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

Top stories

Australia’s stillbirth rate has not changed in more than 20 years, and the rate among Aboriginal mothers is twice as high. A landmark report has found that the change in the number of stillbirths in Australia is out of step with that of other countries. There were emotional scenes in parliament on Tuesday night as Labor senator Malarndirri McCarthy tabled the report in a wooden coolamon, traditionally used in Indigenous families for carrying babies. Other members of the Senate committee, Liberal Jim Molan and Labor’s Kristina Keneally, both held back tears as they spoke of how stillbirth had affected their families. Keneally read aloud the names of every baby stillborn to parents who had given public evidence to the inquiry, concluding with her own daughter, Caroline.



Meanwhile, Kerryn Phelps’ bill for emergency medical transfers from offshore detention has support from Labor, but the party has demanded changes that would keep a ministerial power to refuse transfers. The independent MP has reiterated that “clinicians rather than bureaucrats” should make medical decisions about transfers but said she was open to “ministerial oversight”. Labor on Tuesday also resolved to support a Greens bill stopping the commonwealth from providing financial assistance to coal-fired power plants, and there is an effort to secure the requisite parliamentary numbers for an upset as the Morrison government moves ahead with its controversial energy package. Negotiations are under way with crossbenchers in both chambers.

US senators say they are certain the Saudi crown prince ordered the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. “If the crown prince went in front of a jury he would be convicted in 30 minutes,” Bob Corker, the Republican chair of the Senate foreign relations committee told journalists immediately after briefing from CIA boss Gina Haspel. A handful of leading senators from both parties met Haspel, who flew to Turkey to hear tapes of the 2 October killing from Turkish intelligence intercepts. The Trump administration says there is no “direct evidence” of the prince’s culpability, with the defence secretary James Mattis insisting there was no “smoking gun”. After Tuesday’s Haspel briefing, Republican senator Lindsey Graham said: “There’s not a smoking gun, there’s a smoking saw.”

Tasmania’s critically endangered swift parrots are facing a new threat to survival – polyamory. A study by researchers at the Australian National University has found that a chronic shortage of female swift parrots has wreaked havoc on the bird’s usually monogamous breeding habits. Lead researcher Professor Robert Heinsohn said: “Usually they would be quite conservative, boring even, with their mating habits, they are just monogamous pairings. At the moment there are all these bachelor males … they turn up at the nests of the breeding pairs and they harass the females endlessly.” Researchers took blood samples from hatchlings to conduct a DNA analysis and found that more than half the nests had more than one father. Heinsohn said the pressure from bachelor males distracted the breeding pair from feeding, which reduced survival rates.

More than half of all Australian renters live in a home in need of repairs, according to a national survey that also shows many tenants believe requesting work on their home could lead to eviction. A new report by Choice, National Shelter and the National Association of Tenant Organisations seeks to provide a picture of the lives of the 2.6 million households in Australia who now rent. It finds a large number live in poor-quality homes and on insecure tenancies, with one in 10 saying they had been evicted without a reason at least once. The survey of 1,547 renters found 51% said they were living in a home that required repairing but 68% thought that asking for the work to be done would lead to a rent rise.

Theresa May’s authority has been thrown into further doubt after MPs passed a historic motion to hold the UK government in contempt over its failure to release the cabinet legal advice on the Brexit deal. The vote is an unprecedented move in recent political history and comes at the start of five days of debate leading up to the final vote on May’s Brexit deal next week. Meanwhile, Nigel Farage has quit Ukip after 25 years, saying the party he led to its greatest election successes was now unrecognisable because of the “fixation” with the anti-Muslim policies of its leader, Gerard Batten.

France’s gilets jaunes (yellow jackets) have vowed to continue protests despite a fuel tax U-turn. The French government has suspended plans to introduce an eco-fuel tax, after three weeks of increasingly violent protests across the country. Bowing to pressure from the street, the prime minister, Édouard Philippe, also announced an immediate freeze on gas and electricity prices. But the movement behind three weeks of increasingly violent protests across the country declared it wanted more concessions from France’s leaders and would not accept “crumbs”. The national protests have led to the worst violence in Paris in half a century.

Sport

The first Test of the summer starts tomorrow as Australia take on India in Adelaide. But a cloud will hang over batsman Usman Khawaja, whose brother has been charged with attempting to pervert justice and forgery after he allegedly used fake documents containing a terror plot to kill senior politicians to “set up” his colleague over a personal grievance.

Watford take on Manchester City among four games in the English Premier League this morning. You can follow all the action from this morning’s matches at our live clockwatch blog here.

Thinking time

In our new monthly spot, we feature 20 new and unmissable songs. This month includes Troye Sivan’s Somebody To Love – a stripped down version of Freddie Mercury’s most rousing anthems. All but the first two verses and the chant are discarded, the song relying solely upon Sivan’s sterling vocals, some minimal musical accompaniment and lashes of swirling space.



Violence reverberates generationally, which is why a formal truth and justice commission is a crucial step towards conciliation with Indigenous Australians, writes Paul Daley. While a constitutionally enshrined Indigenous voice to parliament remains hostage to toxic mainstream political manoeuvring and corresponding media coverage, politics is also failing the other Uluru priority: truth-telling. “Truth-telling about the violence against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people on the colonial and postcolonial frontier at the hands of British redcoats, European settlers, militias, police and raiding parties is the great void of Australian historiography, national consciousness and conscience,” he writes.

MC Escher was apparently a bad student. He failed the second grade. He flunked multiple subjects while studying architecture. It is funny, then, that his mind-bending works – the impossible buildings, the complex transitioning shapes – adorn the walls of classrooms the world over. If the National Gallery of Victoria had just gathered a bunch of MC Escher prints together and slapped the art up in any old order, many of us would still have walked away happy. So how does Japanese design studio Nendo fit into the picture?

What’s he done now?

Eric Trump and George Conway, Kellyanne Conway’s husband, are feuding on Twitter about witness tampering and wife respecting. It’s undignified and entertaining and meanwhile Rebecca Solnit writes that Trump’s countless scams are finally catching up to him.

Media roundup

Australia’s $100m first world war commemorative centre in northern France, which was given the green light by the Abbott government, is on track to miss its first-year visitor target by tens of thousands, the Sydney Morning Herald reveals.

Four retired police detectives have spoken to the Australian about Lawyer X, saying they want the ­Victoria police royal commission to “examine the way select evidence from unreliable gangland ­informants has polluted the justice system.”

The Trump-Xi market euphoria has evaporated as Trump, calling himself “a tariff man”, casts doubt on the trade war pause, the Australian Financial Review reports.

Coming up

Senators are due to debate and vote on the Labor bill protecting gay students against discrimination in religious schools.

The Australian screen industry Aacta awards ceremony is on this evening.

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