Jericho certainly thinks so, describing the bleak picture in the Grattan Institute’s latest report on housing affordability as “the end result of short-term politically driven economic policy”. The report demonstrates that 30 years of policy geared towards surging housing prices has left Australians increasingly locked out of the market. “It leaves us with little hope of reversing the trend of declining affordability unless politicians embrace policies that are mostly politically unpalatable.”
What’s he done now?
For a president with a fleet of advisors, why does Trump persist in asking the Twitter-sphere to answer his curly and ill-informed questions? “Why did the Obama Administration start an investigation into the Trump Campaign (with zero proof of wrongdoing) long before the Election in November? Wanted to discredit so Crooked H would win. Unprecedented. Bigger than Watergate! Plus, Obama did NOTHING about Russian meddling.” Trump tweeted overnight. Read the Guardian’s story on the significance of the president’s tweet here.
Media roundup
The Age leads with a Human Rights Commission report into the “hyper-masculine” culture and “everyday sexism” in the Metropolitan Fire Brigade, with entrenched bullying and harassment ongoing issues for the service.
The Mercury reports on the worsening housing crisis in Hobart, speaking to a man who cares for two disabled children and is forced to live in a tent. Hobart is now the fourth most expensive city in Australia, with the median rental property costing $440 a week.
A DIY pap smear test is being rolled out around the country for women over 30 who avoid pap smears because they find it too uncomfortable, the ABC reports. Indigenous women, survivors of abuse, people with a disability and lesbians are the most likely women to refuse traditional testing.
Coming up
The foreign affairs minister, Julie Bishop, will attend the formal signing of the maritime boundary treaty between Australia and Timor-Leste at the UN headquarters in New York.
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