Only one year in jail for anal rape of a child??

But he is black so that is OK, apparently

TWO adults and two teenagers will each spend between one and 15 months behind bars for sexually abusing an 11-year-old boy at a remote Top End Aboriginal community. Rejecting pleas for wholly suspended sentences, Northern Territory Supreme Court judge Trevor Riley yesterday described the anal penetration of the boy between April and August last year at Maningrida, 500km east of Darwin, as "opportunistic" rather than predatory.

However, he said the males had taken advantage of the young victim, who was assaulted on three separate occasions at the community, as he sentenced the four offenders to a total of 32 months in custody. "The future of the victim remains uncertain and of significant concern," Justice Riley said.

The Territory's top prosecutor, Richard Coates, yesterday attributed the reluctance of Aboriginal children to give evidence as an explanation for the decision by the Crown not to pursue more serious rape charges, which could have led to jail terms of 20 years or life. The four offenders pleaded guilty to a total of eight charges, including sexual intercourse without consent. Justice Riley said he would have imposed higher sentences if they had claimed innocence.

The revelations in The Australian last week that nine males who gang-raped a 10-year-old girl in the Queensland Aboriginal community of Aurukun had escaped jail sentences has triggered nationwide debate about indigenous justice. Unlike the Aurukun gang-rape case, Justice Riley rejected pleas from defence lawyers to impose wholly suspended sentences on the offenders. But the sentences were still criticised as inadequate. "For Centrelink fraud and property damage, they'll send people to jail for three times that," Queensland indigenous human rights activist Gracelyn Smallwood said. "We've got to start getting serious about sexual abuse right across the country."

Indigenous activist Boni Robertson said it was important that courts sent a message to thepublic that sexual intercourse with children could not be tolerated. "And why did they call it sexual assault and not rape?" she said. "There's a responsibility to send a message that if you are going to interfere with a child then you are going to face the sternest wrath of the law."

Child sexual assault advocate Hetty Johnston said the sentences appeared to treat abuse as a "misdemeanour". "The length of time they're in jail is not as important as knowing whether they have had time to complete a treatment program and knowing whether they are safe to be released," she said.

The victim of the Maningrida assault has been living in Darwin since charges were laid last year. The court heard yesterday that he could be blamed in the community for any sentence imposed on his abusers. "The boys did bad things to me," he said in his victim impact statement.

Claevon Cooper, 20, was sentenced to three years and nine months behind bars, suspended after 15 months. Isiah Pascoe, also 20, was sentenced to two years and eight months, suspended after 10 months. An 18-year-old boy was sentenced to two years and six months in jail, suspended after six months. Justice Riley ordered a 14-year-old boy who breached bail conditions earlier this year to spend eight months in juvenile detention - suspended after one month - for gross indecency. The judge did not record a conviction against the fifth offender, 17, who fondled the victim's buttocks, instead imposing a 12-month good behaviour bond. He acknowledged defence claims that pornographic movies had influenced the behaviour of the males, but said: "Those matters do not excuse or justify what took place."

Mr Coates said the NT Director of Public Prosecutions had opted for section 127 of the Criminal Code, which made it unlawful for anyone to engage in sexual intercourse or gross indecency involving a child under 16 years. This did not require the Crown to prove the victim consented to intercourse, unlike section 192 which attracts a possible life penalty for sexual assault without consent. In 2006-07, the DPP laid 30 charges under section 127. Mr Coates conceded the reluctance of indigenous children to testify may be responsible for more lenient sentences than would have otherwise been the case. "With this charge, consent is not an element of the offence," he said. "The child is incapable at law of consenting. The prosecution do not have to prove a lack of consent to prove the charge."

Source






School reduced to cartoons and PC self-loathing

A youthful voice of intelligence below

As one who recently graduated from one of Queensland's best private schools, I view the Rudd Government's promise to consult a team of education experts in drafting a national curriculum with trepidation. These so-called experts, remember, inflicted on us entire terms of work on Queen Kat, Carmel & St Jude Get a Life and The Simpsons, not to mention long assignments on designing advertising campaigns and the front covers of teenage magazines. The justification for The Simpsons was that it contains myriad references to Dante. Too bad hardly any of the students knew what he'd written before or after that term. My five years of high school English were dominated by some of the most vapid aspects of our culture. In history, meanwhile, we took a suffocatingly PC approach that emphasised all that is wrong about our nation's past and identity.

Studies are repeatedly showing that standards in literacy and numeracy are slipping. Regrettably, the Howard government failed to halt this trend. But at least it, unlike Labor, recognised the link between falling standards and the time spent analysing the values espoused by, say, a Vegemite jar.

Luckily, many Australian children are indeed articulate and well-read. But this is in spite of their schooling, not because of it. They are fortunate to have parents who see the problem, correct their spelling and grammar and guide them towards better literature than Harry Potter. As for the young people who dispute that this is even an issue, in many cases their education has been so inadequate that they don't even realise its deficiencies. Even if most students can read and write at what the government deems an appropriate standard, the question remains: could they do better?

At high school, I can remember a grand total of five English lessons on language. In Year 8, we had one on synonyms, which was so puerile it was insulting (for example: "big, enormous"), and in Year 11, noticing that many students were still making mistakes in elementary punctuation, our teacher endeavoured to explain the difference between "its" and "it's". Oh, but I'm forgetting, we learned these things in primary school, didn't we? And apparently, grammar and spelling were better taught integrated into all our subjects. Perhaps my (first-rate) physics teachers should have taught me some French as well?

I read seven novels in my five years of English classes. We did study a few works from the canon: four of Shakespeare's plays, A Room with a View and Pride and Prejudice (though we tended to watch the cinematic adaptations to analyse film techniques).

However, since everything is a text (even a table, one teacher told us), and all texts are of equal merit, it didn't matter whether we were reading Macbeth or watching Australian Story. We still churned out essays on dominant discourses, foregrounding, privileging and marginalisation. I recycled these essays from one year to the next, and still ended up with good grades.

All I learned from five years of English was that "texts" can have multiple "readings", and that it is not necessary to choose the one the author intended. What a profound observation. Never mind the subtle nuances of our beautiful language, as employed by Blake, Hardy or Steinbeck. "Critical literacy" taught me to become a critical thinker: critical, that is, of what the education authorities disapproved of.

Subsequently, I became an authority on the marginalisation of the working classes in Pride and Prejudice. I became well-practised at disparaging the West. After a term studying racism, my understanding of American and Australian history surely lacked nothing, except perhaps some knowledge of the oldest constitution in the world, or the war with fascist Japan. I knew plenty about the binding of women's feet in ancient China. But was I aware of the beginnings of democracy in Greece?

After a term on the Vietnam War, everyone had grasped that Americans are stupid. What a shame we never studied the Cold War as a whole, and that nobody mentioned the millions of people who died under Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalin. How about the Holocaust, the foundation of Israel and the subsequent turbulence in the Middle East?

It gets worse. Of my eight terms of history, one was spent on popular culture, one on foot-binding, one on East Timor, and one on racism. In selecting only those periods in history to study, our teachers made it clear what their views were. Yet surely it is inappropriate for them to show political affiliations of any persuasion. Their task should be to provide students with the facts (yes, the facts), discuss arguments on both sides, encourage us make up our own minds and to aspire to great things. At the moment, though, we're made to feel ashamed of most of our history, and to wallow in the cultural mire that is postmodernism.

We were continually being told at school that we were getting a world-class education. Frankly, though, I feel cheated in the humanities. The teaching of other subjects was excellent. Other young Queenslanders may protest that their own experience was nothing like mine. If that is the case, they were fortunate not to attend a school that boasted of "leading the way" in progressive education. Unless Julia Gillard has significantly more influence over the teachers' unions and the state bureaucrats than her predecessor, I am certain that all students will soon have to endure the same boredom that I did.

Source






Immigration Minister grants residency to wrongfully detained refugee

This is mere justice for a man who has been so badly hurt by official bungling

Tony Tran, a refugee whose health and family life was blighted after he was wrongfully detained 5 years ago, has been granted permission to live in Australia. The resolution of his case marks the first step by the new Labor Government to resolve the cases of 247 people found to have been unlawfully detained by immigration authorities in recent years. The Immigration Minister, Chris Evans, announced yesterday that he had granted Binh Van Tran, known as Tony Tran, permanent resident status.

Mr Tran was detained for breaching immigration laws. It was later discovered that the Immigration Department had failed to notify him that his visa had expired. After being detained, he was separated from his wife, who returned to South Korea, and from his young Australian-born son, whom officials sought to deport. During his detention, Mr Tran was stabbed and bashed by another detainee and still suffers from health problems as a result. His case was aired by ABC television during the election campaign and was one of 247 cases referred to the Commonwealth Ombudsman by the Immigration Department in 2005 and last year.

Mr Tran had lived in Australia for seven years, married and had a mortgage before his detention. He was detained months after coming to the attention of immigration officials, when he inquired about a spouse visa for his wife. Mr Tran, who was born in Vietnam but had grown up in the United States as a refugee, had come to Australia on a visa. He had believed he was on a valid visa at the time of his arrest in Brisbane for being an illegal resident.

"I am committed to resolving outstanding issues I have inherited in this portfolio," Senator Evans said. "Part of the process of resolving these outstanding issues is my decision today to grant Mr Tran permanent residence. This is a longstanding case on which the Ombudsman has reported, and which my department has been working on to reach a resolution. "We need to continue to resolve these outstanding cases so that we can rebuild confidence in the system."

Source






Amazing: A shrinking health bureaucracy in Queensland

Only a tiny shrink, though. Nobody is actually fired. Horrors, no!

TWO senior bureaucrat positions have been cut from the top of the state's struggling ambulance service. It includes the abolition of one of nine assistant commissioner posts among 100 head office jobs to redirect $12 million to pay for an extra 100 paramedics. Assistant commissioner for strategic development Arthur O'Brien will move to the vacant role of chief financial officer, still earning about $130,000 a year. Another senior position worth about $100,000 a year in the office of Emergency Services director-general Jim McGowan also will remain unfilled.

The moves come after some lower-level staff were unhappy management positions remained untouched in the fallout from an audit examining why record funding was resulting in worsening service. Estimating savings of $230,000 from axing the two jobs, Emergency Services Minister Neil Roberts yesterday said tough decisions had to be made. "The audit is doing the things we need to do, not the things it would be good to," Mr Roberts said. "This means the Government has had to make some tough decisions." [How awfully tough!]

Source





Australians very dubious about having Muslims around

Understandably

Police were forced to block the entrance of a public meeting in Camden last night when up to 800 people showed up to attend a protest against plans for an Islamic school in the suburb. Officers were required to control around 100 people who were prevented from entering the Camden Civic Centre last night, because the hall reached capacity within half an hour of the doors opening, police said.

Commercial radio reported that members of the crowd were carrying signs and banners bearing racist slogans and that a number became rowdy when they realised they would not be able to enter the meeting. There were reports of mounted police waiting nearby in case the protest meeting got further out of hand. The meeting was also attended by Fred Nile of the Christian Democratic Party.

The final decision on the development application for the 1200-student Al Amanah Islamic College at Camden is expected to be made in March next year. Nearly 2500 submissions have been received from residents - 1829 against, 649 in support. Council staff recommended that the development - a primary and secondary school, a 30-place child-care centre with two residences for caretakers, a reception and convention hall, a sporting hall and an indoor pool - be refused. In making the recommendation they relied on information from the NSW Roads and Traffic Authority and the NSW Department of Education and Training.

A police spokeswoman said that the organisers of the meeting had sent out 1600 flyers despite being aware that the civic centre only catered to around 650. "Organisers had met with police and council officials and it was agreed that once seating capacity was reached, the venue would be closed to those seeking entry,'' the spokeswoman said. "The forum passed without incident, no one arrested and no move along orders were issued.''

Source