Good morning, this is Helen Sullivan bringing you the main stories and must-reads on Tuesday 5 February.

Top stories

The political fallout from the banking royal commission’s final report is in full swing, with Labor seizing on the government’s reluctance to create a user-pays system for mortgage brokers. As the latest Guardian Essential poll shows Labor’s lead narrowing to 52%-48% on a two-party-preferred basis, the opposition will target the Coalition’s apparent reluctance to wholeheartedly embrace Hayne’s user-pays reforms aimed at breaking up the cosy relationship between banks and brokers. Hayne’s damning report into the banking industry, delivered on Monday, recommended that some banks could face criminal prosecution over misconduct such as fees for no service and changing dead people for services. Katharine Murphy explains why the politics of the report left the government with little option but to accept Hayne’s verdict.

Australia’s cheap, dirty petrol ranks among the worst of the OECD nations, yet the peak body representing petrol refiners says the industry should be given until 2027 to adjust to stricter regulations. The chief executive of the Australian Institute of Petroleum, Paul Barrett, hit back at critics who have described Australian petrol as low quality thanks to its sulphur content, saying: “There are a range of fuel parameters which determine the quality of fuel, not just the sulphur content.” But analysts say improving fuel quality could offer significant improvements in CO2 emissions “overnight”.

At least a third of the huge ice fields in Asia’s towering mountain chain are doomed to melt due to climate change, according to a landmark report, with serious consequences for almost 2 billion people. Even if carbon emissions are dramatically and rapidly cut and succeed in limiting global warming to 1.5C, 36% of the glaciers along the Hindu Kush and Himalaya range will have gone by 2100. If emissions are not cut, the loss soars to two-thirds, the report found.

World

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, at a military ceremony in Caracas. Photograph: EPA

Nicolás Maduro has hit back at the “gringo plot to overthrow revolution” in Venezuela, following what he called the “cowardly” and “disastrous” decision of European countries to recognise his rival, Juan Guaidó, as interim president.

A suggestion by one of the EU’s most powerful officials of possible further legal assurances on the Irish backstop has failed to win over Brexiter MPs, leading to heightened talk of the UK leaving the bloc with no deal.

The pope and the grand imam of Al-Azhar have signed a historic declaration of fraternity, calling for peace between nations, religions and races, in front of a global audience of Christian, Muslim, Jewish and other religious leaders.

About US$190m in cryptocurrency has been locked away in a online black hole after the founder of a currency exchange died, apparently taking his encrypted access to their money with him.

In a remarkable new interview, the actor Liam Neeson has said he once wanted to murder a black person, in reaction to the rape of someone to whom he was close.

Opinion and analysis

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The damage being done to Tasmania by bushfires is ‘almost certainly as tragic as the coral reef bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef’, writes Richard Flanagan. Photograph: Reuters

Tasmanians find themselves living in a frightening new world where summer is no longer a time of joy, but a period of smog-drenched dread that goes on week after week and, it seems inevitable, month after month, writes Richard Flanagan. Whole communities are living in evacuation centres or bunking down with friends and family. Volunteer firefighters find themselves no longer fighting fires for a week but for a season. And this would seem to be the new normal. According to David Bowman, professor of pyrogeography at the University of Tasmania, Tasmanians “must think about fire as part of daily life”. Tasmania’s ancient remnant forest and its woodland alpine heathlands are at profound and immediate risk, while Scott Morrison and his colleagues who refuse to tackle climate change are not just deriding their political opponents but mocking the future with the pure contempt of power.

The attempt to extradite Hakeem al-Araibi is a lesson that it’s time to stand up to Bahrain, writes Aya Majzoub. Despite Bahrain’s atrocious human rights record, its allies have not used their influence to press for improvements, emboldening the Bahraini government to take its abuses beyond its borders. The international community, including Australia, must make it clear to Bahrain that it cannot get away with torturing and silencing everyone who speaks out against abuses.

Sport

Never have the New England Patriots been so doubted. A creaking 41-year-old quarterback. A Hall of Fame tight end on his last legs. A slow defence. Julian Edelman, Tom Brady’s favourite weapon, coming off an ACL injury and a doping suspension. Five road losses. It wasn’t the prettiest, but Super Bowl LIII may well have been Bill Belichick’s best coaching job to date.

The family of the footballer Emiliano Sala are desperate for the plane he was travelling in to be recovered from the seabed after it emerged that a body had been spotted in the wreckage.

Thinking time: Inflatable metaphors

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Artist Jeff Koons poses beside one of his works, Balloon Dog. Photograph: Charles Rex Arbogast/AP

“To get great clarity in the balls, you really need to blow them a lot,” Jeff Koons tells Hadley Freedman, with all the solemnity of a man explaining his tax returns. He gazes lovingly at his balls, which in this case are a row of stainless steel spheres suitably blown up to bear an astonishing resemblance to his most famous artistic muse: inflatable rubber toys. But given that Koons shot to notoriety with his 1991 series Made in Heaven – in which he photographed himself and his then girlfriend Ilona Staller in pretty much every sexual position legal in the state of New York – this ball chat really could have gone another way.

Koons, until very recently the world’s most expensive living artist, has the calm, unruffled air that, in New York, is generally only found in the heavily medicated. But in him, it seems more like the zen of a man who has all but the licence to print money. His works sell for multimillions. The art collector Peter Brant, who bought Koons’s piece Puppy, a 40ft west highland terrier made out of flowers, spends $75,000 a year just maintaining it. “Koons,” read one recent, and typical, critical assessment, “has made his name manufacturing toys for rich old boys.”

Of course, Koons hates this kind of chat. “The rest of the world talks so much about money,” he says, “and one of the reasons is I think they feel uncomfortable talking about art. So if they’re writing about art, and they don’t really want to talk about art, then they talk about money – and it’s like, ‘Whew! I didn’t have to talk about art!’” To which it’s tempting to respond: “Sure, Jeff, but it’s kinda hard to see the art when it has a $58m price tag hanging off its neck.”

Media roundup

The banking royal commission inevitably dominates this morning’s headlines, with the West Australian again doing well in the pun stakes: “Sell Sell Cell”, the print front page proclaims above its main report. Amid reams of analysis, Adele Ferguson in the Age and Sydney Morning Herald stands out for highlighting the shortcomings of Kenneth Hayne’s recommendations. The Townsville Bulletin understandably has other priorities, reporting that two men are feared missing as the flood crisis continues, while the Herald Sun reports that Monday’s Melbourne tower block fire has again focused urgent attention on combustible cladding throughout the city.

Coming up

A group opposed to the demolition of Sydney’s Allianz stadium at Moore Park has promised to start legal action today unless the NSW government abandons the plan.

Reserve Bank chiefs gather in Sydney for their monthly rate-setting meeting amid growing calls for a reduction in interest rates against a backdrop of rapidly falling house prices.

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