Your noon Briefing
Welcome to your noon digest of what’s been making news and what to watch for.
Hello readers. Here is your noon round-up of today’s top stories so far and a long read for lunchtime.
Beyond compare
Private health insurer HBF has pulled its products from comparator websites after its internal analysis revealed the industry paid brokers more than $150 million last year.
“The market is shrinking but marketing and commission costs are increasing ...We want to make sure we can give our existing customers better rates, not spend too much in new business.”
John Van Der Wielen, HBF chief executive
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All or nothing
Scott Morrison has doubled down on the government’s determination to take an all or nothing approach to its $140 billion income tax package after the latest Newspoll showed it was the best-received budget since 2007.
“Our budget is a plan for a stronger economy ... A plan for lower, simpler and fairer taxes for all Australians. A plan to see businesses grow and invest in more jobs.”
Scott Morrison
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Christians terrorised
Another bomb blast in Indonesia’s second largest city of Surabaya last night killed three people, the bomb maker, his wife and eldest child, within hours of a wave of deadly attacks on three churches carried out by a young family recently deported from Turkey. It is not yet known whether it was connected to Sunday morning’s terror strikes on three churches across the city.
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Loss leader
Where have all the leaders gone, asks Adam Creighton. From the cricket pitch to the boardroom, from the pulpit to the parliament, the demand for more and better leadership is intensifying, but where is the supply?
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League of their own
Records fell on the final day of the English Premier League season as Manchester City beat Southampton 1-0 to become the first team to reach 100 points. Liverpool’s Mohamed Salah broke a record of his own as he established a new Premier League goalscoring mark with his 32nd goal of the season beating the previous 31-goal record he shared with Alan Shearer, Cristiano Ronaldo and Luis Suarez.
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The literary long read: Meanjin A-Z
Chief Literary Critic Geordie Williamson delves into the new Meanjin anthology of the best Australian short fiction to have appeared in the journal’s pages over the past four decades in chronological order, and finds it overflowing with narratives that interrogate what and how it is to be an Australian self.
“Since the magazine’s inception in the mid-1940s, it has published some of the best short fiction by Australian authors, from Marjorie Barnard to Peter Carey, Vance Palmer to Ellen van Neerven ... each of them idiosyncratically, even incorrigibly, antipodean in approach.”
Geordie Williamson
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Comment of the day
“The only reason Turnbull increased in the polls is because Abbott took a two week break from undermining (him).”
Margaret, in response to ‘Newspoll: Malcolm Turnbull’s popularity surges on the back of the budget’.
China’s great wall of silence
China deliberately concealed information about the coronavirus, and now it is fighting an inquiry. So what is Beijing hiding?
Your noon Briefing
Your 2-minute digest of the day’s top stories.