Good morning, this is Helen Sullivan bringing you the main stories and must-reads on Wednesday 15 May.

Top stories

Bill Shorten will target Clive Palmer during his final appeal to undecided Western Australian voters on Wednesday, declaring the controversial businessman will turn up in Canberra with “a political IOU almost as big as his ego” if voters lodge a protest vote with the United Australia party on 18 May. As the 2019 federal election campaign accelerates in the final week, Shorten will hit the hustings in Perth, visiting three seats – a visit trailing Scott Morrison, who made a brief final appeal to voters in the west at the start of the week. In a speech on Wednesday, Shorten will ask voters to do what they did at the last state election: “Reject the Liberal-One Nation alliance and choose a responsible, reforming Labor government.”

Thirty hammerhead sharks captured on the Great Barrier Reef and exported to a French aquarium over an eight-year period have all died in captivity. The federal government says it knows nothing about it. The deaths, which are the subject of legal action by Sea Shepherd France, could put a spotlight on the trade of threatened sharks caught in Australian waters because of a federal law that allows them to continue to be commercially fished. The last of the 30 sharks died two weeks ago, but the precise timeline and cause of all of the deaths is unclear. The aquarium Nausicaá has told European media the sharks died due to a fungal infection, but earlier reports suggested some of the animals had attacked each other. Sea Shepherd France is alleging the animals were mistreated in captivity and is taking legal action against Nausicaá.

Conservationists have joined the pro-brumby lobby to urge the New South Wales government to reduce collisions between cars and feral horses. But while brumby supporters have called for a reduction in speed limits and more warning signs, conservationists say the only way to reduce the risk is to reverse laws banning the large-scale culling of feral horses. Documents released through freedom-of-information laws show there were four crashes between horses and cars in the Kiandra area of the Snowy Mountains Highway alone last year, compared with six in 2017 and three each in 2016 and 2015. The figures were contained in an email released by the National Parks and Wildlife Service, but a spokesman from the Office of Environment and Heritage said it had no reports of collisions with horses in the past 12 months.

World

Facebook Twitter Pinterest British prime minister Theresa May ahead of a meeting with Nato secretary general Jens Stoltenberg at 10 Downing Street, London. Photograph: Will Oliver/EPA

Executive members of the 1922 Committee are preparing to ask Theresa May to step down immediately if she fails to set out a timetable for leaving Downing Street. Up to 10 members of the powerful group of senior Tory MPs have discussed telling the prime minister to name a date for the end of her premiership or face immediate demands to go. Meanwhile, Theresa May demanded a meeting with Jeremy Corbyn on Tuesday night.

A lawyer whose phone was targeted by spyware that exploits a WhatsApp vulnerability says it was an attempt to hack his human rights data. The lawyer is involved in a civil case brought against the Israeli surveillance company NSO Group whose sophisticated Pegasus malware has reportedly been used against Mexican journalists, and a prominent Saudi dissident living in Canada.

The top British general in the US-led coalition against Isis has said there is no increased threat from Iranian-backed forces in Iraq or Syria, directly contradicting US assertions used to justify a military buildup in the region.

Texas police on Tuesday named Pamela Turner as the woman shot dead by a police officer after she apparently called out “I’m pregnant” during an altercation with him, which was captured on video.



Germany’s AfD has turned on Greta Thunberg as it embraces climate denial. The rightwing populists plan to launch an attack on climate science in a vote drive before the EU elections.

Opinion and analysis

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘While the current DC movies mistake low lighting for high art, Burton’s steaming, decaying Gotham is an ugly thing in all the right ways. Like the LA of Blade Runner or the outer space of Alien, it’s a hand-built enterprise that looks all the better in an era of digital visuals.’ Photograph: Warner Bros/Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar

“Batman Returns is an infinitely weirder and more offbeat blockbuster that would be sanctioned today,” writes Alex Hess as he takes a look at what 90s Batman can teach us. “The Penguin is a gleefully foul creation – you couldn’t dream up a villain in starker contrast to Josh Brolin’s anodyne Thanos – while Michelle Pfeiffer’s sexpot Catwoman, her outfit an open homage to BDSM fetishism, is a reminder of how miserably celibate our superheroes have been left by the age of mass appeal.”

“Last weekend Bill Shorten did something unthinkable: he launched an arts policy. After six tumultuous, gooseflesh-raising years for Australia’s arts community, marked by deep cuts, an onslaught of grim news and a tremendous sense of uncertainty, the sector has come to expect nothing and fear everything,” writes Luke Buckmaster. “But there was an elephant in the room during that arts policy launch. Labor did not address the single-most important issue currently facing the future of the Australian screen industry: the subject of content quotas.”

Sport

The Matildas’ World Cup squad, announced yesterday by coach Ante Milicic, is youthful but ambitious, experienced but not arrogant. And it’s a squad that gives Australia every chance of a run deep into France 2019, with an appearance at the Parc Olympique Lyonnais in July by no means out of the equation, writes Richard Parkin.

South Africa’s track federation will appeal against the recent Caster Semenya ruling, the country’s sports ministry has confirmed. The government ministry said two of the three judges who heard the case at the court of arbitration for sport were “conflicted”.

Thinking time: ‘We all know Peter Dutton’

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Many voters appear undecided on whether to extend Peter Dutton’s political life. Photograph: Joel Carrett/EPA

Nine months on, Dutton’s leadership challenge still simmers in the background of every conversation with voters in Dickson, the seat the home affairs minister holds by a slim margin of 1.7%. Dickson has become the test site of a great political experiment: an exhausting, years-long local campaign in a place considered among the most disengaged in the country, where most people would rather talk about the footy than about politics. GetUp has knocked on more than 12,000 doors. Labor’s challenger, Ali France, has been on the ground campaigning for 15 months. And yet, with just days until the federal election, a huge swath of voters appear to be undecided, trying to weigh the policies and personalities, and the mountains upon mountains of campaign material.

Cheryl Springer, the president of the Pine Rivers Chamber of Commerce and the director of a successful solar business, says the decision is among the hardest of any election she can recall. “It’s very difficult for me, my husband, my sons, who traditionally would be Liberal voters, who would vote for Peter Dutton, to marry that up with what we know is going to happen with climate change under another Liberal government,” she says.

“We have got a lot to think about. And it has been discussed endlessly within the family of course, because we all know Peter Dutton.”

Media roundup

The ABC reports that an Australian is believed to be among four people who have died in Alaska following the collision of two small sightseeing planes. The Australian writes that Bill Shorten has started an “unholy war by targeting Morrison’s religion”. Bill Shorten appears on the cover of the Daily Telegraph this morning, with the headline The great divider, for a special report on life under Labor that asks “who will win and lose in Shorten’s class war?” The Sydney Morning Herald reveals that former rugby league player Jarryd Hayne “will be served a new charge of sexual intercourse without consent on Wednesday when he returns to a Newcastle court over allegations he sexually assaulted and bit a 26-year-old woman at her home in the Hunter in 2018”.

Coming up

The Fair Work Commission will hold a hearing in the annual minimum wage case in Sydney. ACTU president Michele O’Neill will address the hearing.

Public hearings in the royal commission into aged care quality and safety will continue focusing on residential care, in particular the needs of people living with dementia.

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