Another sex offender from among Australia's black refugees

The story below by Natasha Robinson appeared in the print edition of "The Australian" on Dec 1st and was briefly online before being taken down. There are several other reports of the matter online but only one other identifies the offender as Sudanese

A Sudanese migrant allegedly infected a woman with the HIV virus just 11 days after a psychologist warned authorities there was a "high risk" he would infect others. But Victoria's Department of Human Services did not take out an isolation order on Lam Kuoth, 27, until after the victim was allegedly infected.

Mr Kuoth faced Melbourne Magistrates Court yesterday for a committal hearing, where he faced five counts of' reckless causing serious injury. Mr Kuoth has not yet entered a plea. He is accused of infecting his victim, who cannot be identified, with HIV on April 22, seven months after he was diagnosed with the virus. A police summary tendered to the court said Mr Kuoth first came to the attention of the Department of Human Services in December last year, when various concerned sexual partners contacted authorities.

Between December last year and April this year he was counselled by department nurses. It is not clear if Mr Kuoth was already HIV positive when he entered Australia in May 2006. He was diagnosed as having the virus in September of that year.

Victoria's former chief health officer Robert Hall signed an order requiring Mr Kuoth to wear condoms with all sexual partners and to attend counselling, the police summary said. A psychologist on April 11 wrote a report to the Department of Human Services and concluded that "at this stage, Mr Kuoth would be considered high risk of infecting others with HIV". The department did not move to isolate Mr Kuoth and 11 days after the report was written it is alleged he had sex with a woman and infected her with HIV.

Mr Kuoth's case follows a furore in Victoria that erupted after it emerged that a man charged with intentionally spreading HIV, Michael Neal, ignored health orders for years while allegedly attempting to infect male sexual partners with HIV. The case led to the sacking of Chief Health Officer Robert Hall, who did not use his powers to isolate Mr Neal.

Mr Kuoth's bail was continued last night. His case continues on Monday, when he is expected to plead guilty.




A loss for civilisation

By Mark Steyn

ACCORDING to my Oz-watching pals in Britain and the US, John Howard is not a failure but a victim of his own success. He made Australia safe for the Labor Party: or, at any rate, safe enough that a sufficient number of bored electors were willing to take a flier on a house-trained Labor on the short leash of a quasi-Blairite leader.

That, at any rate, is the spin. Even if it's correct, and accepting that in parliamentary democracies even the greatest generals go a bridge too far, I regret Howard's end. True, I object in principle to Australia's gun laws, and I regard much of the Aussie economy as embarrassingly overregulated after a decade of supposedly conservative rule. But, as the former prime minister put it in one of his most famous soundbites, this is no time to be an 80 per cent ally. I am a 100 per cent ally of Howard.

From my perch several thousand kilometres away, I won't pretend to be an informed analyst of the internal dynamics of the Liberal Party. During my last visit, en route to yet another meeting, there'd usually be someone in the car explaining why the fellow I was on the way to see was on the outs with whichever prime-minister-in-waiting I'd met the day before. I felt a bit like Bob Hope in The Paleface, heading for the big shootout and getting his head stuffed full of contradictory advice: He leans to the Left, so draw to the Right; the wind's in the east, so shoot to the west. What mattered to the world was the strategic clarity Howard's ministry demonstrated on the critical issues facing (if you'll forgive the expression) Western civilisation.

First, the prime minister grasped the particular challenge posed by Islam. "I've heard those very silly remarks made about immigrants to this country since I was a child," said the Democrats' Lyn Allison. "If it wasn't the Greeks, it was the Italians ... or it was the Vietnamese." But those are races and nationalities. Islam is a religion, and a political project, and a globalised ideology. Unlike the birthplace of your grandfather, it's not something you leave behind in the old country.

Indeed, the pan-Islamic identity embraced by many second and third-generation Muslims in the West has very little to do with where their mums and dads happen to hail from. "You can't find any equivalent in Italian or Greek or Lebanese or Chinese or Baltic immigration to Australia. There is no equivalent of raving on about jihad," said Howard, stating the obvious in a way most of his fellow Western leaders could never quite bring themselves to do.

"Raving on about jihad" is a splendid line which meets what English law used to regard as the reasonable-man test. If you're a reasonable bloke slumped in front of the telly watching jihadists threatening to behead the Pope or Muslim members of Britain's National Health Service ploughing a blazing automobile through the check-in desk at Glasgow airport, "raving on about jihad" fits in a way that President George W. Bush's religion-of-peace pabulum doesn't. Bush and Tony Blair can be accused of the very opposite of the traditional politician's failing: they walked the walk but they didn't talk the talk. That's to say neither leader found a rhetoric for the present struggle that resonated. Howard did.

Likewise, Peter Costello. Sympathising with Muslims who wish to live under sharia law, he mused: "There are countries that apply religious or sharia law: Saudi Arabia and Iran come to mind. If a person wants to live under sharia law these are countries where they might feel at ease. But not Australia." It's a glum reflection on the times that such an observation should be controversial.

Yet it stands in marked contrast to, say, the Dutch Justice Minister Piet Hein Donner, who remarked that if the electors voted to bring in sharia he'd be OK with that, or the Swedish politician who said that Swedes should be "nice to Muslims while we are in the majority so that when they are in the majority they will be nice to us".

Underpinning those words is the realisation that most of the Western world is very demographically weakened. Immigration adds to the gaiety of the nation, improves the choice of restaurants and makes pasty-faced white folks feel very virtuous about their multiculti bona fides, but a dependence on immigration is always a structural weakness, and should be addressed as such. At a time of unparalleled prosperity and peace, the majority of developed nations have chosen, in effect, to give up on the future. Howard's ministry was one of the first governments to get this and, in contrast to the dismal Euro-fatalism above, to try to do something to reverse it.

Costello's exhortation to Aussie couples - have one for mum, one for dad, and one for Australia - gets the stakes exactly right. The mid-20th century entitlement state was built on a careless model that requires a constantly growing population to sustain it.

When I made this point in a speech in Australia, Malcolm Turnbull passed me a note in which he'd scribbled down various population models based on certain fertility-rate calculations. I confess I've always had a certain antipathy to Turnbull because his republicanism seemed small-minded and unworthy, but in the years in which I've spoken on this subject to political figures on three continents, that's the only occasion in which a key government figure already knew the numbers and understood their implications.

And that brings us to the Coalition's next great strand of strategic clarity. At his 2006 education summit, Howard called for "a root and branch renewal of Australian history in our schools, with a restoration of narrative instead of what I labelled the 'fragmented stew of themes and issues"'. As he explained at the Quadrant 50th anniversary celebration: "This is about ensuring children are actually taught their national inheritance." The absence of a "narrative" and an "inheritance" is a big part of the reason that British subjects born and bred blow up the London Tube, why young Canadian Muslims with no memory of living in any other society plot to behead their own prime minister.

You can't assimilate immigrants and minorities unless you give them something to assimilate to. It's one thing to teach children their history "warts and all", quite another to obsess on the warts at the expense of all else. The West's demographic weakness is merely the physical embodiment of a broader loss of civilisational confidence. Australia should never have had a "department of immigration and multicultural affairs", but, given that it did, Howard was right to rename it the Department of Immigration and Citizenship. Government should promote citizenship, not multiculturalism.

The Coalition was all but unique in understanding the three great challenges of the age - Islamism, demography, civilisational will - that in other parts of the West are combining to form the perfect storm. Just as importantly, unlike so many second-tier powers, Australia did not put its faith in the chimera of insipid obsolescent transnational talking shops in which attitudes substitute for policy. I liked to call Alexander Downer my favorite foreign minister, which, in hindsight, was damning with the faintest of praise.

After all, I'm not sure during his long tenure how many candidates there ever were for runner-up: Dominique de Villepin? Britain's Robin Cook and Margaret Beckett? Canada's Lloyd Axworthy and Bill Graham? Colin Powell I never expected much from, but few hitherto clear-headed types have shrunk in office as remorselessly as Condi Rice. I loved Downer for his gleeful mockery of transnationalism and its pointless committees stuffed with representatives of what he called "busted arse countries".

In more genteel mode, he put it like this: "Multilateralism is a synonym for an ineffective and unfocused policy involving internationalism of the lowest common denominator." See Darfur, the Iranian nukes, the UN's flop response to the tsunami. If it's right to intervene in the Sudan, it's not wrong because the Russian guy declines to stick his hand up at the relevant meeting. The Howard years saw the emergence of a regional power that, from East Timor to Solomon Islands, understood its responsibilities at a time when the Euro-Canadian poseurs shrunk from theirs.

As a distant observer of Australian affairs, I had some small personal contact with Howard and co. over the years. Merry, feisty, blunt and fair, they were exactly what we need at this moment: happy warriors. I'm saddened Australians feel differently. But if it's too late to get the US constitution amended in time for them to run for president next November, the savvier candidates ought to snap 'em up as speech writers.

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And pigs might fly

More of that wonderful "modelling"!

AUSTRALIA can afford to introduce tough pollution and carbon reduction targets to curb global warming, a new report says. The Climate Institute today released findings which it says show there will be little economic impact if Australia establishes measures to reduce greenhouse gases. The report, by the institute, CSIRO and Monash University, found that if Australia committed to reversing its pollution by 2012, reducing emissions by 20 per cent by 2020, and becoming carbon neutral by 2050, economic growth would not be hampered.

It said that under the required changes economic growth, using GDP as a measure, would be 2.8 per cent annually to 2050 compared with 2.9 per cent if no action was taken. Employment would increase from 9.7 million to 16.7 million jobs by the middle of the century, while energy prices would fall from 6 per cent of average income today to 4 per cent by 2050.

Climate Institute chief executive John Connor said the UN climate change conference in Bali, which started today, would be an early test of the incoming Australian Government's commitment to curb global warming. He said the report showed that drastic action, starting with the two-week Bali conference, was affordable. "Australia's economy isn't just dependent on energy intensive and trade exposed sectors," Mr Connor said. "We can actually manage the transformation there and still have substantial growth across all of the sectors of agriculture, mining, telecommunications - a whole range of sectors will still have robust growth. "If we put in place good restructuring policies, like we have in the past with competition policy, dairy and steel and other reforms, we can really have an economy ready for the 21st century."

During the federal election campaign, new Prime Minister Kevin Rudd committed Labor to a 60 per cent carbon emissions reduction by 2050. However, Mr Connor said a bolder position was needed. "This modelling shows we can afford an investment and become carbon neutral by 2050," he said. Mr Connor praised Labor's new environment team, headed by Environment Minister Peter Garrett, but said Bali would be its first big step. Mr Rudd already has committed the Government to ratifying Kyoto.

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Maths skills sink to a five-year low

MATHS skills among Year 7 students have fallen to their lowest level in five years. Unpublished figures to be released next month, and obtained by The Weekend Australian, show that more than one in five Year 7 students failed to acquire the necessary maths skills to progress through school. The proportion attaining minimum standards in maths has fallen below 80 per cent for the first time, to 79.7 per cent, and is down from a high of 83.5 per cent in 2002. The report looms as the first major challenge to confront incoming deputy prime minister Julia Gillard, who has been handed the role of implementing Kevin Rudd's education revolution.

In a further indictment of the national education system, an OECD report released this week shows Australia trailing Estonia and New Zealand in science skills. The OECD Program for International Student Assessment conducted last year among 15-year-olds in 57 countries focused on science skills. It ranked Australia eighth on the students' mean scores, behind Finland in first place followed by Hong Kong, Canada, Taiwan, Estonia, Japan and New Zealand. The previous PISA test, carried out in 2003, ranked Australia sixth in science, fourth in reading and 11th in maths.

The Australian Council for Educational Research, which administers PISA in Australia on behalf of the OECD, said that when statistical difference was taken into account, Australia tied in fourth place for science with a number of other countries. ACER chief executive Geoff Masters said Australia had maintained its performance from the previous PISA test, in which it ranked fourth out of 41 countries.

The 2006 years 3, 5 and 7 National Benchmark Results were sent to the state and territory education ministers this week for approval before their scheduled public release by the end of the year. The 2006 results show the general trend among Year 3 students is a stable proportion of students meeting the benchmarks with 91 per cent passing reading, 92.7 per cent passing writing and 92.6 per cent passing numeracy. The results for Year 5 students are more patchy, with an increasing proportion of students failing to meet the benchmarks. In 2006, about 12 per cent of Year 5 students failed to meet the reading benchmark, 6 per cent failed to meet the writing benchmark and 10 per cent failed to meet the numeracy standard. By Year 7, the proportion falling behind had widened further, with about 11 per cent failing the reading benchmark, 8 per cent failing the writing benchmark and about 20 per cent failing to meet the numeracy benchmark.

The report seeks to discredit the huge difference in Year 7 numeracy skills, saying the benchmark appears to be too hard. "This apparent drop in progress can in some way be attributed to a concern that the benchmark standard for Year 7 has been set at a higher level than for the other year levels," it says. The Year 7 numeracy benchmark requires students to deal in whole numbers to seven digits, and use decimals with two place values in familiar situations, such as money and measurements. The national benchmark results also highlight the gap between the indigenous community and the rest of the nation.

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