Good morning, folks. Hope you had good weekends.

1. Welcome to another stoush on quarantine. Western Australia Premier Mark McGowan said he was “getting to the end of my tether” over the federal government not helping states with quarantine arrangements. “This is why my request to the Commonwealth government to reduce the international arrivals cap is vital,” he said. “If we are going to crush this virus … we need to slow the flow of returning travellers.”

2. McGowan flagged that WA’s snap lockdown, or at least some of its measures, would continue beyond today. That’s despite no new cases being detected in the community yesterday.

3. Further to all that, there’s an interesting story in the Sydney Morning Herald today on the politics of border closures and the vaccine rollout. In short: the media’s fixation on international travel and borders may well not reflect the opinion of the population, who are by and large quite happy to keep borders shut and have rewarded state premiers who have implemented their own tough measures.

4. But, while we’re on borders: the SMH has also profiled a number of Australians who are using the Kiwi travel bubble to fly internationally. Before you try using the loophole, you should probably be aware that those who try the New Zealand route to abscond overseas do risk large fines or imprisonment.

5. Rent prices for houses outside of major cities skyrocketed in the first quarter of 2021, with higher average rents recorded in coastal cities like the Gold and Sunshine Coast than in Sydney and Canberra. Data from the ABS shows the exodus from capital cities has sustained well into 2021, as rent increases become more widespread across regional and coastal hubs. “The rents now on the Sunshine Coast and Gold Coast are comparable to the expensive parts of the ACT and Sydney,” Domain senior research analyst Nicola Powell said of the report’s findings.

6. A record 99,200 Australians living overseas returned to Australia over the 2019/2020 financial year, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. The arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic and the threat of border closures helped reverse long-standing migration patterns. The number of new temporary student visa holders also dropped 31.2%, roughly in line with the three months of border closures covered by the data.

7. Cryptocurrency exchanges are seeing a flood of signups for their self-managed super fund products, as Australians look to invest their retirement savings into digital assets. BTC Markets revealed that the platform had seen SMSF applicants increase fivefold and that Australians were actively trading tokens within their funds. Business Insider Australia spoke to a few SMSF trustees who have invested heavily into cryptocurrencies about how they trade and how much they’ve made.

8. Rapidly-spreading variants are fuelling India’s dramatic surge in coronavirus cases, experts said. The latest surge wouldn’t have been quite so bad, experts added, if the country hadn’t loosened social distancing restrictions or been slow to distribute vaccines to the public. Hospitals are running low on oxygen and bodies are piling up at crematoriums, according to local and international media.

9. SafeMoon, a new digital token launched in March, has rapidly captured the attention of crypto traders. It comes as dogecoin, that other venerable meme currency, didn’t quite strike the heights speculators hoped. Searches for the new cryptocurrency peaked early on April 20, the day dogecoin was meant to soar to $1. “SafeMoon is similar to dogecoin in the sense that it is unclear what the utility of the project is or will be,” Ava Labs president John Wu told Insider.

10. NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter completed its third flight over the Martian surface on Sunday. Sunday’s flight pushed the helicopter to its farthest distance yet: around 100.58m. David Lavery, the project’s program executive, said the flight was “nothing short of amazing.”

BONUS ITEM

Little tidbit for those following the “Byron Baes” saga: “Executives including Netflix’s director of public policy Nick O’Donnell flew to Byron Bay last week for crisis talks with stakeholders.”

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