Queensland police say they're unable to fight gangs

Too busy doing paperwork

POLICE say they are losing the fight against youth violence but the Government refuses to acknowledge the existence of organised teen gangs. The Courier-Mail has documented up to a dozen named gangs on the Gold Coast alone. They are tightly knit groups identified by colours and tattoos, with some linked to criminal adult gangs. Other parts of Brisbane have their own versions of American gangs the Bloods and the Crips, or have gangs named after their suburbs or ethnic groups.

Two police officers admitted to The Courier-Mail the "grubs have control of the streets" because of understaffing. "Most police divisions struggle to put two cars on the road each shift and those crews can have up to 30 jobs backed up on their call sign when they start duty," one two-decade veteran said. Another officer said he was "trapped in the station doing paperwork". "I would love to be on the road for any entire shift to catch crooks," he said.

Online readers of The Courier-Mail claimed Police Minister Judy Spence, who has said there is no evidence of organised youth gangs, was out of touch. "What planet is she on?" wrote one reader. "Her only answer to every issue is to pretend it's not happening," another reader said. More incidents of youth and gang violence were revealed by residents, including attacks on vehicles by dozens of youths in Clontarf and Deception Bay.

Opposition police spokesman Vaughan Johnson said the Government had no real plan for dealing with youth violence and was in denial about gangs. "We need more police presence where young people are active," he said. "These youth gangs should be home in bed. Police have got to have the power to get them home where they belong." He also doubted claims there were no statistics on youth gang violence. "They have the statistics but they don't want them released because they are embarrassing," he said.

Premier Anna Bligh yesterday said there were no easy answers to tackling the problem of youth violence and gangs. She said the Government had set up a youth violence taskforce and it would continue to consider ways to target the problem. "I'm concerned by advice from the Police Commissioner that what we're starting to see in relation to youth violence is firstly younger teenagers involved, secondly more girls involved in this sort of activity and thirdly a higher likelihood that some sort of weapon, particularly knives, being involved," she said. "These are difficult issues for our police, they involve responsibility from our schools, from parents and from the community and a law enforcement response."

MEANWHILE, on Surfers Paradise beach, two girls cooling their aching feet in the surf after a night of clubbing are bashed and robbed by an all-girl teenage gang. At Elanora and Main Beach, homes are trashed by youths from the Palmy Army, South Side Soldiers and Keebra Crew teen gangs. In the Currumbin Valley, a man's ears are cut off, allegedly by Lone Wolf bikie gang members who have graduated from, or have links to, notorious Tweed Coast youth gang, the Coomicub.

Coast gangs once were comprised of relatively innocent bodgies, widgies or surfies. But like other urban areas of Australia, the Gold Coast has seen an upsurge in gang activity in recent years. In the border towns of Tweed Heads and Coolangatta, the Coomicub has become notorious for violence after a string of incidents in and around southern Gold Coast nightspots over the past two years. The gang took its name from a local rap band. Many members bear a distinctive 'C' tattoo and wear shirts and jumpers featuring the word Coomicub emblazoned in gothic writing. Last year some members of the gang were arrested over fights in Coolangatta and Palm Beach and a wild clash with the Palmy Army at the Palm Beach surf club. Police believe many senior Coomicub members have graduated to become Lone Wolf bikies.

Members of a group of about a dozen children and teens who savagely attacked off-duty police officer Rawson Armitage and his girlfriend Michelle Dodge at Coolangatta late last year were believed to have gang links. Gold Coast police said the problem lay with the parents of gang members, many of whom they claimed were "druggies and deadbeats themselves".

Source





Teachers union has proposed a national system of performance pay

Unusual for a teachers' union. "All teachers are equal" is their usual mantra

The teachers union has proposed a national system of performance pay that would restructure the profession to pay the best teachers more money to stay in the classroom. The Australian Education Union is calling on the Rudd Government to fund a national system of accomplished teachers that would assess teachers against a published set of standards and pay them at least $100,000 a year. The system would be voluntary and insert a new salary band for classroom teachers above the existing wage scale, which most teachers top in their first eight or nine years.

Federal president Angelo Gavrielatos said a new career structure was required to move away from the current system under which teachers are forced to leave the classroom and undertake administrative positions to achieve further pay rises. "This is a two-step process in giving professional pay for teachers," he said. "First we need to ensure as a country that we have a competitive professional salary to attract teachers in the numbers required to ensure a qualified teacher in front of every single classroom, no matter where it is in the country. "Beyond that, I restate our preparedness to negotiate a framework that further recognises and rewards demonstrated teaching skills, knowledge and practice."

Primary school teacher Anthony Atkinson welcomed the plan to recognise the profession's best performers and to give new teachers a guide to what is expected of them. Mr Atkinson, who is in his second year of teaching at Merri Creek Primary School in Melbourne's inner suburbs, said the system would focus attention on the professionalism of teachers. "I like the idea of having a set of standards that are a way of recognising things when still in the classroom," he said. "Anything that gives you a roadmap for your professional development ... is definitely going to be helpful."

The union proposal is based on a report commissioned from Educational Assessment Australia at the University of NSW, which developed a set of standards for assessing teachers as accomplished performers. The report looked at professional standards developed by the teacher registration bodies in each state and territory to compile a set of about 100 indicators for measuring the quality of teaching practice.

The majority of questions dealt with standards of teaching and practice, curriculum and programming, lesson planning and content, assessment and reporting, implementation of teaching practice, professional development, and participation in the school community. The EAA study sought to indicate the proportion of teachers who met the accomplished teaching standard, and found half the 1833 surveyed teachers met 57 per cent of the criteria.

Education Minister Julia Gillard said the AEU report was timely and would add to the work being done by governments to improve rewards, incentives and career structures for teachers. "Better ways to reward quality teaching certainly need to be developed and any reward system needs to be based on transparent standards for assessing teachers," she said. "We need to find ways of valuing teachers who are teachers of excellence because we want to keep the best teachers in front of classrooms."

Opposition education spokesman Tony Smith also welcomed the union's turnaround on performance pay, saying the AEU had "come out of the Stone Age" to discuss the issue.

Source





California nonsense comes to Australia

Push to ban 'dangerous' trans fats

The South Australian Government will push for a national ban or tougher controls on the use of trans fats in foods. The Government will use the next meeting of national food and health ministers in October to push for tougher regulations controlling the use of trans fats which have been linked to heart disease, strokes and diabetes.

Most trans fats consumed today are created by the hydrogenation of plant oils, a process that adds hydrogen atoms to unsaturated fats to render them more saturated, making them attractive for baking and extending their shelf life. "These really dangerous fats are in everyday foods that people eat and particularly in junk and processed foods," said SA Premier Mike Rann. "Trans fats offer no nutritional value whatsoever and indeed are linked to serious health issues."

Mr Rann said the state government also wanted restaurants and food manufacturers to label their menus and products to allow consumers to know exactly what they were eating. He said the Government was about to start working with other states on a national survey to determine how much trans fats were in common foods. "We believe the time to act on trans fats is now," Mr Rann said. "We need to regulate these fats and protect Australians."

Source






Immigrants flooding into Australia -- legally

Leftist governments love immigrants -- because they tend to upset the status quo and create problems for governments to "solve"

Did you know the Rudd Government is implementing the biggest immigration program since the end of World War II, and the biggest intake, in absolute numbers of permanent immigrants and temporary workers, in Australia's history? Did you know the migration program for 2008-09 has set a target of 190,300 places, a robust 20 per cent increase over the financial year just ended?

On budget night, May 13, amid the avalanche of material released by the Government, the Minister for Immigration and Citizenship, Senator Chris Evans, issued a press release stating, among other things: "The use of 457 visas to employ temporary skilled migrant workers has grown rapidly in recent years. A total of 39,500 subclass 457 visas was granted in 2003-04 compared with an expected 100,000 places in each of 2007-08 and 2008-09." That is a 150 per cent increase in four years. Did you know the number of overseas students coming to Australia is also at a record high, with 228,592 student visas granted in 2006-07, a 20 per cent increase over the previous year?

Under the Rudd Government, Australia's net immigration intake is now larger than Britain's, even though it has almost three times the population of Australia. To put all this in perspective, the immigration program in the Rudd Government's first year is 150 per cent bigger than it was in the Howard government's first year. The immigration intake is running almost 60 per cent higher than it was three years ago.

On November 14 last year, when Kevin Rudd launched Labor's election campaign, he mentioned at length the challenges of climate change and water shortages: "It is irresponsible for any national government of Australia to stand idly by while our major cities are threatened by the insecurity of water supply." While presenting a commendable shift away from John Howard's inertia on these issues, his policy is breathtakingly inconsistent. Not only did Rudd commit to a policy of building high-energy desalination plants for Australia's main cities, he has also committed Australia to record levels of immigration.

Talk about shifting sands. To quote Rudd in this same keynote speech: "Mr Howard lacked the decency to even mention Work Choices at all during his 4400-word policy speech on Monday. Work Choices has become the industrial relations law that now dare not speak its name." Rudd did not have the decency to mention immigration once in his 4300-word campaign launch. It is the most glaring inconsistency of his Government.

The immigration figures quoted above do not even include New Zealanders, who are not counted as part of Australia's annual migration program, nor do they include people who have overstayed their visas. Add another 50,000 or so people to an equation which will see a million people added to the population during the three-year term of the Rudd Government [compared with an existing population of about 20 million]. The only element in Australia's immigration program that is not going gangbusters is the refugee and humanitarian intake, which remains static at 13,500 places a year.

It was not until Evans made his first key policy speech last week that I began to appreciate the scale of the Government's selective silences. He began with a ritual bashing of his Liberal predecessor as minister, Kevin Andrews, who is now not even in the Opposition shadow outer ministry and would do his party a favour if he retired. After the point-scoring Evans got to the essence: "Today I want to announce . [that] mandatory detention is an essential component of strong border control . [but] children and, where possible, their families, will not be detained in an immigration detention centre . Detention that is indefinite or otherwise arbitrary is not acceptable . Detention in immigration detention centres is only to be used as a last resort and for the shortest practicable time ."

It was not until the last paragraph of his long speech that Evans got to the core point: "In the future, the immigration system will be characterised by strong border security, firm deterrence of unauthorised arrivals, effective and robust immigration processes and respect for the rule of law and the humanity of those seeking migration outcomes."

Sounds like Howard. In other words, the fundamentals of the system are not going to be changed. The Rudd Labor Government is not dismantling the detention system first set up by the Keating Labor. It is not ending the excision of Australian territory from the Immigration Act, which prevents asylum-seekers from entering Australian territory via offshore islands. It is not ending the detention of adults until security and health checks are completed. It is not cutting funding for navy border patrols. It is maintaining the new Christmas Island detention centre, far from Australia's shores, and capable of housing 8000 people short-term, as a place to warehouse any new wave of boat people.

The fundamentals have not changed because they cannot change. The electorate holds dear the principle that people cannot blithely determine when and how they will move to a new country, bypassing immigration controls or refugee programs. This is elementary to a nation's sovereignty.

The hysterics in the refugee and mandatory detention debates have always thrown around words like "shame" and "gulags" and engaged in moral relativism, comparing Howard to Saddam Hussein, while refusing to recognise that there are real consequences of failures of immigration policy. Thousands of Australian have paid a heavy price for the failed refugee-vetting processes in the 1970s and 1980s, when many people who should never have been allowed into the country were approved. We are still paying the price.

Labor learned the hard way that to compromise border security is to invite political disaster. This is why the Rudd Government is still talking tough on border security, and has a major immigration policy but dare not speak its name.

Source