Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
Critics warn of imperial fantasy but the economic and political forces pulling the UK back to the region are real
Some will call it a tilt, others a rebalancing and yet others a pivot but, either way, the new big idea due to emerge from the government’s foreign and defence policy review on Tuesday will be the importance of the Indo-Pacific region – a British return east of Suez more than 50 years after the then defence secretary Denis Healey announced the UK’s cash-strapped retreat in 1968.
Boris Johnson and his admirals are billing the focus on a zone stretching through some of the world’s most vital seaways east from India to Japan and south from China to Australia as Britain stepping out in the world after 47 years locked in the EU’s protectionist cupboard. Others warn Johnson is indulging a hubristic and militarily dangerous imperial fantasy.
More than 100,000 women are expected to march in Canberra, Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane to demand action in response to allegations of workplace abuse. Follow latest updates
Janine Hendry, a founder and organiser of the March4Justice, explained to the ABC this morning about why organisers turned down Scott Morrison’s offer of a private meeting with a small number of march delegates:
I think it is really quite disrespectful to the women whose voices need to be heard to have a meeting with our prime minister behind closed doors.
I have invited the prime minister, as I have all other sitting members of parliament, to come and march with us, to come and listen to our voices. I don’t think it is really a big ask – we have come to Canberra.
If deal goes ahead Singapore could become a quarantine gateway for vaccinated stranded Australians and other travellers
The Australian government is working on a plan to create a travel bubble with Singapore.
If struck, the deal could also establish Singapore as a quarantine gateway for travellers on their way to Australia, the Age and Sydney Morning Herald report. Deputy prime minister Michael McCormack confirmed the government was working on the plan on the ABC on Sunday morning.
China’s importance to the Australian economy has exploded in recent years – but data shows Australia is not nearly so important to China
China’s importance to the Australian economy has exploded over the past decade, fuelled by an apparently insatiable need for iron ore and helped along by increasing demand for luxury goods as the country became richer, analysis of UN trade data by Guardian Australia reveals.
Federal health minister Greg Hunt released from hospital after leg infection
The Victorian premier, Daniel Andrews, has been moved out of intensive care and on to a hospital ward after breaking a bone in his back and several ribs when he slipped on wet stairs earlier this week.
Also on Saturday, the federal health minister, Greg Hunt, was released from hospital after a leg infection.
Scott Morrison joins Joe Biden, Yoshihide Suga and Narendra Modi in plan to send 1bn coronavirus vaccines to Asian and Pacific island countries
A historic first meeting of leaders of the Quad – an informal grouping of Australia, the United States, India and Japan – has ended with a promise to boost manufacturing of the Covid-19 vaccine to help low-income countries and to keep international climate goals within reach.
The leaders during the meeting agreed to pool financing, manufacturing and distribution capacity to send 1 billion coronavirus vaccines to Asian and Pacific island countries by the end of 2022.
Former Australian finance minister’s candidacy was dogged by complaints from environmental groups
Australia’s former finance minister Mathias Cormann has won a hard-fought election to become the new chief of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), despite grave concerns voiced by environmental groups over his record on climate change.
Cormann narrowly defeated the Swedish former EU trade commissioner Cecilia Malmström in the election to lead the 37-member Paris-based organisation, which gives advice to member governments on economic trends, inequality, fighting corruption and trade and is seen as the world’s leading rulemaker on corporate tax.
China itself has been accused of operating detention centres, with more than 1m people estimated to have been detained in Xinjiang
China has said it is “deeply concerned” by what it described as the Australian government’s operation of offshore detention centres, and has called for the sites to be closed immediately.
Blessed with sunny weather, diverse locations and a ready-made film industry, Sydney and the Gold Coast have become movie powerhouses
On a warmish Wednesday evening early in the year, Paul Mescal was celebrating his birthday and everybody seemed to know. The Irish actor, famous for his neckchain and his leading role in Normal People, was in Sydney, Australia, for a new film, and the word was spreading. He was photographed running in Centennial Park. He was sighted at Tamarama Beach. He popped into an inner-city pub.
But on the list of stars now working in Australia, Mescal – in Sydney for a musical film adaptation of Carmen – is comfortably mid-level. Thanks to its relative freedom from Covid-19 and associated restrictions, Australia – blessed with diverse locations, sunny weather and a ready-made film infrastructure – has become Hollywood Down Under.
The PM has rejected claims of favouring Coalition and marginal seats through subsidised flights; and WA opposition leader Zak Kirkup insists he has no regrets as he prepares for landslide defeat. Follow all the latest updates, live
Good news for NSW residents in Auckland, they will once again be allowed to return to Australia without quarantine, as the New Zeland cluster dies out with no more new cases reported in the recent Auckland cluster since 28 February.
NSW health released a statement last night confirming the (one-way) travel bubble will reopen:
People who have been in Auckland in the past 14 days will be exempt from hotel quarantine provided that they seek testing for Covid-19 after arriving in NSW. They must self-isolate in their accommodation until they receive a negative result.
NSW Health will follow up arrivals from Auckland if a negative test is not recorded for them, to inform them of their obligations.
The OECD has so far been unable to find a clear winner in the contest between former Australian finance minister Mathias Cormann and former European trade commissioner Cecilia Malmström – so the decision may not be finalised until later this month.
Cormann and Malmström, the Swedish candidate, are the final two nominees for the role of secretary general of the Paris based OECD. The selection process is based on seeking to find consensus among OECD member states.
Following discussion with the Selection Committee, the Chair’s conclusions were finalised and these were communicated first to the nominating ambassadors, and then to the Heads of Delegations in plenary. Following these consultations, the Chair has been unable to identify which candidate has the most support. Further steps will be taken in March, with the aim of concluding the process.
In the category’s 38-year history, almost 80% of African nations have never had an artist nominated; no Middle Eastern or eastern European musician has ever won; every winner in the past eight years has been a repeat winner; and nearly two-thirds of the nominations have come from just six countries (the US, the UK, Brazil, Mali, South Africa, India). The situation shows little signs of improving.
Users told their pin was incorrect when they tried to log in to the state’s official contact-tracing app
New South Wales residents were left unable to check in to restaurants and other venues on Thursday afternoon using the state’s official Covid check-in app, Service NSW, after it went offline.
The outage lasted about four hours and affected the official Service NSW app, although Service NSW said its coronavirus webform check-in was not impacted.
Monitors on Queensland’s Lady Elliot Island have only seen a handful of albino hatchlings but never an adult
Jessica Buckman is used to finding stragglers when she heads out to check recently hatched green turtle nests on Queensland’s Lady Elliot Island.
But the tiny pink creature she found in the neck of one nest on Monday was far from a usual find – a rare albino hatchling that was having a little trouble digging itself out.
The $1.2bn package to provide cheap flights has already been dismissed as ‘second-rate’ by tourism sector, as opposition questions scope
Labor has questioned why 13 regions to benefit from half-price flights to boost tourism include marginal seats in Tasmania and Queensland while neighbouring areas miss out.
The Morrison government on Thursday unveiled its $1.2bn tourism and aviation rescue package combining discount flights with business loans – but the scheme has already been labelled “second-rate” by the two sectors that warn it is an incomplete replacement for jobkeeper wage subsidies.
Lawyers for Osama al-Hasani have ‘credible concerns’ he was targeted for his political views but his wife says she is ‘still hoping for a miracle’
The wife of an Australian citizen who is to be extradited to Saudi Arabia says she “hopes a miracle will happen” after a Moroccan court approved his transfer.
International lawyers acting for Osama al-Hasani, 42, have asked United Nations special rapporteurs to raise his case with Moroccan authorities, citing “credible concerns” that he was being targeted by the Saudi Arabian government for his political opinions.
Government must ‘justify the cost and ensure it represents value for money’, Kristina Keneally says of invitation dinner for 900
The Department of Defence is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on events to celebrate the centenary of the air force – including an invitation-only dinner for 900 guests.
Labor has raised questions about the price tag for the centenary dinner, calling on the government to “justify the cost and ensure it represents value for money”.
Analysis: revelations may be used in member state debates about becoming republics, say experts
In the 1980s, it was the question of apartheid-era South Africa that threatened to drive a wedge through the Commonwealth.
But while some credit the Queen then with a heroic role behind the scenes – dramatised with more than a dollop of artistic licence in season four of The Crown – in 2021 the threat comes from a row over alleged racism within the royal family itself.
Cairns hospital called a code yellow on Tuesday due to an influx of patients, including a number of Covid-19 payments from Papua New Guinea.
More from AAP:
More than 260 people presented at the emergency department on Tuesday, with road crash victims adding to increased pressure on services.
“A sustained high number of presentations to the ED, alongside a spike in trauma admissions and several patients needing isolation for Covid-19 had led to the hospital declaring a Code Yellow,” the hospital said in a statement on Wednesday.
News that the Hong Kong legislator Ted Hui is settling in Australia after being granted a travel exemption by the Australian government is unlikely to go down well in Beijing.
When Guardian Australia contacted the Chinese embassy in Canberra for comment on the matter, an official pointed us to remarks made by the foreign ministry spokesperson in Beijing last week. The foreign ministry spokesperson, Wang Wenbin, told reporters Monday last week:
China’s position on Hong Kong-related issues is consistent and clear. Hong Kong is China’s Hong Kong, and every bit of Hong Kong affairs belongs to China’s internal affairs, in which no other country has the right to interfere.
The Chinese side urges the Australian side to stop meddling in Hong Kong’s affairs and China’s internal affairs in any way. Otherwise the China-Australia relations will only sustain further damage.
Power station produces 13% of Victoria’s and 3% of national emissions and employs 500 people
One of Australia’s dirtiest coal-fired power stations, Yallourn in Victoria’s Latrobe valley, will close four years earlier than scheduled and be replaced, in part, by a grid-scale battery.
EnergyAustralia announced on Wednesday it would shut the 1970s-built, 1,480-megawatt brown coal plant in mid-2028.
As the new series of SBS’s film revitalisation project airs, Guardian Australia’s film critic considers the consequences of this trend in film-making
Paolo Cherchi Usai – the Italian curator and former head of the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia (NFSA) – once put forward an elegant definition of moving image preservation, calling it “the science of gradual loss and the art of coming to terms with its consequences”. Those melancholic words present the dispossession of our celluloid and digital pasts as inevitable, and efforts to maintain them a will-o’-the-wisp exercise: impossible to achieve, like reaching the gold at the end of the rainbow.
But loss is far from the first thing that comes to mind after watching the second season of SBS’s four-part documentary series Australia in Colour. Separated into different themes, the first episode is devoted to family, exploring issues such as changing gender roles, the stolen generations and the arrival of contraceptive pills; the second, about sport, investigates national heroes and drinking culture.