Church preacher, 39, raped and impregnated a 20-year-old woman in a Sydney park after meeting her on a bus, leaving her suicidal and needing an abortion


The preacher.  Not your average Australian pastor

A woman who was impregnated by a church preacher after he raped her in a park has been consumed with suicidal thoughts since the horrific incident.

Lensard Tambanemoto, 39, was a student, father and an active member of a church who took part in 'preaching' when he raped a young woman in a Western Sydney park after they studied together at a library.

The victim revealed in an impact statement, which was read out in court on her behalf, that she still suffers from flashbacks and debilitating anxiety from the 2014 incident, The Daily Telegraph reported.

She had suicidal thoughts in the lead-up to the trial, the court was told during the sentencing hearing on Tuesday. 

Those thoughts still consume her, according to the statement.

'I self-harmed, engaged in extremely reckless behaviour and constantly thought of committing suicide. I still do.

She was just 20 when she was waiting at Bankstown train station and Tambanemoto started a conversation with her.

They talked through Facebook Messenger for four days before they decided to meet at a library.

As they walked home they stopped at a park, where she was raped.

Crown Prosecutor Tarik Abdulhak said the victim said no many times.

The victim fell pregnant from the rape and decided to have an abortion, which she felt guilty over.

'The pain of having an abortion has affected me tremendously, I still get very depressed on the anniversary of the abortion and on Mother's Day because I developed a strong bond with the child despite going through with the abortion,' she said.

In August Tambanemoto was found guilty by a jury of sexual intercourse without consent and indecent assault following a trial at Downing Centre District Court.

He will be sentenced next month and faces up to 14 years behind bars.

SOURCE 







ACTU wants a return to the dark days of mass union militancy

Today we are being given a glimpse of the bleak industrial relations landscape future in Australia were there to be a change of government next year.

Thousands of construction and other workers will have walked off work sites, in many cases ordered to leave their work sites, to take part in a protest designed to overturn the laws that govern Australia’s workplaces.

What do they want? They want there to be no rules. No regulator. And no check on their power.

The ACTU wants a return to the dark days of mass union militancy, it wants workplace division and disruption, it wants the ability to flagrantly break any industrial laws it doesn’t like, and it demands union officials be given the power to subject businesses up and down the country to their every demand, regardless of the capacity of those businesses to accede to those demands.

If past behaviour is any indication, unions will have been pressuring employees over recent days to engage in industrial action in conjunction with the protests – for appropriate “high viz” media exposure.

For example, CFMMEU organisers will be pulling employees off building sites. Costs to productivity – to the community as a whole – have been estimated to run into the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Militant unions will be bullying employers to approve absences and employees to ask for them – saying that a failure to agree to release employees from work will have consequences for their business. We all know what this means.

Union bullies will usually say, release the delegates or we will take out the whole workforce and you will lose production for the day. Which would you prefer?

The protest day will also be dressed up as trade union training leave or leave to attend trade union activities.

But it is not trade union activities – it is political protesting, for which unions want employers to pay. And they will be joined by the usual suspects from the Greens, the Socialist Alliance and other fringe groups to pad the numbers.

But Australians do not want the rules being thrown out and anarchy being brought in.

It is indeed fortunate that most Australians have no memory of industrial strife of the last century when nationwide or rolling strikes would shut down our ports, trams, trains and airlines, and our power generators.

Industrial action before the modern era of reform was 44 times higher than today in a much smaller population.

This is because successive federal governments – both Labor and Liberal – have made a series of important reforms to our industrial relations system that have seen Australia move towards more co-operative, productive and fair workplaces.

For example Laurie Brereton and Paul Keating deserve credit for their legacies, achieved with bipartisan support from the Coalition, that ended economy wide arbitration in favour of enterprise bargaining. Reforms introduced by John Howard and Peter Reith on the Liberal side of politics, including freedom of association, simplification of awards and effective remedies against industrial action, were not supported by Labor at the time, but were thankfully retained by subsequent Labor governments.

The massive drop in strike activity in Australia has been of enormous benefit to the lives of working Australians and the Australian economy.

Australians don’t like it when their childcare centres, schools and hospitals are disrupted. They don’t like losing pay for no apparent reason. And they don’t like it that the cost of construction is 30 per cent higher than it should be.

To put the illogicality of this campaign into context, the ACTU wants to put a wrecking ball through the Fair Work Act – a framework that was introduced only a few years ago by Julia Gillard.

As Minister for Jobs and Industrial Relations I acknowledge some of the work done by my recent predecessors; I don’t agree with everything obviously.

But the past few decades of industrial policy have been marked by one common denominator – a shared belief that the industrial landscape should be directed towards an economy that supports co-operation, good, well-paid jobs and safe workplaces.

This is now at risk with the ACTU’s Sally McManus’ pitch to Bill Shorten that the rules need to be thrown out. To date it seems Mr Shorten has given every indication he will give in to those demands.

In June, ACTU Secretary Sally McManus told media a minimum wage rise will not lift workers out of poverty. Sally’s Law – which is that there should be no law, will become Bill’s Law.

A modernising industrial relations system has been a major contributing factor to Australia’s long trajectory of economic prosperity and strong jobs growth, particularly over the past few years.

But the ACTU, which has seen its membership wither on the vine over the same period, now wants to overturn all that, putting at risk jobs and damaging thousands of small and medium sized businesses.

First they turn our peaceful streets into battlegrounds – but next it will be our harmonious workplaces.

By all means make a case for reform – but don’t rip up the rules because you cannot make a logical case for lawbreaking. Don’t try to remain relevant by causing division and disruption.  And don’t risk employees’ welfare further by inciting breaches of the law.

SOURCE 






Must not cut down trees in NSW

A state Nationals MP has lodged a private member's bill to extinguish one of NSW's largest national parks, a move that opponents say signals an "open season" on the state's natural heritage.

Austin Evans, the member for Murray, is demanding the 41,000-hectare Murray Valley National Park revert to a state forest to allow timber harvesters back in.

Mr Evans, an engineer by training, campaigned for the degazetting of the eight-year-old park during his narrow byelection win over the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers candidate a year ago.

How the Liberals-dominated Berejiklian government responds could reveal how much it is prepared to cede sway over environmental issues to its junior coalition partner to bolster support in rural areas ahead of the March state election.

A national park has not been reversed in NSW before, and such a move would likely rile environmentalists who had fought for three decades to win support for the region's conservation.

"My expectation is [the government] will be supportive of it," Mr Evans told Fairfax Media.

"I think they are having discussions at the moment," he said, adding he hoped for a second recording of his bill by the year's end.

A spokesman for environment minister Gabrielle Upton declined to say which way the government was leaning.

"This is a private members bill," he said. "The NSW government will respond to it in due course."

Mr Evans said his community felt short-changed following the park's creation, saying compensation offered to buy out timber workers was "less than the timber industry earned in a single year".

Promises of a boost in tourism had also been "an absolute furphy", with visitor numbers to the region dropping, he said.

But Labor, the Greens and environmental scientists who helped make the case for the park, warned of an "open season" on conservation if the government bowed to Mr Evans' demands

SOURCE 





Coalition could indemnify new coal projects against potential carbon price

The energy minister, Angus Taylor, has signalled the Australian government could indemnify new power generation projects against the future risk of a carbon price, and says it could also support the retrofitting of existing coal plants.

In an interview with Guardian Australia, the man dubbed the “minister for getting power prices down” by the prime minister, Scott Morrison, has also committed to keeping current subsidies for households and businesses to install renewable energy technology like solar panels until 2030, and insists Australia’s electricity sector will reduce emissions by 26% on 2005 levels in “the early 2020s”.

Taylor on Tuesday outlined a range of measures the government wants to implement to help lower power prices, including cajoling retailers into offering customers out-of-cycle price cuts so consumers could experience hip-pocket relief by January, ahead of the next election.

He also foreshadowed policy interventions to boost investment in new “reliable” power generation, including providing a floor price, contracts for difference, cap and floor contracts and government loans.

Morrison held out the prospect of government support for new coal-fired power stations “where they meet all the requirements” of the yet-to-be finalised mechanisms to boost investment in new electricity generation.

One of the key problems preventing private investment in new coal-fired power generation is proponents have struggled to get finance because they are unable to predict future carbon risk, particularly given Australia’s decade-long partisan standoff over emissions reduction policies.

Taylor told Guardian Australia the government would look to remove the risks stopping investment in new power generation. “I’m saying we will look at whatever risks that can’t be managed by the companies that need to be managed to get investment.

“What we are saying is the risks that government needs to absorb to get investment in reliable generation, we will look at absorbing. We need the investment.”

Asked whether he acknowledged that would expose taxpayers to risk, Taylor said: “We’ll look at the risks and we’ll seek to minimise the risks to the commonwealth.”

The concept of the government underwriting new investments in power generation in order to boost competition in the market was originally recommended by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission but with tightly defined criteria. The government is pursuing the ACCC’s general principle, but writing its own rules.

The ACCC was focused on encouraging new market participants, but the energy minister said the government could back the retrofitting of existing power plants to extend their operating life.

Asked how retrofitting an existing plant was bringing new generation into the market, he said: “It’s new generation if it would otherwise be gone, that’s the point.

“What we want is additional investment, new investment, that would mean we get capacity we wouldn’t otherwise have.”

Business is extremely wary of the government’s plans to impose price regulation in the energy sector, and about oft-repeated public threats by the government to wield a “big stick” – introducing divestiture powers to break up power companies engaging in price-gouging.

The chief executive of the Business Council of Australia, Jennifer Westacott, warned on Tuesday that “ad hoc intervention in the energy market, such as underwriting generation investment or forced divestment, is sending a signal to the world that investing in Australia comes with considerable risks”.

“In the long term this will only result in less investment in energy generation, less reliable energy and ultimately higher prices,” the BCA chief said.

Taylor told Guardian Australia he was confident the government had the power to legislate to force divestiture, and a toughening of regulatory options was required because of poor market conduct.

Asked whether he expected legal challenges from power companies in the event the government ever used the divestiture power, he said: “I can’t predict what people are going to do.”

Asked what trigger the government planned to use to break up badly behaving power companies, Taylor said it was a lack of competition and deliberate withdrawal of supply.

“The issue is, have we got enough capacity and supply in the market to meet customers’ needs and are companies in the sector thwarting that, are they deliberately taking anti-competitive action to withdraw supply from the market to drive up prices?”

Stakeholders in the energy market are also enormously frustrated with the Coalition’s chopping and changing on energy policy, which culminated in the ditching of the national energy guarantee’s 26% emissions reduction target.

Taylor insists the electricity sector will hit 26% well before 2030. Asked why the government ditched a target it was going to easily exceed, the minister said: “Labor want a higher target. We are not going to facilitate that in any shape or form.

“We are not going to load the gun for Labor to have a much higher target.”

Energy ministers will meet this Friday for the first time since the Morrison government grounded part of the Neg. Taylor wants to sound out his counterparts on whether they will agree to roll out new price regulations in the electricity market, or whether Canberra will force the change by overriding them.

The Victorian energy minister, Lily D’Ambrosio, has warned she has no intention of agreeing to anything on Friday, given the state is days away from entering caretaker mode ahead of the state election.

SOURCE 

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).    For a daily critique of Leftist activities,  see DISSECTING LEFTISM.  To keep up with attacks on free speech see Tongue Tied. Also, don't forget your daily roundup  of pro-environment but anti-Greenie  news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH .  Email me  here