Your noon Briefing

Welcome to your noon roundup of what’s making news and what to watch for.

Hello readers. Here is your noon digest of what’s making news and a long read for lunchtime.

Commissioner Kenneth Hayne.jpg

Banks told: ‘No gags’

Banking royal commissioner Kenneth Hayne has backflipped on a warning against financial services victims or whistleblowers breaching gag orders in submissions to the inquiry. Opening the commission in a small, packed courtroom in Melbourne this morning, Mr Hayne also said he would be looking into why some banks and other financial services industry players he had asked for more information about their misconduct over the past five years had advised they would fail to meet a deadline of 4pm tomorrow. The commission last week advised that submissions should not include material that breaches nondisclosure or non-disparagement clauses in deals settling their disputes with the industry. However, Mr Hayne warned today that any institution that tried to enforce a gag clause against a person giving a submission faced “immediate consequences”.

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Janet Albrechtsen reflects on her falling out with the PM and that infamous Latham insult.

‘Ho’ to foe

Columnist Janet Albrechtsen has laid bare the deterioration of her friendship with Malcolm Turnbull, who in 2002 rang as a friend to alert her she had been called a “skanky ho” in federal parliament, but last year as Prime Minister blocked her from a board reappointment. “I worked out very early on in this job that you make a new set of friends every week and a new set of enemies, and that’s just kind of how it is,” Albrechtsen told The Australian’s Behind the Media podcast. In 2014 the Abbott government appointed Albrechtsen to the National Museum of Australia’s council for a three-year term. “At the end of last year I was told that I wouldn’t be renewed on the board of the National Museum even though I’d been told by the relevant minister that I was going to be renewed.”

“And then I heard that Malcolm Turnbull had said, ‘Well, I can’t possibly — why would I reappoint her? She is an enemy of mine.’ ”

Janet Albrechtsen

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Minister Rob Stokes speaks at a press conference about the unveiling of a revolutionary new Ôpop up schoolÕ solution to house Ultimo Public School students while their former school site is redeveloped into a new cutting edge educational facility. Pic Jenny Evans

Schools for rich

A push to make academically ­selective schools accessible to all students regardless of intellectual abilities has been bolstered by fresh data suggesting the sector is overwhelmingly catering for students from highly privileged backgrounds. Analysis by the Catholic Education Commission of Victoria shows that on average 70 per cent of students attending selective-entry schools in Sydney and Melbourne come from the top quartile of the population, as measured by socio-educational advantage. There are three Sydney schools — Northern Beaches Secondary College, Normanhurst Boys’ High and Hornsby Girls’ High — where four out of five students are classified as being in the top quartile.

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Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce and partner Vikki Campion at Palm Cove, Queensland on December

Dog days for Joyce

The Barnaby Joyce saga now has a life of its own — he’s become like the loaded dog of Henry Lawson fame, writes Peter Van Onselen in a key piece of analysis. Keep up with all the developments from parliament in our live rolling blog, PoliticsNow.

“It’s now about entitlements, political donations and question marks over whether the DPM’s burgeoning new relationship resulted in misuses on either front.”

Peter Van Onselen

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TOPSHOT - A photo taken on February 10, 2018 shows North Korean cheerleaders wearing masks as they perform during the women's preliminary round ice hockey match between the unified Korea team and Switzerland at the Pyeongchang 2018 Winter Olympics, at the Gangneung Ice Arena in Gangneung. According to Yonhap, South Korea's unification ministry has denied reports that the masks featured the image of North Korea's late founding leader Kim Il-sung. The masks were worn as the cheerleaders sang 'Whistle', a North Korean song whose lyrics are about a man's unrequited love for a female neighbor. / AFP PHOTO / Ed JONES

Northern exposure

A South Korean television crew set up a covert camera opposite the rooms occupied by the North Korean cheerleaders at the Winter Olympics. The angle was poor, the lighting bad and the ethics dubious, but the journalists were determined to crack one of the great mysteries of our time: what are North Koreans really like? The surveillance produced irrefutable evidence of just one thing: they like to sit around in their pyjamas in the evenings, watching television. Another reporter got a similar scoop when she photographed a group of cheerleaders visiting a public lavatory. Young North Korean women, it emerged, touch up their make-up in the mirror from time to time. Follow all the action from day 3 of the Winter Olympics here in our live blog.

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17/03/2017: Tjuntjuntjara remote community school 550 kms east of Kalgoorlie, in the Goldfields-Esperance region of Western Australia. The school Principal, Charlie Klein, has won a Commonwealth Bank teaching award.Pic by James Croucher

The long read: A decade of failure

It has become the Prime Minister’s annual statement of failure, a ­catalogue of defeat when the Closing the Gap report is presented full of detail about how attempts to ­reduce indigenous disadvantage have delivered little. For a stab at authenticity you might introduce it in a few rote-learnt words of the local Ngunnawal language: a rhetorical device, an incantation to distract from the modern-day smoothing of the pillow.

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Comment of the day

“Show some gravitas and dignity, Mr Joyce, and just step down.”

Mary, in response to ‘Barnaby Joyce’s hold on power at risk over affair: Nats’.