Good morning, this is Eleanor Ainge Roy bringing you the main stories and must-reads on Tuesday 27 February.

Top stories

Australians are more troubled by any possible misuse of entitlements than they are about the relationship between Barnaby Joyce and Vikki Campion, the latest Guardian Essential poll shows. The latest fortnightly survey of 1,028 respondents suggests voters are more worried about Campion being moved between offices after she left Joyce’s office as a consequence of their relationship (50%) than they are about the former deputy prime minister having a sexual relationship with a subordinate (23%).

With the media frenzy around Joyce’s travails gathering pace over the past fortnight before his resignation as National party leader and deputy prime minister, voters were asked their view about whether journalists should expose the private affairs of politicians. While politicians have been almost uniformly critical of the intrusive media reporting of the relationship, voters were split, with slightly more voters approving of the media scrutiny (44%) than disapproving (41%) of it.

Russian president Vladimir Putin has ordered five-hour daily ceasefires in the besieged Syrian enclave of eastern Ghouta after eight days of intense fighting and hundreds of civilian deaths. The “humanitarian pause” effectively replaces a United Nations security council resolution that had demanded a month-long ceasefire in the embattled region. Putin’s move highlighted in stark terms Russia’s primacy in Syrian affairs and the UN’s failure to impose an end to the fighting in the area bordering Damascus. The move by Moscow follows mounting condemnation of the violence, with the UN secretary general, António Guterres, describing the situation in Ghouta as “hell on earth”. “I am embarrassed for the UN security council,” said Ghanem Tayara, the chairman of the Union of Medical Care and Relief Organisations, which helps run dozens of hospitals in Syria. “The mightiest nations on the planet cannot enforce the most basic standards of human rights and decency.”

The New South Wales ombudsman is investigating whether WaterNSW misled it when providing data last year on the number of prosecutions and enforcement actions it had taken in the previous 15 months. The ombudsman confirmed a second special report will be tabled in the first week of March but declined to outline its contents. Special reports are a last resort when the ombudsman deems that a report to the minister is insufficient. The new report will say that statistics provided to it by WaterNSW on prosecutions and compliance activities since July 2016 were seriously overstated by the agency.

Antarctica’s king penguins could disappear by the end of the century, a new study has found. Rising temperatures and overfishing in the pristine waters around the Antarctic risk the health of the penguin’s last great wilderness. Up to 70% of king penguins could either disappear or be forced to find new breeding grounds. The findings come amid growing concern over the future of the Antarctic. Earlier this month a separate study found that a combination of climate change and industrial fishing is threatening the krill population in Antarctic waters, with a potentially disastrous impact on whales, seals and penguins.

As the once-safe Labor seat of Batman in inner-city Melbourne gears up for a byelection on 17 March, Guardian Australia reporter Calla Wahlquist joins serial Greens candidate Alex Bhathal for a day to find out whether she has a chance with voters. Concern about climate change and Australia’s asylum seeker policies are emerging as key issues, giving Bhathal a very real chance against Labor’s star candidate, the former ACTU president Ged Kearney. “People who you would just think are not going to be voting for the Greens come up to me and say, ‘I love the Greens, I really hate what’s happening to refugees,’” Bhathal says. “People would be amazed ... at the diversity of people who are concerned about that.”

Sport

Australia used to be masters of the multi-phase game during the Wallabies’ golden era in the late 1990s and early 2000s. For the country’s current Super Rugby teams, it may be a case of going back to the future as that successful formula comes back into fashion.

In the Football Weekly podcast today Max and the pod discuss the Carabao Cup final, Arsenal’s decade-long capitulation, Mourinho’s game-changing substitutions, goalkeeping howlers, Sol Campbell’s self-confidence and more.

Thinking time

For more than two decades, the Australian indie rock outfit Augie March have been churning out solid albums distinguished by wordy lyrics which – mostly – avoided calling anyone “baby”. Bootikins, out this week, is up there with the best of them – a meditation on growing old and the natural world.

Two of Australia’s most acclaimed writers, Helen Garner and Kim Scott, took to the stage together at Perth writers’ week. Brigid Delaney hears them sharing their thoughts on literature, writing communities, #MeToo and more. “Garner could deliver her shopping list – indeed, she recently did just that – and we would still be on the edge of our seats. Scott, meanwhile, is the author of some of the most beautiful and urgent missives from Indigenous Australia, and is a truth-teller about this country’s history of conflict.”

The latest in our Present Traces series of films from Macquarie University recreates the meeting between Henry Lawson and the Indigenous Australian first world war veteran Douglas Grant. In an accompanying column, Paul Daley writes how Grant’s story offers up “so many competing narratives of Australian history. There is the frequently overlooked story of modern Australia – that of violent dispossession and all its profound reverberations through intergenerational Indigenous trauma and disadvantage. And there is Anzac, the national birthing narrative that legions of Australian political leaders and conservative polemicists cling to – the (tragically failed) invasion that has inveigled cultural consciousness and national definition since the 1980s to the detriment of so much else.”

What’s he done now?

Donald Trump has renewed his criticism of an armed sheriff’s deputy who failed to enter a high school in Parkland, Florida during a mass shooting this month, saying he would have run into the building even if he did not possess a weapon. Trump said officers who were outside the school at the time of the shooting “weren’t exactly medal of honour winners”.

Media roundup

The Sydney Morning Herald leads with an investigation into thousands of tonnes of NSW garbage being shipped to Queensland where it is dumped in landfill instead of recycled. The University of Western Australia has investigated 33 allegations of sexual harassment on campus in recent years, the West Australian reports, including an alleged rape that resulted in an international student having his student visa cancelled. And the ABC has an opinion piece on the degrading hazing rituals revealed at the University of Sydney, saying the excuse that participation was “voluntary” let the disturbing rituals flourish. Nina Funnell writes that some alumni speak in nostalgic terms about hazing practices and advocate for their continuation.



Coming up

Senate estimates hearings continue in Canberra. In Victoria, an inquiry into youth justice centres is due to publish its report.

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