Morning mail: water buyback questions, Notre Dame donations, university sacking

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/apr/17/morning-mail-water-buyback-questions-notre-dame-donations-university-sacking

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Good morning, this is Helen Sullivan bringing you the main stories and must-reads on Wednesday 17 April.

Top stories

Mysteries still surround companies chosen for $200m of Murray-Darling water buybacks. Despite questions in the Senate, calls for papers and freedom of information requests, it remains unclear why the former agriculture minister Barnaby Joyce chose the companies he did for almost $200m of water buybacks in 2017. The buybacks of water using funds allocated for purchasing environmental water under the Murray-Darling Basin plan have been controversial because they proceeded without open tender and, once announced, were criticised because of the reliability of the water purchased.

The Greens will push Labor to back key parts of its new environment strategy, including a $2bn nature fund, in exchange for crucial support of the opposition’s climate change policy in the Senate. Flagging the party’s readiness to horse-trade over energy policy if Labor wins the election, the Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young said the party was not afraid to use its numbers on the crossbench to extract stronger commitments from Bill Shorten on the environment.

The federal circuit court has ruled that James Cook University’s sacking of a professor was unlawful. Peter Ridd, who was the head of the physics department at the institution from 2009 until 2016, had criticised scientific research about climate change’s impact on the Great Barrier Reef. Judge Salvatore Vasta ruled on Tuesday the 17 findings made by the university were all unlawful. Vasta said the university had not understood the whole concept of intellectual freedom: “It allows academics to express their opinions without fear of reprisals.”

Within 24 hours of the federal election being called some Australians began receiving application forms for postal votes. The mostly unmarked envelopes didn’t come from the electoral commission but from local candidates and political parties which enclosed information about their policies and an addressed reply-paid envelope. There’s nothing illegal in that – electoral legislation allows for a candidate or political party to send out postal vote applications and include material they wish to send to voters. The practice is not new for political campaigners but, with increasing concerns about privacy and data collection, some voters are questioning a lack of transparency about exactly what they’re up to.

World

Notre Dame Cathedral was within “15 to 30 minutes” of complete destruction as firefighters battled to stop flames reaching its gothic bell towers, French authorities have revealed. Wealthy industrialists and ordinary individuals have donated more than €600m (A$944m) in less than 24 hours to help restore the Paris cathedral, but experts have said reconstructing the building could take decades.

Jeremy Corbyn has said Brexit talks with the government are stalling because of a Tory desire for post-withdrawal deregulation. The teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg has meanwhile chided EU leaders for holding three emergency summits on Brexit and none on the threat posed by climate change.

Facebook allowed a man charged with threatening to kill the US congresswoman Ilhan Omar to post violent and racist content for years, and took no action to remove his posts when he was arrested, a Guardian review has found.

Almost every adult in the UK could receive a payout of up to £300 (A$545) from Mastercard after a court ruling paved the way for a £14bn (A$25bn) class action lawsuit. The legal action taken by the former UK financial ombudsman Walter Merricks claims that 46 million UK consumers paid higher prices in shops over a 16-year period because of allegedly excessive transaction fees charged by the credit card.Bernie Sanders has drawn enthusiastic cheers in surprising Fox News town hall. The setup looked potentially hostile but became a free, hour-long commercial for the Sanders candidacy, broadcast to Fox viewers.

Opinion and analysis

The photographer Brendan Beirne visited massacre sites across Australia and, using infrared technology, he created a series of images which take you to the unquiet places where Indigenous people were slaughtered. Among the places he visited is Campaspe River in Victoria, where, in 1839, a pack of armed settlers pursued a group of Djadjawurrung people who had taken some sheep. Up to 40 men women and children were said to have been killed.

Anastasia Glushko grew up in state care. She went on to study at the Australian National University and the University of Oxford. But from some 50,000 children in foster care in Australia only about 2.8% will make it to university. “To accept as unproblematic that fewer than 3% of children in care attain higher education, compared to 39% of the general population, is to accept that spending time in care renders a child fundamentally incompatible with academic learning compared to their peers,” writes Glushko. “I do not accept it.”

Sport

International Gay Rugby has welcomed the swift action taken by the authorities after last week’s homophobic Instagram post by the Australia fullback Israel Folau was liked by the England No 8 Billy Vunipola.

Sir Bradley Wiggins’ one-hour UCI cycling world record has been broken by the Belgian Victor Campenaerts. The 27-year-old Lotto Soudal rider covered 55.089km in his record attempt at the Aguascalientes indoor velodrome in Mexico.

Thinking time: A conditional fair go

“It’s a talking point, and the danger with talking points is journalists can stop listening,” writes Guardian Australia’s political editor, Katharine Murphy. “To avoid a sudden death by soundbite, and lulled by the ceaseless cacophony, we can sometimes fail to interrogate what is sitting right in front of us. Scott Morrison has shared a few versions of the same organising idea since taking the prime ministership last year, but the clearest articulation of his mantra came during the opening press conference of the 2019 election.

“Morrison was asked about the fair go. A journalist asked the prime minister how he intended to counter Labor’s campaign messaging about the importance of fairness. It’s worth recording his answer in full. ‘I believe in a fair go for those who have a go, and what that means is part of the promise that we all keep as Australians is that we make a contribution and don’t seek to take one,’ the prime minister said.

“Now what this means, if we take a moment to listen, is the prime minister of Australia believes the fair go is conditional: it has some footnotes attached to it. The fair go applies if you have a go and if you don’t seek to ‘take’ a contribution. It doesn’t automatically apply to everyone equally. While Morrison’s construction is designed to prompt a nod of affirmation from the listener it’s actually a discordant thought to articulate in the Australian experience.

“Many of us ‘take’ contributions frequently through public education and universal healthcare and family payments and childcare assistance – and we do that because it is the Australian way. These are priorities Australia has set for itself in the way we conceive of the institution of government, and what it does. Making a contribution without taking one is not what happens in reality. Not in this country.”

Media roundup

The Sydney Morning Herald reports that the Institute of Public Affairs is urging Coalition MPs to support a manifesto that includes selling the ABC and pulling out of the Paris climate agreement. ALP wipes policies from web is the Australian’s top yarn this morning, with the news that “Bill Shorten was blindsided yesterday when Labor’s official campaign website deleted reams of information explaining his signature reforms to negative gearing and capital gains tax, and reposted simplified ‘fact sheets’ with key details stripped out.” The Canberra Times features a sweet cartoon showing a firefighter giving water to a Notre Dame gargoyle.

Coming up

The former Greens leader Bob Brown is leading an anti-Adani convoy that leaves Hobart on Wednesday and will travel up the east coast, staging rallies in various cities.

Treasury and the finance department are expected to release the pre-election economic and fiscal outlook report online about 2pm.

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