Good morning, this is Graham Russell bringing you the main stories and must-reads on Thursday 14 December.

Top stories

The five-year-long royal commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse wraps up today, and presents its final report and recommendations to the governor general. It has been called “life-changing”, “life-saving” and “a call to arms” on child protection for all institutions. Experts agree the painstaking, sensitive and thorough work the commission has done over the past five years is only the beginning of the road to reform: the true measure of its success lies in changes to be implemented by bodies including state and federal governments. “Has it changed the lives of children? Has it changed the lives of survivors? Are we making the world a better place?” asks Prof Leah Bromfield, the co-director of the Australian Centre for Child Protection at the University of South Australia.

Manny Waks summed up what the royal commission process has meant to him as a victim: “It was us against everyone and then the royal commission came along. Suddenly people said, ‘Hang on, what you have been saying has been true all along.’ And even more people came forward. And it was such a vindication and validation that we didn’t do anything wrong.” For her part, Bromfield hopes the official marking of the end of the commission’s work on Thursday won’t mean that its findings to date and the stories of survivors fall from the public consciousness. “I really worry about what that would say to survivors,” she said. “We’ve had five years where we’ve been trying to say. ‘You matter. This matters. Your story matters.’ And if we drop it like a hot potato, I can’t imagine how devastating the impact of that would be.”

Democrat Doug Jones has beaten his Donald Trump-backed Republican rival Roy Moore in the diehard Republican state of Alabama, setting off a political earthquake likely to shake Washington. The victory reduces the Republican’s Senate majority to one seat and and raises the prospect that the 2018 midterm elections could dramatically shift the balance of power in Congress. “Alabama’s not an outlier, it’s a trend,” said Tom Perez, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee. The columnist Richard Wolffe describes the result as a red line for Trump-style politics. And, in a fresh blow to Donald Trump, one of his most prominent African American supporters, Omarosa Manigault Newman, plans to leave the administration next month. The former Apprentice contestant joined the White House as director of communications for the Office of Public Liaison to work on outreach programs. The decision comes at the start of what’s expected to be a round of departures heading into the new year.

The Greens have called on the government to cap the pay of the most senior public servants and give low-ranked public service workers an annual 4% pay rise as a way to boost stagnant inflation and wages growth. The Parliamentary Budget Office has costed the plan, and puts it at $963m. The Greens say the Coalition could lead by example after urging workers to demand pay rises from private-sector employers to help counter the problem of long-term stagnant wages. The party wants the pay of top bureaucrats capped at at five times the full-time adult average weekly earnings – about $480,000 – which would involve a significant cut for several department heads. It also suggested the pay rises apply to non-executive public servants.

A renowned surgeon has admitted marking his initials on the livers of two patients while performing a transplant in the UK. Simon Bramhall pleaded guilty on Wednesday to two counts of assault after using the gas argon – which stops livers bleeding during operations and can highlight an area to be worked on – to sign “SB” on the organs. Speaking after Bramhall’s suspension in 2013, Joyce Robins, of Patient Concern, said: “This is a patient we are talking about, not an autograph book.” A prosecutor, Tony Badenoch, told the court the case was without legal precedent in criminal law.

Students from families with lower education levels are as far as four years behind their better-off peers when it comes to reading and writing, and the gaps have worsened since 2008, an analysis of the latest Naplan test score results says. The results prompted a stern response from the federal education minister, Simon Birmingham, who called them a “wake-up call” and used them to encourage state education ministers to accept his push for a mandatory phonics check for year one students. But the former Productivity Commission economist and convenor of public education lobby group Save Our Schools, Trevor Cobbold, said the scores also provided a snapshot of entrenched disadvantage in the school system. The results, published on Wednesday, show that the proportion of students meeting national minimum standards either flat-lined or declined across most year groups since last year, while average reading and numeracy skills of Australian primary students have improved only slightly since the tests were introduced a decade ago.

Sport

The four-time Tour de France winner cyclist Chris Froome is fighting to salvage his reputation after a failed drug test during his victory in the Vuelta a España in September. A joint investigation by the Guardian and Le Monde revealed that the 32-year-old Team Sky cyclist had double the permitted levels of the asthma medication salbutamol in his body. Froome admitted he had upped his dose of the drug during the race – but insisted he had not broken any rules.

Media coverage of England’s status as a “team of raucous boozehounds” will delight Australia, who have quietly gone about their business of winning the Ashes, and can complete a series victory with a win in the third Test which starts today. Meanwhile, Joe Root has had to step in to quell suggestions of a rift after Jimmy Anderson appeared to blame coaching staff for England’s bowling performance in the first innings in Adelaide.

Thinking time

The Endless Summer. Photograph: courtesy of Second Sight

In one of the last interviews he gave before his death this week, the surf film pioneer Bruce Brown talked about the making of The Endless Summer, the low-budget 1950s gamble that turned into a $33m cult classic. He tells how early Hollywood attempts at surf movies “made us out to be a bunch of idiots having food fights”, spurring him to show it was a legitimate sport. He dipped into his own pocket to finance what he called “a kind of pipe dream” and initially planned only to visit South Africa, then discovered that around-the-world tickets were cheaper. The film’s stars Mike Hynson – who didn’t tell his mother where he was going – and Robert August were chosen mainly because they could take off for three months and pay for their own air fares.

The mining boom has ended, and the latest housing price figures released this week suggest we have also reached the end of the housing boom, says Greg Jericho. “Since the RBA began cutting interest rates, the housing boom has mostly been about Sydney and to a lesser extent, Melbourne. So it is significant that the latest residential housing price data released on Tuesday showed that the housing prices in Sydney fell 1.4% – the biggest fall since December 2015.”

Judge Roy Moore was one of the scariest – and most unpleasant – men I have ever met. So says Stephen Bates, a former religious affairs correspondent who spent some time with him in Alabama in 2006, when Moore was running for nomination to be the Republican candidate for state governor. He made the state capital, Montgomery, sound like Gomorrah, a hotbed of decadence and corruption. There were too many immigrants demanding to take the driving test in Persian, he bizarrely insisted. During lunch at a restaurant, Moore was brusque and charmless, regarding me as he might a stain. I asked him how he would feel if he lost the governor’s primary. “I am not running because of ambition,” he said. “I am running to serve the will of God. If he judges that is not the place I serve him, well, I will probably be happy.” Then he paused and corrected himself: “I will be happy.

What’s he done now?

Clearly smarting from Alabama’s rejection of the candidate he heavily endorsed, Donald Trump has taken to Twitter to say he never thought Roy Moore would be able to win and that the “deck was stacked against him”. He is clearly also mindful of the makeup of Congress, referring to “razor-thin margins” in the House and Senate. The president has also taken issue with the (alternative) fact that not only is the mainstream media’s coverage of him fake but also negative.

Media roundup

The Sydney Morning Herald has gone big with its ReachTel poll, which gives the Liberal candidate John Alexander a clear – though shrinking – lead in the run-up to this weekend’s Bennelong byelection. It claims the revelations about Labor senator Sam Dastyari’s China links have not helped the party’s candidate, Kristina Keneally. The Australian Financial Review says it has had a peek at Monday’s mid-year economic and fiscal outlook and is pretty sure that universities will lose billions in funding via cuts that do not require legislation. And the Courier-Mail goes for a poster front page to hail Brisbane’s favourite son, Jeff Horn, after he successfully defended his WBO welterweight boxing world title by defeating Briton Gary Corcoran in the 11th round. Vegas looms next, it says, under the headline: “What a belter.”

Coming up

The anxious wait for 77,000 HSC students in New South Wales is finally over this morning with results released by SMS, email and online.

A parliamentary committee in Western Australia is conducting an inquiry into laws that would allow citizens to make informed decisions regarding their end-of-life choices.

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