Girl gang-rape warnings ignored by Left-indoctrinated social workers

You would have to be a Leftist moron to put the welfare of criminal black men ahead of the welfare of brutally-treated little black girls. Those, however, appear to be the sick priorities of political correctness

THE family of a 10-year-old gang-rape victim have revealed they had warned child safety authorities she would be attacked if taken out of a Cairns foster home and returned to their remote Aboriginal community of Aurukun.

Amid a continuing public outcry over the Queensland Department of Child Safety's failure to protect the girl and a Queensland District Court judge's controversial decision not to jail her attackers, her family has told of a community in crisis and "a little girl who has had the light turned off on her life". They expressed outrage at the sentence the nine males received, and claim some of the offenders had first raped the girl when she was seven. "She should never have been allowed to come back from foster care while those boys were still here. We told that to welfare. (Some of) those boys had raped her in the past," the girl's mother said.

In October, judge Sarah Bradley decided not to record convictions against six teenage attackers and gave three others, aged 17, 18 and 26, suspended sentences over the rape. The sentences will be appealed and dozens of other sex abuse cases from the cape reviewed after the lenient sentences in the gang-rape case were revealed. The prosecutor in the case, Steve Carter - who described the rape as "a form of childish experimentation" of which the victim was a willing participant - has also been stood down pending an internal investigation.

The girl's aunt said she was deeply offended by Mr Carter's claim that the victim had consented to the rape, and said suggestions underage sex was a fact of life in cape communities was abhorrent. "That's not right. It's not traditional to have sex without parents' consent. Something is not right. She is a little girl who has had the light turned off on her life," she said. Her uncle, the family patriarch, said sexual assaults, family violence and drugs had become so bad in the community he would support a Northern Territory-style intervention. "The violence happens all the time. Something needs to be done, we shouldn't have to live like this," he said.

Cape York Aboriginal leader Noel Pearson last night described the case as "just the tip of the iceberg" of dysfunction in indigenous communities. Mr Pearson blasted the notion that indigenous children taken into care and placed with non-indigenous foster carers were "another Stolen Generation" - as social workers in the Aurukun case believed. He said that where children's welfare was under threat, the placement should be "one of safety, whether it is whitefellas or blackfellas". "Those child protection practices that have sought to place Aboriginal children exclusively with Aboriginal carers have resulted in a great deal of harm for the individual children under care," Mr Pearson said.

"This is a case of children in urgent need of protection. As long as Aboriginal society is so dysfunctional that we have to take children into care and protection, we should never hear people bleat about some Stolen Generation. "Today children on communities are living in dysfunctional situations where their welfare is under threat. There should be no hesitation in taking them out of those threatening circumstances and placing them with carers - whitefellas or blackfellas."

Queensland Premier Anna Bligh has vowed to take radical action and work with federal Indigenous Affairs Minister Jenny Macklin if the review of sex abuse cases finds systemic problems. "What's not clear until we look at all of these cases is, is it a systemic issue where the standard of justice is somehow different or lower in these communities?" Ms Bligh said. "Or is this a one-off aberration from one particular officer?"

The girl's family speak to her once a week by satellite link because she is housed in a secret location in north Queensland. "She sleeps with the light on. She gets jumpy when they get new case workers," her uncle said.

The uncle said no authority had contacted the family since the story was reported. He first heard about it on the radio, and he welcomed the opportunity to speak to the media. Authorities had neglected to inform the family the case was being heard in October in a courthouse less than 100 metres from the victim's former home.

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Child victims of political correctness

Jenny Macklin had better get out her red pen: there's a lot more to say sorry for than the actions of social workers more than 40 years ago. The Minister for Indigenous Affairs hailed the 10th anniversary of the Bringing Them Home report on Tuesday with the news that she was busy formulating a national apology, "from the heart", for the stolen generation. While she's at it, she should start formulating an apology to all those children murdered, raped and abused in the past decade as a direct result of the report, which, in the name of cultural correctness, has put so many obstacles in the way of removing indigenous children from unsafe homes.

Take, for instance, the case of the 10-year-old girl gang-raped in Aurukun, in remote Cape York, last year. In a decision that made headlines around the world, from The New York Times to Al-Jazeera, the Cairns District Court Judge Sarah Bradley allowed all nine attackers to walk free because the girl "probably agreed to have sex with all of you". She released six teenage males with no conviction and gave three older males, aged 17, 18 and 26, suspended sentences. She did, however, give them a stern talking to: "It is a very shameful matter and I hope that all of you realise that you must not have sex with young girls."

It was not the first time the little girl - described by a former foster carer as "just a skinny 10-year-old . not even developed"- had been raped. Reportedly "mildly intellectually impaired", having been born with foetal alcohol syndrome to an alcoholic mother, she had been gang-raped by five juveniles at the age of seven in 2002 in her hometown of Aurukun. According to The Australian newspaper, the girl was then moved between foster placements before going to a non-indigenous family in Cairns in July 2005, who ensured she went to school and received counselling.

But she stayed only nine months before being removed by social workers from the Orwellian-sounding Child Safety Department, which believed that placing an indigenous child in a white foster home was creating a new stolen generation. The girl was sent back last April to Aurukun, where she had contracted syphilis and gonorrhoea, and within a month was raped again.

The moral compass of so many authority figures in this tragic story is so out of whack with universal community standards, you wonder if they are in the grip of a sort of group delusion, in which theoretical compassion is more real than people's suffering. Only the much-maligned local police, according to Queensland's Premier, Anna Bligh, "took the matter very seriously", pursuing the charges and making sure they went to court. But there, those on the comfortable side of the bench let down the victim.

Even the prosecutor in the case, Steve Carter, who might be expected to be the girl's advocate, produced no victim impact statement, despite being asked by Bradley. Yet he offered all sorts of mitigation for the perpetrators, requesting they not receive custodial sentences. He told the court on October 24 that the attackers were "very naughty" but had just been indulging "in a form of childish experimentation [which was] consensual . in a general sense", despite the fact one of the attackers was 25 at the time. Carter gave an intriguing insight when he told the judge: " It'd be arrogant of me to stand here and start seeking [harsher sentences]." He has been stood down this week pending an appeal and a Queensland Government investigation into the case.

Bradley, too, has come under fire this week, with calls she be removed from the bench. But you can hardly blame even her, as she, too, is a model product of her culturally correct times. As recently as January this year, she gave an insight into her thinking in a speech in Perth at a judges' conference titled "Using Indigenous Justice Initiatives In Sentencing". Indigenous offenders should be treated differently, in a more "culturally appropriate" way, she said, because of their "gross over-representation in the criminal justice system". Just 2 per cent of the population, they comprised more than 22 per cent of the prison population.

She said "legislative and informal initiatives" were needed in sentencing so that "penalties can be more creative, meaningful and appropriate". She is singing from the sentimental songbook of the progressive left so perfectly it is no wonder the 1976 law graduate has been the golden girl of the Queensland Government's affirmative action program for women lawyers. The aim of lenient or "creative" penalties is to reduce incarceration rates of indigenous men, as recommended by the 1991 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. But as one Cape York worker said yesterday: "You've got this spiral of dysfunction in these communities - of course the rate of imprisonment is going to increase."

To choose not to enforce the law in such dysfunctional communities only renders them even more dangerous for their most vulnerable members: children and women. Suspending the state's laws when dealing with Aboriginal offenders is what the Melbourne University academic Marcia Langton describes as the "ultimate race-hate practice", which rewards "serial rapists and murderers".

It is the behaviour of such people which prompted the former federal government's Northern Territory intervention, an attempt to stem the epidemic of child sexual abuse. There are encouraging reports trickling out of early successes, with school attendance rates up and violence down. To his credit, the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, has vowed to keep the intervention going, for a year at least. But there are signals of the watering down of key aspects - such as reinstating the scrapped permit system, which had so much to do with maintaining secrecy around child abuse.

Even this week, when asked about the case of the little Aurukun rape victim, Macklin indicated she is a prisoner of culturally correct thinking when she claimed at the 10th anniversary of the Bringing Them Home report that there was no connection with child protection policies today.

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WA dumps Leftist Outcomes Based Education (OBE)

WESTERN Australia has officially dumped the controversial Outcomes Based Education (OBE) program with the introduction of a new syllabus. WA Education Minister Mark McGowan today announced the reintroduction of a kindergarten to year 10 syllabus at the beginning of the 2008 school year. In a reference to the controversial OBE program, which was heavily criticised by teachers, Mr McGowan said the new content would mark the end of ``content free and woolly objectives in education''. "We want to assure parents that students are being provided with the highest standard of course content possible,'' Mr McGowan said. "The fad of the 1990s to dispense with syllabus caused considerable anxiety among teachers, many of whom were left without any clear guidance about what to teach or how to assess students.''

The minister said the new syllabuses were developed in consultation with more than 6,000 teachers, administrators and academics. Among the changes, the new syllabus places a greater emphasis on history teaching, and the importance of play for kindergarten to year three children. State School Teachers Union of Western Australia president Mike Keely welcomed the move, saying it would bring certainty and support to teachers.

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Orwellian Left quick to unveil totalitarian heart

...the tale of confessions and executions went on, until there was a pile of corpses lying before Napoleon's feet and the air was heavy with the smell of blood ... - George Orwell in Animal Farm (1945).

CALL off the dogs. I confess. I am a conservative. Apparently this is enough to warrant an execution in the minds of some leftists who resemble George Orwell on speed with neither the sense of humour nor skill for satire. By calling for a purge of this conservative columnist and all like her, Crikey contributor Guy Rundle has compressed Animal Farm by going straight to the last chapter and skipping the irony.

Animal Farm subtly portrayed the big risks of totalitarianism. Over time, the pigs who had overthrown the human oppressors (remember the motto: "four legs good, two legs bad,") became the two-legged tyrants. At least Orwell's classic allowed the passage of time to obscure the pigs' hypocrisy a little. We could enjoy the slow descent into anarchy.

Deeming themselves the brainworkers, the pigs keep all the milk and apples for themselves. They steal the puppies and raise them as their vicious secret police, allowing the pigs to finally take over the farm declaring that "all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others".

Rundle and his friends who are petitioning The Australian for my dismissal - and that of other conservatives - have not bothered with even the fig leaf of a few months' quiet preparation. Barely two weeks after the election of the Rudd Government, those so recently cheering the authors of Silencing Dissent have risen on their hind legs to demand the silencing of dissenting conservative columnists at the Oz.

After my colleague Tom Switzer's Monday morning defence of pluralism on this page, Rundle responded in the afternoon edition of email gossip screed, Crikey. Rundle said Switzer, this newspaper's opinion editor, and its editor-in-chief Chris Mitchell needed to "clean house". While it was acceptable to keep "one such contrarian columnist", he argued, the bosses needed to rid this newspaper of all the rest of us conservative columnists because we "have no dialogue with the times".

Now, Rundle does a wickedly good pig impersonation of Orwell's Napoleon, the Berkshire boar who solemnly believes that all animals are equal provided he gets to call the shots, intimidating and executing the animals who disagree. His snorting is hard to take seriously. This newspaper ran a long piece by Rundle in the current edition of the Australian Literary Review, paying him a very handsome sum - even after he repeatedly railed against Mitchell in Crikey. Ain't plurality grand? If it were only Rundle engaging in this kind of tyrannical madness, we could put it down to the accidental, but glorious, lunacy that is Crikey.

But some of Australia's most distinguished left-wing thinkers have been assailing the Oz with these totalitarian demands. Accordingly, one can draw some conclusions about the prevailing currents of left-wing thought. In particular, that this mob does not really fancy free speech. Unless you agree with their sentiments.

Switzer did an admirable job dealing with the intellectual defects in the "muzzle the conservatives" mantra. But being a genteel chap, Switzer was too polite to those calling for a mass sacking of News Ltd conservatives such as myself, The Herald Sun's Andrew Bolt and The Daily Telegraph's Piers Akerman. He declined to point out just how rank is the hypocrisy of those so recently, and so quickly, converted from complaining that John Howard stifled dissent to advocating that the editors at The Australian embark on some serious strangulation of conservative voices.

Switzer was too polite to note that those who now say a change of government justifies a purge of out-of-favour columnists failed to express a similar view in 1996, or 1998, 2001 or 2004. Or to point out the inconsistency in believing that the left-of-centre press typified by The Age should remain forever true to its constituency, while the right-of-centre press should apparently find a brand new one after each election. Or to wonder why a 53 per cent to 47 per cent election win for Labor should mean that the 47 per cent lose any right to read like-minded opinion.

To argue, as Robert Manne does in The Monthly, that the culture wars are over is fallacious. We are talking not about a war where one side declares victory, but about a continuing debate. Nothing more, nothing less. There will be future debates on issues such as a republic, a charter of rights, an apology to indigenous people, to name but a few.

Of course, we can afford to be flippant about those calling for a pogrom of conservatives at The Australian. The prospect of it happening is sufficiently negligible to allow us a chuckle at their expense. Not so funny, though, is the knowledge that this kind of mentality will come to the fore in many other places: in our universities and schools where such calls may be successful. Those who doubt this need only recall the disgraceful treatment meted out to Geoffrey Blainey by the academic community in 1984.

Blainey, Australia's greatest living historian, dared to voice concerns over immigration when he was dean of the faculty of arts at the University of Melbourne. Free speech and genuine inquiry were tossed off campus when Blainey was picketed by protesters and ultimately hounded out by academics who thought he had no right to express misgivings about immigration. Similarly, if Rundle and his friends were in charge, it's hard to imagine Keith Windschuttle being allowed to air his courageous and painstaking expose of the shameful manipulation of Aboriginal history. And will there be room for dissent in our schools?

The blatant political indoctrination pursued by national teachers' unions will presumably be ramped up to ensure those nasty conservatives don't get back in power. Pat Byrne, the Australian Education Union federal president, who crowed about progressive educators who "had succeeded in influencing curriculum development in schools, education departments and universities" may feel even freer to peddle politics in the classroom.

And what about Wayne Sawyer, the former chairman of the NSW Board of Studies English curriculum committee, who castigated teachers after the 2004 federal election for failing to produce a more "questioning, critical generation" of students because they had voted for a Howard government? Will he and his ilk now be openly reminding teachers of their job to keep moulding a new generation of progressive thinkers?

Ultimately the proof of free speech is to be found in what is actually published and said. The Howard government was spectacularly bad at oppression. Criticisms flowed freely, as they should. Shelves in every bookstore groaned under the weight of books with titles such as Silencing Dissent, The War on Democracy and Not Happy, John. Don't count on Rundle and his Animal Farm friends being so inept

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