Gang of knife-wielding African thugs go on wild crime spree in Melbourne overnight - stealing luxury cars and terrifying residents across the city

An armed gang is on the run after terrorising Melbourne last night with two home invasions and a carjacking.

Four men of African appearance broke into a home in Bentleigh East, Melbourne at around 8.40pm on Sunday.

They stole valuables and drove off in the victims' car but crashed it on the freeway.

The men then carjacked another and broke into a second home where they stole two more luxury cars and terrified the residents.

During the first break in, one of the gang was armed with a knife and threatened the owners, a 39-year-old man and 32-year-old woman. The couple were both assaulted and left with minor injuries.

The men then fled with jewellery, computers and handbags, and also took the victims' black BMW.

The gang crashed the car on the Westgate Freeway by driving it into a barrier.

As a car slowed down to help, one of the gang got out and tried to open the door.

The 45-year-old man and his female passenger, 39, managed to drive away unharmed.

Police were then called to a house in Port Melbourne just after 9pm after reports of an aggravated carjacking.

It is understood a woman was about to put her child into the car when she was approached by three men. One pulled out a knife and demanded her vehicle.

The victim, a 42-year-old Box Hill North woman, called for help and was assisted by a family member, a 40-year-old man also from Box Hill North.

He was also threatened by the gang, who took off in their vehicle, described as a black 2012 Hyundai i30 with registration ZEX859. The victims were not injured.

Police later responded to an aggravated burglary in Derrimut about 12.10am on Monday. On this occasion, four masked men armed with knives broke into a home on Ivy Close and were confronted by the occupants.

A 65-year-old man was assaulted during the incident and sustained a minor laceration. He did not require hospital treatment. A 58-year-old woman, 91-year-old man and 64-year-old woman, who were also home at the time, were not injured.

The gang stole two cars, a grey 2010 Mercedes sedan registration XOB358 and a black 2015 Honda HR-V registration 1EY3DI.

The stolen Hyundai from Port Melbourne was dumped nearby. Both the Honda HRV and Mercedes remain outstanding.

Detectives believed the incidents were linked. The investigation is ongoing. Anyone with information is urged to contact Crime Stoppers.

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Thanks, Bob Brown, You Helped Labor Lose The Unloseable Election


Greens leader Bob Brown

For an alleged Labor party to put Greenie causes ahead of worker welfare was epic folly.  Coal miners are workers too and they make a good dollar.  Labor now need to divorce themselves from their happy marriage to the Greens

Still trying to figure out how Labor lost another unloseable election? The pollsters got it wrong, the bookies got it wrong, the punters got it wrong the ABC and most of the mainstream media got it wrong. And obviously Bill Shorten got it very wrong.

Bob Hawke got it right when he said, “Never underestimate the intelligence of The Australian voters”. He probably should have added, “Especially in Queensland”, where Labor lost two seats and the LNP shored up their margins even in Peter Dutton’s Dickson, where Labor and GetUp put in a huge effort.

We even saw the spectacle of another ex-Labor PM Paul Keating, shakily urge voters to “drive a stake through his dark political heart”.

Why did they all get it so far off the mark? Well Queenslanders don’t take kindly to a bunch of ratbags from the south telling them how to run their economy and create jobs. So Bob Brown’s Anti-Adani Convoy couldn’t have come at a better time for the LNP. Waving banners shouting “Coal Kills” and “Block Adani” floated like a lead balloon over a State which reaps billions from coal exports.

This folly combined with Shorten’s fence sitting and the Palaszczuk Government’s stalling over issues such as the numbers of a common bush bird, the black-throated finch. Anastacia must be worried she’ll be next.

The LNP increased its vote substantially in the previously very marginal seat of Flynn, which was high on the Labor wish list. Centered on the major coal port of Gladstone and held by Ken O’Dowd since 2010, it also takes in an extensive agriculture and beef area including the North Burnett region.

Rockhampton’s Michelle Landry increased her LNP winning margin in neighbouring Capricornia and in Dawson, centred on Mackay, the so-called Member for Manila, George Christensen, gained another big unexpected win. Further north in Townsville, Labor’s Cathy O’Toole was out-gunned by war veteran LNP candidate, Phillip Thompson. In all these centres, jobs and the economy were major factors.

Combine all that with Labor’s big taxing agenda, its hit at self-funded retirees, negative gearing, Capital GainsTax, the blank cheque it sought for an un-costed, over-ambitious climate policy (including a controversial push for 50 percent electric vehicle sales by 2030), and the result in Queensland and most other States is not surprising.

Add the arrogant advice to retirees and investors from Labor’s Treasury spokesman and candidate for the top job, Chris Bowen, “If you don’t like it, don’t vote Labor”.

Good advice. So the voters said it’s not time to risk Shorten, we’ll stick with Scott Morrison and a stable economy.

Now it looks likely Morrison will gain an absolute majority and enjoy a major opportunity to grow his influence over the coming term.

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One in seven young people think men can force sex if a woman changes her mind

One in seven young Australians think a man can force a woman to have sex if she initiated the interaction but then changed her mind, a survey has revealed.

According to the National Community Attitudes towards Violence against Women Survey (NCAS) Youth Report, released today, high numbers of Australians aged 16-24 hold disturbing beliefs about sexual consent and abusive relationships.

When asked if a man was "justified" in continuing to have sex with a woman who had taken him into a bedroom and started kissing him before pushing him away, 14 per cent of respondents said yes, with men and women equally likely to hold this view.

The results also showed one in three young men believed "many" women who say they have been raped actually had consensual sex and later had regrets. In reality, false rape accusations are believed to be incredibly uncommon (often cited as two per cent of total allegations, although a 2013 AIFS report found the variety of contexts in which an allegation can be declared "false" means care should be taken when trying to quantify the occurrence).

Lead researcher Dr Anastasia Powell, lecturer in legal studies at RMIT, said the knowledge gaps were "concerning".
"Australian law emphasises active and communicative consent, and consent is something that should be occurring throughout an encounter," she said.

The report is the latest data set to come from NCAS, a national telephone survey conducted by Australia's National Research Organisation for Women's Safety (ANROWS) and VicHealth in 2017 commissioned by the federal government.

While young people's understanding of physical domestic violence had improved since a previous community attitudes survey was undertaken in 2013, large numbers did not recognise emotional abuse and controlling behaviour as forms of domestic violence.

A quarter of the young men surveyed blamed women who had experienced image-based abuse (colloquially known as "revenge porn") for sending the pictures in the first place, while one in five did not think using technology to track their partners' movements, or reading text messages without their knowledge, amounted to domestic violence (over double the number of women who held this view).

Forty-three per cent of young people agreed it was "natural for a man to want to appear in control of his partner in front of his male friends", with men and women equally likely to believe this.
"That's a substantial number of young people who have normalised the idea of male control at a time when they are learning and practicing what a normal relationship should look like," Dr Powell said.

Nicole Juniper, 22, was in a year-long emotionally abusive relationship in her late teens. While she was originally shocked by the survey results, after reflecting on her own experience, she said she was less surprised.

"[It was] my first serious relationship, I couldn't see red flags," she said.

The Moonee Ponds student took months to recognise her ex-partner's behaviour, which included reading her emails without her knowledge and not letting her see male friends, as abusive, and stayed in the relationship once she did.

"I thought he would be in danger without me; he said he would end his life multiple times."

Ms Juniper said there needs to be better education about emotional abuse in schools, to empower young people to speak up when they think their friends could be in an unhealthy situation.
"There's not a lot of understanding around abuse when it isn't physical," she said.

Renee Imbesi, principal program officer for mental wellbeing at VicHealth, said, although failure to recognise emotional abuse as domestic violence occurs in all demographics, it can be a particular problem for young people without much experience in intimate relationships, who might confuse controlling behaviour with care.

"There's the attitude that, 'Oh, they want to know where you are because they love you.'"

Sixty per cent of young people surveyed indicated that they don't know where to go for help in a domestic violence situation.
"[Services] need to start talking about 'control', because a lot of young people aren't calling it domestic violence or abuse," Ms Imbesi said.

From a health policy perspective, Ms Imbesi said the benefits of achieving gender equality in the home are "significant".
"Intimate partner violence is still the leading contributor to women's ill health and disease in women aged 18 to 44, and the majority of that burden of disease is mental health related: anxiety, depression, and also suicide," she said, noting gender norms can also take a toll on men's mental health.
"When you're promoting equal relationships between men and women, you're promoting mental wellbeing."

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ABC gave us groupthink on steroids

Was the ABC deliberately biased towards the ALP at the federal election, or was its gross fail just a problem of groupthink?

After all, most of the commercial media and ABC had already failed to anticipate the rise of One Nation over resentment at the ­climate change agenda of then prime minister Malcolm Turnbull at the 2016 election. Back then, Pauline Hanson’s party won four Senate seats, 4.1 per cent of the ­national vote and 9.1 per cent of the Queensland vote.

Surely that media fail should have alerted the ABC to the possibility that One Nation and Clive Palmer’s advertising blitz could affect­ this year’s Labor campaign, which former leader Bill Shorten said was a referendum on climate change. Maybe not, if your journ­alists are committed climate change activists who believe that stopping the Adani mine Queenslanders overwhelmingly want can save the Great Barrier Reef, ­despite ballooning carbon dioxide emissions from China and India.

The ABC is the best-resourced news organisation in the country, paid for by taxpayers who vote across the political spectrum. In Queensland, which swung strongly to the Coalition, the ABC’s many state-based staff apparently failed to see the trends in their own backyard. The ABC has news ­bureaus in Brisbane, the Gold Coast, the Sunshine Coast, Toowoomba, Bundaberg, Rockhampton, Mackay, Cairns, Townsville, Longreach and Mount Isa.

Discussing the ABC’s coverage last Monday night on Sky News’s Chris Kenny on Media, the long-time ABC critic interviewed journ­alist and former ABC staff-elected representative Quentin Dempster. Kenny regularly gives his ABC critics airtime in a way the ABC never would, and good on Dempster for going on the show. He offered two defences of the ABC’s failure: few others saw the result coming and ABC political reporters were basing their views on published polling that showed Labor likely to win.

Kenny admitted he too had expecte­d a narrow Labor win but said he had claimed many times that the Coalition had a chance. He named several Sky News journ­alists who had publicly said all through the final week of the campaign that the ­Coalition could still win. He also named many others who had said Labor would win.

Kenny said no experienced political journalist could take a 51-49 poll to the ALP with a margin of error close to 3 per cent and say for sure Labor would win. Kenny asked why, if there were a range of views at Sky News, did literally everyone at the much larger ABC fall in behind the Labor narrative?

Great question. Kenny is correct­. As Peta Credlin, Alan Jones and Paul Murray pointed out for weeks before poll day, there was always a “narrow path” to a ­Coalition win built around Queensland and a rejection of Labor’s anti-coal, high-taxing, highly redistributive policies.

Later last Monday night, Paul Barry on the ABC’s Media Watch lamented the bias of News Corp Australia papers, which largely got the election right, and defended the ABC, which he thought ran a fair and balanced campaign. It did not and the nation knows it. Viewers saw the maudlin performance of its election-night hosts — Barrie Cassidy, Laura Tingle, Annabel Crabb, Andrew Probyn, Michael Rowland and Leigh Sales — as they realised Labor was losing.

The nation had heard Tingle on the ABC’s 7.30 throughout the previou­s week proclaiming both sides knew the Coalition was gone. It had heard the anti-Adani campaigning of Radio National’s Fran Kelly and ABC Sydney breakfast radio host Wendy Harmer.

Barry is a great journalist and Media Watch’s best-ever host. He has been prepared to kick the ABC. He, like predecessor Jonathan Holmes in his book on the ­future of the ABC, On Aunty, has said publicly the ABC is biased to the left. The pair spoke about the issue at Gleebooks in Sydney in March.

Said Holmes: “I think the sort of person that most ABC people think about when they make their programs are the sort of people (who) think roughly the same as they do and I think that’s somebody a bit left of centre. They are talking to people like me and they are not talking to people who think differently to me.”

The two presenters of the ABC’s flagship media program from 2008 until today agreed the ABC needed to change. Yet last Monday night Barry could not see what was wrong with Labor’s plans or the ABC’s coverage of them, and regarded News’s correct critic­ism of those plans as bias. Groupthink on steroids.

News, like its Sky News subsid­iary, employs journalists with a ­diversity of views. Think of this paper’s writers from the left: Troy Bramston, Phillip Adams, Graham Richardson, Alan Kohler and, from the left of the Coalition, Peter van Onselen and Niki Savva.

The Courier-Mail has copped a bucketing on social media but its national affairs editor, Dennis Atkin­s, is a former Goss government staffer, as was former business writer and political columnist Paul Syvret. Long-time columnist Terry Sweetman is of the left. The nation’s biggest website, News Corp Australia’s news.com.au, is very left-wing.

This is as it should be because readers of the biggest newspapers in the country have diverse views. As do viewers of the ABC. Yet the ABC does not represent a diversity of views.

Just look at who ABC TV invited on to its late-night edition of The Drum to speak to Ellen Fanning after Saturday night’s count, when Fanning condescendingly said: “I’ll be the Queenslander on the panel cos none of youse are.” Joining her were prominent left-wingers Magda Szubanski, Jamila Rizvi, Layne Beachley, Graham Innes and the much more thoughtful Stan Grant, who correctly said that Australians do not like centrally imposed, top-down reforms. No conservative was in sight.

Long-time former Labor premier Bob Carr wrote in The Sydney Morning Herald on Thursday critic­ising many Labor policies most commentators on the ABC had supported. Extra funding for schools would have been better spent on quality teachers, he wrote. Voters know we are at ­record education funding levels but going down in international education performance tables.

Carr thought plans to subsidise the private sector wages of childcare workers were dangerous, as this paper said. Carr criticised the belief that voters overwhelmingly supported higher taxes for better services and the “anti-enterprise” flavour of Shorten’s “top end of town” rhetoric. Pretty much what many of News’s papers argued.

Voters are smarter than journ­alists think. They were right on climate­ and Adani. They know Australia, with 1.3 per cent of global CO2 emissions, can’t change the climate. They support the aspirat­ion that is anathema to the public service culture of the ABC.

And on franking credits they knew Labor was just wrong. Franking credits are a refund for tax paid by a company to remove double taxation. Paying refunds to people who pay no tax is not a subsidy­. And self-funded retirees on low incomes were the big losers. Rich superannuants mostly do pay tax because they have investments in property and shares outside their super. The ABC should have understood this.

At least it has a journalist as chairwoman now and the era of MBA chairmen and MDs afraid to discuss content is over. Ita Buttrose needs to act like the editor she is. A good place to start would be trying to align ABC news values with community values. Less campaigning on gender and environmental issues and more on living standards. More about religious freedom and less condemnation of Judaeo-Christian values.

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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