Another Muslim serial rapist

Gets only nine years. If a Muslim serial rapist (such as Bilal Skaf) gets a really long sentence, the legal establishment turns itself inside out to overturn the sentence -- though they don't seem to have been able to do anything about the disgusting Hakeem Hakeem -- so I suppose this is the best we can hope for

A man has been jailed for at least nine years for raping four women and attacking two others. Sedat Avci, 21, of Broadmeadows, terrorised women in the northern suburbs between April and August 2005. Most victims were walking alone in the evening and were subjected to terrifying sex attacks. Avci had pleaded guilty to seven counts of rape.

County Court Judge Jeanette Morrish said yesterday Avci had waged a "cowardly, aggressive and violent campaign" on vulnerable women but believed his prospects of rehabilitation were good because of his youth and his return to the Muslim faith. She sentenced Avci to 16 years in jail, with a minimum of nine. The maximum term for rape is 25 years.

Crime Victims Support Association president Noel McNamara slammed the jail term and said he planned to write to the acting Director of Public Prosecutions, Jeremy Rapke. "That's 1.5 years each for six women who have got life sentences -- it's a terrible disgrace," Mr McNamara said. "It's a great insult to the victims and the community." Mr Rapke will review the case.

Avci was just 19 when he violently assaulted women in Coburg, Coolaroo, Brunswick and Hawthorn. One victim was about to drive off when Avci asked to use her mobile phone. He then forced his way into her car and repeatedly raped her. In a victim impact statement read in court, the woman said her life had been turned upside down. "I will have to work every day of my life to make sure this doesn't define who I am," she said. A victim who was raped twice while walking her dogs said the memory of the attack haunted her.

Avci also pleaded guilty to a count of aggravated burglary and another charge of robbery after attacking a pregnant woman in front of her children, aged three and four.

The serial rapist was arrested in August 2005 after police matched his fingerprints to those on a newspaper at the scene of an attack. A psychiatric report revealed Avci did not have a mental impairment at the time of the attacks, but was using amphetamines. Avci threatened most of his victims with a knife and in one case told a woman who tried to escape he would shoot her if she tried again.

In a letter of apology to his victims, Avci said he had "no good excuse" for what he had done. "To say sorry is not enough to heal the heartache and pain I have caused to your lives and your families' lives," he said.

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Hope for the innumerate

A teaching program that helps students "trust their heads" to recall basic mathematical facts has turned students failing maths into some of the best performers. The QuickSmart program, developed at the University of New England at Armidale in northern NSW, targets students failing national numeracy benchmarks who enter high school struggling with basic arithmetic and who often still count on their fingers.

John Pegg, who developed the program with Lorraine Graham, said QuickSmart was a last chance for students who needed to be proficient in basic maths before the end of primary school to develop the skills and proficiency required in high school. "These students use inefficient and error-prone approaches to learning and recalling information," he said. Professor Pegg, director of the National Centre of Science, ICT and Mathematics Education for Rural and Regional Australia, said students likened the improvement to "trusting their heads", meaning the answer to a sum like 7x5 came immediately.

The program received funding last week worth $200,000 from the federal Government and is being used with 800 students in 60 schools in NSW and the Northern Territory, including remote indigenous communities, where the rise in test scores is more than double the improvement in the average student.

At Orara High School in Coffs Harbour on the NSW north coast, about 70 students in Year 7, with about one in three having failed to meet minimal national numeracy benchmarks, were then taught using QuickSmart. Learning support teacher Lyn Alder said the school had a large proportion of students from low socio-economic backgrounds and about 11 per cent were indigenous. When they sat the NSW numeracy test earlier this year, the improvement in their results had almost doubled compared with the rest of the state, while the indigenous students' marks more than doubled compared with other indigenous students.

Ms Alder said about 40 per cent of the students jumped two levels in the four-level assessment system, from low to proficient or elementary to high. "It's given students the confidence to put up their hands and answer questions in class," she said. "They may not always be correct but they're prepared to have a go, and when you're dealing with students in a low socio-economic school, that's not always the norm."

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Mad ideas crack me up

Andrew Bolt comments on the latest Greenie commandments

NOT a month goes by without even more crackpot schemes to save a planet that shows no sign of sickness - and we are the ones to suffer. It's official: global warming zealots really do want humans to go rot to "save" the planet. Barrister Robert Larkins, founder of the Victorian Environment Defenders' Office, this week confirmed what I always suspected. No more cremations, he demanded. Hell is hot enough without us cremating our globe as well. As he puts it: "Cremation produces carbon dioxide and pollutants that go directly into the atmosphere."

And what does all our wicked carbon dioxide do, children? Repeat what you've been taught, please: That's right: it is killing your world. It is causing blistering heat. It is causing seas to drown whole islands. So, plop the dear departed in a cardboard box and offer his body to the species of life that best symbolises sacred Gaia: feed him to . . . a tree.

Oh, yes. Heed the sermon of "natural burial advocate" Roger Short, a Melbourne University professor: "Being buried at the base of a tree is such a simple way to go . . . it's the best sequester of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere that's ever been invented, powered by sunlight and giving off oxygen as a waste product."

Such a comfort to the grieving. Feed humans to the trees to save the world. Says it all. After all, what is there left that we must not give up to "save the planet"? We're told by the Greens to "use alternatives to air conditioner", by Greenpeace co-founder Paul Watson to fly not in jets but "solar power blimps", by Greens leader Bob Brown to scrap coal-fired power, by Rough Guides founder Mark Ellingham to "travel less", by the Brumby Government to shower shorter, and by the Howard Government to use only stark-light low-energy globes.

You'll be sweaty, smelly and stuck at home lit like a toilet block with only a dole cheque to cover your soaring power bills. But that's OK -- it's to save the world, a cause so great that we must even sacrifice our children.

Absolutely true. Britain's Optimum Population Trust this year said having a large family should be regarded as an "environmental misdemeanor". Alarmist of the Year Tim Flannery has called for our population to be cut by up to a third, and ABC radio even ran a lecture by a green zealot suggesting we "put something in the water, a virus that would be specific to the human reproductive system and would make a substantial proportion of the population infertile."

Not a month goes by without even more crackpot schemes to make us suffer to save a planet that shows no sign of sickness, or gratitude. Here's some newspaper reports from the last two weeks alone.

Item: More kangaroos should be slaughtered and eaten to help save the world from global warming . . . Greenpeace . . . urged Aussies to substitute some red meat for roo (or vice versa, actually) to help reduce land clearing and the release of methane gas. Now, even Skippy must die to save the planet from gassy cows?

Item: Plans to switch 90 per cent of milk supplies to long-life UHT have been put forward by (British) Government officials. They claim the move would help curb carbon emissions. Drink foul coffee after eating your roo -- for the planet's sake!

Item: Flat screen television manufacturers will have to become greener after the release of a (Howard Government) discussion paper suggested many plasma and some LCD TVs could be banned for being energy hungry.

Remember how Mao Zedong once demanded the Chinese peasants melt their cooking woks for scrap iron to feed the revolution? How we laughed at such a brainless gesture, which just left people even worse off. Now, the laugh is on us. And, again like Mao, we force even children to do useless work to show their faithful hearts. Here's a news report on an Adelaide child care centre which has just been given an certificate for forcing children to work for the planet:

"They help their carers by planting seedlings in the yard, recycling plastic containers and hanging out the washing on the line, rather than using the power-hungry clothes dryer." Work, children, work! It won't alter Adelaide's weather by a zephyr, but the planet demands your sacrifice, even though it hasn't actually heated since 1998 and may soon cool.

Of course, you'll console yourself with the thought that nobody could ever force such schemes on you. Not in a democracy. But the faithful have thought of that problem, as Professor David Shearman, an assessor with the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, explained this week on ABC radio.

"Do you believe that climate change can be arrested under our own sacrosanct system of liberal democracy?", he sneered. We voters would never agree to the "solution" to global warming, and "this condemns democracy".

Shearman, a medico, had a better idea: "If you were a patient in the intensive care unit, would you wish each decision made authoritatively by a medical expert or by a democratic committee?" So, feed democracy to the trees, too! To save the planet! And I can only ask: save the planet for what? It sure isn't being saved for humans, or even Skippy. So for whom?

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MORE OF THOSE GREAT GOVERNMENT HEALTH SERVICES

Three current articles below:

Negligent NSW public hospital staff doomed baby boy

GRIEF-stricken Fatima Abdallah should be celebrating her baby boy's four-month birthday this weekend - instead she is mourning his death and left wondering how a Sydney hospital failed to diagnose her son's life-threatening heart condition. Marwan Yahya died on June 19, five days after being sent home from Liverpool Hospital despite showing signs of a serious problem.

NSW Health has launched an investigation but his heartbroken mother contacted The Daily Telegraph yesterday desperate for authorities to explain the bungle. "It's been four months and I still haven't been told anything," a distraught Ms Abdallah said yesterday. "I keep calling the hospital but they brush me off and tell me to wait. I have a feeling they just want this to go away."

The first-time mum knew something was wrong with her little boy just hours after he was born. Marwan was blue around his mouth and fingers, breathing faintly and, as the hours passed, he refused to eat - just laying in his cot. Ms Abdallah said she asked nurses what was wrong but was told his condition was "normal". "I didn't enjoy those first few days with him because I was so worried. I knew something was wrong. I felt like they were treating me as if I had no idea," she said.

Her worst fears were confirmed when the two-day-old infant was sent home and started having seizures because his brain was starved of oxygen. After rushing back to Liverpool Hospital, Ms Abdallah and Marwan were transferred to the Children's Hospital Westmead, where tests revealed he had hypoplastic left heart syndrome. Doctors told the family that, had the condition been detected at birth, Marwan could possibly be alive today. "They had booked him on a flight to Melbourne where the operation is performed but when they found out how severe his brain damage was, there was nothing they could do," Ms Abdallah said. "We were told to say goodbye to him and they turned off the machines."

The harrowing ordeal follows a litany of hospital scandals that have embarrassed Health Minister Reba Meagher. South Western Sydney Health Service apologised to the family when they met with them yesterday. A health service spokeswoman said the disease that claimed Marwan can be "difficult to detect at birth". Ms Abdallah said she could not comprehend how doctors or nurses at Liverpool could have missed her son's condition. "He may still have been alive today if someone had listened to me," she said.

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Man dies after old ambulance breaks down

Plenty of money for bureaucrats but no money for new vehicles

A MAN has died after paramedics from a broken-down ambulance were forced to run almost two blocks to try to revive him in Melbourne's southeast. Ambulance Employees Australia (AEU) general secretary Steve McGhie confirmed a 56-year-old man died from a cardiac arrest before paramedics could reach him at his Elwood home last night. Mr McGhie said an ambulance broke down about two blocks from the house about 6pm (AEST), forcing paramedics to run with life-saving equipment, including a defibrillator. But the man's heart had stopped by the time the paramedics arrived.

"The vehicle had 160,000 on its odometer - it should be retired ... even though the Government has assured Victorians that they are safe and secure," Mr McGhie said. "The ambulance had power failure and they couldn't keep it running. "They grabbed the defibrillators and the oxygen equipment and ran to the house. "They tried to resuscitate the man at the scene but were unsuccessful."

The death follows a bitter dispute between the Metropolitan Ambulance Service (MAS) and its members' union over "unsafe" vehicles. Paramedics last week said the MAS threatened them with $6000 fines unless they use the vehicles, which have exceeded their agreed service life of three years or 150,000km. About 45 Mercedes ambulances had exceeded their agreed lifespan, Mr McGhie said.

Mr McGhie called on Victorian Health Minister Daniel Andrews to get new ambulances on the road, saying it "was a sad state of affairs in Victoria" if paramedics are forced to run to save their patients. "This is the sixth incident in the last two weeks and the Government has to step in," he said. "They've got to get more vehicles."

Tim Pigot, spokesman for Mr Andrews, said it was an operational decision by the MAS of how they managed resources. "We have more than doubled funding for ambulance services across Victoria since 1999," Mr Pigot said. "This has resulted in an extra 738 paramedics and 101 ambulances on Victorian roads. "Victoria has the safest and best ambulance system in Australia." Metropolitan Ambulance Service spokesman James Howe said the service was investigating the incident.

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Inert bureaucracy incapable of dealing with the sort of family problems they are set up to deal with

More "child welfare" destructiveness. They should sack all the Left-indoctrinated social workers and employ experienced mothers instead -- who would have learnt some commonsense from experience and who should at least be a lot less intimidatory. If the mother below had REALLY been a druggie, they would have had the kid back with her straight away. That is the firm rule of social workers worldwide -- because it shows how "non-judgmental" they are. Accusing normal middle-class families of "witchcraft" and the like is fine, however

All Michelle wants is what most mothers take for granted. To be able to tuck her seven-year-old son tightly into bed every night with a kiss and a fond "sleep tight". But for five long years, that has not happened often. For Michelle is the mother of Cameron, the autistic boy whose plight of being trapped for five years in an inappropriate respite centre for severely disabled and disturbed people in Hobart was raised in the Tasmanian Parliament on Thursday.

After a public furore yesterday, the State Government announced last night that Cameron would finally be leaving the Lutana facility where he has lived most of his young life this weekend to live with a foster family. The Government's Director of Children Services, Mark Byrne, said on Thursday that despite four years of trying, it was not possible for Cameron to live with his own family. Human Services Minister Lara Giddings wrote in a letter to Opposition Leader Will Hodgman in March that "after many efforts to support Cameron in his home environment" his mother had acknowledged "he could not return home as she was unable to care and support him".

It is these sort of official judgments and comments that make Michelle distraught, bewildered and angry. "I'd move heaven and earth to get Cameron living here with us," a tearful Michelle said yesterday. "There's not a day that goes by that I don't wish he was here with all of us. "And I've never said I won't have him. I just want him home."

The first Michelle and her partner knew about the uproar over Cameron's plight was when she looked at the newspaper yesterday morning. She could not believe what she read. First, that letters expressing dire concern about her son and his future had been circulating between ministers and within high levels of the Government for the past 12 months, without her being told. Second, that the Government was claiming Cameron's mother did not want him to return home. And finally, that allegations were being made that she was somehow a "troubled mother" with a dysfunctional lifestyle and a drug problem who had given Cameron a horrific start to life and who then rarely visited him while he was in care.

Michelle and her partner claim nothing could be further from the truth. It is why yesterday morning they rang Mr Hodgman -- who highlighted Cameron's predicament in Parliament this week after 11 months of government inaction -- and then got in touch with the Mercury. They wanted to tell their side of the story. And it is a very different one to that portrayed.

Instead of being a tale of abandonment and a callous lack of caring by a little boy's mother, it's a story of how battling families can become so worn-down and demoralised by government bureaucracy, bullying and inertia that they feel they no longer have any rights or say about their own child. Mixed in with that is a sorry saga of government departments failing to communicate with each other. And of a mother, fearing judgments were being made about her every time she visited her son or met Child Protection case managers, developing a reluctance to interact with government officials and disability workers about her own aspirations and wishes for Cameron.

But amid the sadness and lack of communication, there is also hope. Hope instilled by a close-knit Glenorchy family with little money but lots of resilience, desperately longing for nothing more than to have Cameron back living in their midst, alongside his four brothers and sisters. A shiny new boy's bicycle sits in the backyard of the red-brick home on a steep hill. It's the longed-for bike that Michelle and her partner gave to Cameron last weekend for his seventh birthday, when he came home for an afternoon visit after a birthday party organised by staff from the Lutana home at Hungry Jack's in Glenorchy. All the family were there to see Cameron, including his sister and brother. And there was the new bike, a big chocolate mudcake covered with candles -- and plenty of love and excitement.

A weepy Michelle shows photos of Cameron, a beaming smile on his face as he tried out his bike surrounded by family and friends. "We all love him to bits, he's such a gorgeous fantastic kid," Michelle's partner said. "Sure, he can be a handful, but Michelle's a great mother and she adores that kid -- we all do. "All this about him having troubled family life and Michelle having a drug problem, it's all just rubbish."

Michelle says she has never been on drugs or had a drug issue. She doesn't deny when she left Cameron at Lutana aged just under two that she was at her wit's end. He had just been diagnosed as autistic, she had a tiny baby and older boy to cope with too, her partner had just left her, and she was clinically depressed. Just after putting Cameron into respite care, for what his mother hoped would be just a short-term stay, she had a nervous breakdown and tried to commit suicide by overdosing on pills. But since then, and since moving in with her partner to his Glenorchy home four years ago, life has become much more settled for Michelle and her extended family.

Cameron, a bright little boy who loves nothing better than curling the hair of visitors, is at Glenorchy Primary School, while his brother is a budding soccer star. Michelle has just got a part-time job working in a canteen, while her partner is a pensioner while he waits for a knee reconstruction next week. "We've always been battlers, but the kids come first," Michelle's partner said. "It's like that when Cameron comes to stay -- we take him out fishing on the boat or take him driving in the four-wheel-drive -- we'll do anything to help our kids."

Michelle angrily denies she has not visited Cameron for six months at a time and disputes court documents that say she has refused to collect Cameron or "engage with (departmental) services (staff).". Instead, she tells a story of not being offered help. Of not being told about support systems that were available -- which she has since been offered in droves since yesterday when Cameron's case was made public. "It's not as if I ever said that `OK, he's autistic, I'll dump him here and someone else can deal with him'," Michelle sobs. "But you just feel after a while that you are banging your head against a brick wall; that the department is stretched to the limit and doesn't seem to have the funds or the services they need to have to help people like me or Cameron."

The big issue for the couple is really as much about public housing as getting more support to cope with an autistic child. They say they cannot have Cameron back with them while they live in their Glenorchy home surrounded by steep steps, footpaths, fast cars and a little back garden. "Ideally, we need another government house that is a bit bigger and out of town on a bigger flat block, where Cameron can ride his bike and play, without me having to watch him 24 hours a day," Michelle said. "I've never said I don't want Cammy, just that this house is too dangerous for him to live in."

The family have never been offered a combined case management session with a public housing representative and a disability services or child support worker. Last night, Michelle was told that a foster family had been found for Cameron to live with immediately. At first tearful, she then conceded it was probably a good thing in the short term for Cameron, if only to get him out of the inappropriate Lutana centre. But after the fuss of the past day, Michelle and her partner are determined to get Cameron back living with them in the long term, and for regular access visits in their home while he remains in foster care.

Mr Byrne said he was reviewing all of Cameron's case and was absolutely prepared to "re-engage with the family" if they wanted to be involved. Michelle said: "All I can hope is that out of all these half truths and lies told about me and my family in the past day, that it is all for Cameron's good in the long run. "I don't want empty promises -- I've had enough of them -- but if we can get a more suitable house and some help with Cameron and then get him home, that's all I could ever want."

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