Another young man tossed out of his college following a rape allegation

Bettina Arndt

I’m tackling serious stuff in my YouTube video this week – another young man tossed out of his college following a rape allegation.



This one happened a few years ago at the University of Western Australia. You will see from my interview with the male student in question – I’ve called him ‘Nathan’ – that he readily admits didn’t handle his sexual relationship with his new girlfriend very well. The relationship was only a few weeks old, his girlfriend clearly had sexual issues. But the appallingly biased handling of the inquiry by his college  gave him no opportunity for a fair hearing, he was given no legal advice before being expelled from college after his girlfriend, led on by her feminist friends, misrepresented what happened between them.

Here is the classic believe-the-victim scenario which has led to so many American college students winning big legal payouts due to a university’s failure to protect their due process rights.

I have absolutely no doubt this is now happening at universities across Australia. Last year I made a video with a PhD student at Adelaide University who was pursued by a university committee following rape allegations. I will be making further videos regarding a number of similar cases I am following up at the moment – in some I need to wait for the completion of legal action before going public.

Listen up, people. This is happening on our watch. We are allowing our universities to be bullied into getting involved in adjudicating these criminal matters, using grossly unfair semi-judicial processes which have no place in institutes of higher learning.

I’m currently preparing a detailed letter to send to all members of the University of Sydney Senate, urging them to  seek a proper explanation from the administration as to why the University is embarking on this course. I am providing them with detailed evidence of the huge costs and damage to the reputations of American colleges from becoming involved in such matters, explaining that the Trump administration is now acting to restore due process rights on campus. 

As members of the governing body of the university, I will be urging these people to make it their business to thoroughly investigate how the administration proposes to avoid the expensive and damaging likely consequences of this move and suggesting they seek legal advice on the desirability and consequences of this new direction.

I’m hopeful that the large, varied group included in the Senate will include some independent folk prepared to start asking tough questions. I’m starting with Sydney Uni because I am still awaiting news of their investigation of my complaint about the violent protest against me last year.

I’ll be following up with similar letters to board members at other universities, initially targeting those we know to have introduced regulations regarding this issue. But since I know of two cases at UWA which does not appear to have officially moved in this direction, I suspect similar cases are happening under the radar at campuses across Australia.

Email from Tina -- bettina@bettinaarndt.com.au






Fake charges of racism deepen our divisions

The intake of Lebanese Muslims in the '70s WAS poorly conceived and executed

Our history — in its good and bad aspects — is deeply compromised by the culture wars as exemplified by the media campaign unleashed against the “racist” Liberal Party for its many sins, one of the most conspicuous being the issue of Lebanese Muslims allowed here by the Fraser government.

In his celebrated interview with Scott Morrison, host Waleed Aly presented this as a primary item in his accusation: “Does your party and your Coalition have a problem of Islamophobia?” The essence of Aly’s critique was Peter Dutton’s suggestion “that Lebanese immigration in the 70s was a mistake or that mistakes were made around it”.

This was condemned as unacceptable and dangerous. A number of journalists took up the same theme. They pointed to Dutton’s 2016 remarks that Fraser had made a mistake in the entry of Lebanese Muslims fleeing the civil war and nominated this as evidence of Liberal racism or Islamophobia, or both. Aly, highlighting the Coalition’s anti-Islamic problem, asked Morrison: “Why single out the Lebanese community in that context?”

The first point to be made is that politicians from all sides should do better in canvassing ­racial and religious issues. The second point is that this arena is loaded with hypocrisy, with most politicians and media adopting one side or the other in the culture war and running polemics to suit their cause.

Asked for his view on this issue, former immigration minister Philip Ruddock, known for his ties with the Lebanese community, said: “The Lebanese Concession was recognised to have been a policy mistake and it was closed down in a relatively short time. The only test required was to have relatives in Australia, but even that could not be adequately enforced and there is no doubt it was abused.

“Malcolm Fraser properly insisted that the entry be based on non-discriminatory grounds but the entry criteria were such that the policy did not meet the normal Australian standards of integrity that should characterise our immigration program.”

Fraser initiated the policy through his immigration minister, Michael MacKellar, given the plight facing many Lebanese who fled their country. Prominent Christian Lebanese business leaders had approached Fraser and urged him to take action — in short, to bring Christian Lebanese to this country.

The entry criteria were exceptional. People did not have to qualify as refugees and were given no assessment to this effect. Nor did they have to meet normal immigration entry standards in relation to skills, qualifications, language or resources. The only alleged test applied was having relatives in Australia — and there was plenty of scope for this to be manipulated and abused.

On January 1, 2007 the cabinet documents for this period were released. Advice from the Immigration Department had been that too many Lebanese Muslims were being accepted without “the required qualities” for successful integration, a lethal conclusion violating the principles governing the success of Australia’s immigration program.

The Fraser cabinet was told many of the entrants were unskilled, illiterate and had questionable character and health standards. This was a collapse in normal entry standards. The cabinet documents explicitly confirm the humanitarian decision to accept entry was made on conditions that fell far short of Australia’s normal entry criteria. MacKellar said most applicants were sponsored by relatives living in Sydney’s southwest and many settled around Lakemba. Officials reported that many were misrepresenting their background during interviews in “deliberate attempts to conceal vital information”.

In a November 2016 column the Sydney Institute’s Gerard Henderson said: “Immigration Department staff sent to the region to administer the program had no way of checking whether the applicants had a relative in Australia.” Officials have privately confirmed this to the writer. One said: “We lost control over what was happening.”

Interviewed at the time by The Australian’s Matthew Franklin, Fraser confirmed the government’s relaxed entry criteria on humanitarian grounds. The submission said that as many as 90 per cent of the entrants were Muslims, suggesting many Christians, ironically, were not interested. In his memoirs, co-authored with Margaret Simons, Fraser wrote that of those who came “nine out of 10 were Muslim” and conceded this represented a significant change in the nature of immigration from Lebanon because previously “migrants from Lebanon had been mainly Christian”.

In his book Fraser said there had been a mistake but claimed it was in resettlement and planning. This is undoubtedly true. But his understandable effort to deny any mistake on entry policy cannot be sustained given the facts, cabinet documents, chaos surrounding the process and admissions by the minister and department about the flawed entry criteria.

Indeed, this is worse than a mere mistake. The evidence suggests it is one of the most significant failures in the immigration intake over the past several decades. While cause and effect are hard to directly prove, the southwest of Sydney was subsequently the location of Islamic gangs, crime, violence and racial and religious baiting. Do people believe that when you abandon the integrity of the intake — even for a short time — there are no consequences?

It is morally and intellectually dishonest to raise this 70s episode as evidence of Liberal Party Islamophobia, as Aly did, along with criticising any minister who calls it a mistake while ignoring, concealing or seeking to deny what really happened.

The next question is: Should Dutton have made these comments in 2016? His remarks were provocative because he drew the link between the 70s entry and the high number of second and third-generation Lebanese Muslims charged with terrorist-related ­offences, saying they constituted 22 out of 33 people.

Dutton made clear he did not seek to discredit an entire community. He called it “a particular issue” and told parliament he would not allow the community “to be defined by those people doing the wrong thing”. This, however, was the exact charge against him — by Bill Shorten, the Greens and much of the media.

Dutton was branded a racist and a bigot and much of the media agreed — as they agreed with Aly last week. At the time Shorten accused Dutton of engaging in “lazy disrespect, wholesale labelling of entire communities for the actions of a tiny minority”.

In his defence Dutton said Australia had a highly successful humanitarian program of 18,750 people and an immigration intake of 200,000, but when things were not working “we should own up to our mistakes”.

That justification is far too convenient. Greens senator Nick McKim clarified the paradox, saying: “Just because something is fact doesn’t mean it is reasonable or productive to talk about it.” That can be right — but, on the other hand, outright suppression of core realities cannot help anybody. Dutton, however, was unwise in his language given the intelligence agencies’ rely on the co-operation of the Muslim community. He should not have linked the 70s intake with the problem of foreign fighters in 2016, despite being factually correct in that Lebanese Muslims were manifestly over-represented among terrorism offenders.

This leads, however, to the final question: how much damage is being done by the progressive forces as they parade their manic virtue branding and hang the accusation of racism and Islamophobia on every hook they see? This is not helping the country; it is exacerbating, not repairing, our divisions. At the time Malcolm Turnbull as PM held Dutton’s critics to account for the consequences of what they were doing — saying they sought to “inflame unrest, animosity and racial hatred”.

Turnbull was right. We need to understand that branding our political leaders as racists and agents of Islamophobia constitutes its own form of counterproductive extremism; witness the unjustified comments that Morrison had contributed to the atmosphere leading to the New Zealand massacre. Consider the historical method at work. The progressive quest is to lay on the table every sin of the White Australia policy, every racial, colonial and sexual injustice since European settlement — and that constitutes a multitude — yet when there are historical issues that do not suit the progressive agenda, they must be hidden, disguised or suppressed. Spare us the hypocrisy.

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Lebanese Muslim Australian father-of-four is sentenced to four months in Bali's notorious Kerobokan prison for stealing a $1,250 Gucci handbag




A Sydney father has been sentenced to four months in Bali's notorious Kerobokan prison for stealing a $1,250 cream designer handbag.

Bilal Kalache, from Merrylands in Western Sydney, was convicted on Monday of taking the Gucci handbag from a duty-free store in the popular tourist destination of Kuta without paying, according to The Daily Telegraph.

The father-of-four was holidaying with his wife and children at the time of the theft on January 10.  

The 43-year-old had been shopping with a friend and his son when he stole the cream handbag after the shop assistant left the store front to retrieve an item from the back.  

He claimed he simply forgot to pay for the expensive designer bag after purchasing another black Gucci purse and a pair of sunglasses.

The bag was found in Kalaches' son's suitcase as they tried to board a plane home to Australia.

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The Greens' extraordinary plan to BAN coal in Australia - calling it 'the new asbestos - despite exports earning $66BILLION every year

They know there is no hope of this being enacted.  It is just an attempt to make themselves look good and wise

The Greens have unveiled their radical plan to ban coal despite it bringing Australia more than $66billion every year.

The party on Thursday released a new climate plan, which sets 2030 as the target year for the nation to be running on 100 per cent renewable energy.

The policy - which comes with a call to arms from Swedish school student Greta Thunberg - shows how the Greens would push a Labor government if elected in May.

Greens leader Richard Di Natale described coal as 'the new asbestos', saying the party wants to shut down every coal power plant in New South Wales, The Daily Telegraph reported.

'We once used asbestos in our buildings because we thought it was safe. But we now know better, so we have banned it. Now it is coal's turn,' the Greens' policy stated.

The party wants to put an end to thermal coal burning by setting a yearly limit on coal exports from 2020 and reducing it every year until it hits zero in 2030.

At the same time, the party is pushing for the nation to be running on 100 per cent renewable energy by the time the coal industry ceases trading.

The plan would include a $65billion carbon tax, and an immediate ban on new coal mines, fracking and conventional onshore and offshore gas and oilfields. 

Industry experts said the economy will suffer under the plan.

Coal was the highest earning export commodity in Australia last year, accounting for $66million in revenue, according to Australian Bureau of Statistics figures.    

Last financial year, coals exports brought the NSW economy about $17billion, with thermal coal exports reaching 164.6million tonnes. 

NSW Mining CEO Stephen Galilee told Daily Mail Australia the overall economic cost of banning coal would send the state into a deep economic recession.

'The Greens policy would cost NSW its most valuable export industry and over $17billion in export income, as well as over $2billion a year in mining royalties, which help pay for schools and hospitals.

'Over 20,000 NSW coal miners would lose their jobs, devastating mining families and communities, and over 130,000 more jobs across NSW would also be potentially affected,' Mr Galilee said.

The CEO said more than 7,000 businesses currently part of the mining supply chain would also be hit, threatening even more jobs.

'Electricity supply to families and businesses across NSW would also be at risk of price rises and blackouts which would affect a range of energy-intensive industries including manufacturing, transport and construction,' he said.

Mr Di Natale has denied his party's plan to shut down all coal-fired power stations and phase out thermal coal exports will cost Australians jobs. 

The Greens want a $1billion transition plan for workers affected by banning coal, which Mr Di Natale believes will create more than 170,000 new jobs.

'We will lose no jobs because under our plan we will have a national authority, a publicly-owned authority, with express intent to manage this transition,' he told ABC Radio National on Thursday.

'The reality is this is happening already, people are going to lose their jobs because the economics are making it so.'

Mr Di Natale said unlike the major parties, the Greens planned to create a jobs boom in the renewable energy export industry. 

As part of the plan, the Greens want the nation to stop using gas - despite experts saying the energy source is an essential part of future energy sources.

Phasing out petrol cars and moving to electric vehicles was another key objective mentioned in the Greens idealistic plan.   

Luxury fossil fuel cars would be hit with a 17 per cent tax to help pay for scrapping registration fees, import tariffs, GST and stamp duty on electric vehicles.

The Greens have also proposed establishing a new public energy retailer and re-regulating electricity prices to address price gouging following the coal ban.

Mr Di Natale said the mining and burning of coal remained the single biggest cause of climate change in Australia and around the world.

'You need the Greens in the Senate to push Labor to make sure we do what needs to be done,' he said.

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 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