Australia's fall from Lucky Country to Cruel Country (?)

Below is a sob story from a Leftist writer in a Leftist newspaper.  So, as usual, the important information is what she leaves out.  These men were NOT refugees.  They had refuge as soon as they arrived in Pakistan. They are illegal immigrants determined to force themselves on us to grab the economic benefits that Australians have created for themselves.  They could return to Pakistan at any time but they are fed and housed for nothing so why should they do that?


They were young men – call them Liam and Ben – best mates, far from home, full of chutzpah and crazy self-belief. They'd been through a lot together and landed on this idyllic-looking tropical island. One day they were swimming near a waterfall when, stupidly, Liam drowned. He was a poor swimmer, got stuck under a log, drowned.

This terrible accident was just the start. Liam, a bit older than the others, had a wife and child at home. His grieving friends wanted to preserve his body against the tropical heat, pay their respects and fly him home to his family, but they had no money. The ubiquitous uniformed black shirts, agents of the foreign power that controlled the island, were impatient with this prayer and repatriation nonsense and insisted they bury the body and be done. But the young men were determined. Selling their few possessions – phones, watches, cigarettes – they raised enough for body-preserving chemicals, then persuaded their own government to fly Liam home.

It sounds like a story of middle-class white kids caught in some heartless tin-pot dictatorship. In fact the waterfall is on Manus Island. The young men's real names are Kamil and Zubair. Pashto-speaking Muslims driven out by the Taliban, they became best friends despite being on opposite sides of the Sunni-Shiite divide.

Both were "processed" – in that manufacturing terminology we use to dehumanise – and found to be genuine refugees, fleeing for their lives. Yet our very own black shirts, the much-hated Australian Border Force, stood and watched their grief, refusing help or even sympathy. The government that finally flew the body home was the one the boys had implicitly rejected: Pakistan.

Of course, there's worse brutality, especially in these camps. There's rape, bullying, humiliation, emotional, physical abuse and, most egregious of all, the deliberate erasure of hope. 

Any remaining doubt about whether this is actually deliberate – whether we're just somehow unable to protect people from abuse, or resettle them without years of limbo – was removed, along with any remaining hope, by Malcolm Turnbull's latest "they will never set foot in this country" atrocity. Never? We take in war criminals but ban forever those who have done nothing but need our help.

Zubair, now 23, is a former student of business and IT. Unthinkingly, I ask what he's been doing. "Nothing," he says. What's the point? He has no future. His English is good and his quiet despair makes me want to weep. But what I really cannot get past is how comfortable Australia has become with the routine casualisation of cruelty.

This is not our self-image. No way. We consider ourselves the good guys. Fair, open, warm, much like the Americans after WWII. But as Michael Leunig notes, "we are a people who are quite able to declare things about ourselves which are not true ... This is our strength, and has made our nation very stupid, dysfunctional and unhappy – but so what? We're the greatest people in the world."

The Australian Border Force's Facebook page depicts them as all-round decent fellows, busting drug rings and rescuing sea turtles caught in ghost nets. To their human bycatch, however, trapped in the Australian government's harsh exemplary punishment policies, they offer only further cruelty.

For this is meant as punishment. It's couched – dammit, it's SOLD – as a deterrent, like hanging the carcasses of sheep-mauling dingoes on the fence for the others to see.

But there's a critical error here, quite apart from the misconceived morality: a huge error in logic. For it's not wrongdoers we're punishing, as a deterrent to others. We're punishing their innocent victims. We're decorating the fence not with dingoes, but with brutalised lambs. Talk about victim blaming.

So it's wrong in logic. It's morally wrong, trashing people's lives for political effect. It's wrong in law – directly contravening our UN obligations to care for people who seek our help, process them expeditiously and resettle any found to be genuine refugees. (That is, three-quarters of the 800-odd remaining on Manus and 400-odd on Nauru). It's also vastly expensive  – $10 billion so far.

But what of the psychology? What does it mean for us, to us, to perpetrate such cruelty?

Zubair's back-story is pretty standard. He was a middle-class kid of wealthy business owners in the pretty Kurram Valley, near Pakistan's troubled border with Afghanistan. Zubair was studying in Peshawar. Then the Taliban came. Targeting the family for extortion and demanded $30,000. The family didn't have it. Zubair was badly beaten and the family forced to flee, leaving everything. 

They moved from city to city but the Taliban kept finding them and demanding Zubair, the eldest son, as a recruit. Zubair escaped on foot through jungles and countries: his family, including seven sisters and four brothers, one of whom has cancer, are still on the move, still prey. Zubair speaks to them occasionally, but doesn't know when or if he'll see them again.

This story is verified; there is no threat. They're not queue-jumpers. There is no queue for people fleeing death. In Australia they'd be assiduous nation-builders. Yet Turnbull, channelling Trump, insists that our "generous humanitarian program" depends on walling the continent with what amounts to a reinvigorated White Australia Policy.

I'm reminded of an elderly white couple I met in Jo'burg. Big supporters of black rule but understandably fearful of violence, they'd bought into a walled community, but found themselves increasingly terrified. The safer, the scareder. Finally they thought bugger it and bought a house in the street "like everyone else". Now they don't even lock their doors.

Protectionism makes us fearful, fear makes us cruel, cruelty rebounds. You can see on Malcolm's face what his Hanson-pleasing is costing him. He looks more like Trump every day. (I swear his nose is growing). More chilling still is that he's doing it, in the end, for us.

In Australia's fall from Lucky Country to Cruel Country, 10 billion will count as nothing. What this craven, mean-spirited, power-seeking fear-based fortress-Australia cruelty will cost us, if we let it, is our souls.

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Those charming boat people again

Thank you Kevin Rudd for this person's presence in Australia

A girl who was allegedly held captive by an asylum seeker for a month in his Sydney home has been found after she was seen running barefoot for her life down a Western Sydney street.

The 15-year-old foster-home girl was allegedly kept as a hostage in a Blacktown home, in Sydney's west, for four weeks before she was seen by police being chased down a nearby street at 1.30am on Thursday.

An asylum seeker who came to Australia illegally by boat in 2013 is alleged to have been her captor, The Daily Telegraph reports.

Bangladeshi national Rashadul Islam, 29, was reportedly seen chasing the 15-year-old girl down the busy road before attempting to grab her and drag her away before police intervened.

Neighbour Amarjeet Singh told the Daily Telegraph the girl 'seemed scared and was asking police to help her' as she ran down the street.

'Across the road was a man in his late 20s talking to police and shouting at the girl,' Amarjeet said.

When police saw the horrific scene unfold, the girl and her alleged captor were both taken back to Blacktown Police Station.

The girl was later taken to The Children's Hospital at Westmead for medical assessment, and was released a short time later.

She told police she had been sexually assaulted by Islam and kept against her will in the closed up house for four weeks.

The owner of the Blacktown house, Joe Chen, said Islam told him the 15-year-old girl was his girlfriend. 'He said she was a girlfriend. (I) saw them together making dinner … shopping together, always together,' Mr Chen told The Saturday Telegraph.

The home owner said he rented the room to Islam two months ago and noticed the girl when she started living there three weeks ago. Mr Chen also revealed Islam had a lock on his bedroom door.

The 15-year-old girl was reported missing by the foster home facility where she lived immediately after she went missing in October. 

She reportedly met Islam in a chance encounter after leaving the group foster home in Sydney's west last month.

The Saturday Telegraph reported Islam arrived illegally by boat on March 24, 2013.

He landed in waters off Christmas Island and was held in a Phosphate Hill detention centre for two months.

He was then flown to Australia on May 15, 2013 where he was granted a bridging visa under the Rudd government.

A crime scene was established at the address where police seized a number of items that will undergo forensic examination.

Islam, 29, has been charged with aggravated sexual assault and common assault and has been refused bail.

Detectives from the State Crime Command's Child Abuse Squad are investigating the matter and the Department of Immigration and Border Protection has been notified regarding the man's arrest.

A Department of Family and Community Services (FACS) spokesperson said the department was 'deeply saddened' by the alleged crime but would not comment any further.

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Queensland University of Technology case thrown out as 18C inquiry looms

A Brisbane judge has thrown out a controversial case of alleged racial vilification at the Queensland University of Technology, as an inquiry into Australia's race hate laws looks set to be announced next week.

The QUT ruling, which has emboldened Coalition MPs pushing for changes to section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, comes as Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull gave his clearest signal yet on Friday that an inquiry will be held into the provision and freedom of speech.

Federal Circuit Court judge Michael Jarrett on Friday dismissed a case against three QUT students embroiled in controversy over Facebook comments made in the wake of an incident in a computer lab reserved for Indigenous students.

The case had not yet proceeded to a full hearing, but Judge Jarrett said it had no reasonable prospect of success.

Opponents of section 18C – which makes it unlawful to "offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate" a person or group on the grounds of race – believe the case exemplifies why the law should be amended or repealed.

Cindy Prior, an Indigenous staff member at QUT, lodged a complaint under section 18C after student Alex Wood posted on Facebook in 2013: "Just got kicked out of the unsigned Indigenous computer room. QUT is stopping segregation with segregation."

Another student, Jackson Powell, added the comment: "I wonder where the white supremacist lab is." A third man, Calum Thwaites, was accused of writing "ITT N-----s", a claim he vehemently denied.

Ms Prior accused the trio of racial vilification and sued for $250,000 for damages, lost wages and future economic losses. The case advanced from the Australian Human Rights Commission to the Federal Circuit Court in 2015.

Criminal sanctions do not apply for breaches of section 18C, but the court can make orders including awarding compensation.

In a written judgment, Judge Jarrett said the comments by Mr Wood and Mr Powell were in the category of "mere slights" and not "sufficiently profound or serious" to attract the operation of section 18C.

The comments were not made because of Ms Prior's race and were not reasonably likely to offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate Indigenous people, he said.

As to the post allegedly made by Mr Thwaites, Judge Jarrett said there was "no evidence" to contest his claim that he did not make the comment. He dismissed the claim against all three students.

All but one Coalition Senate backbencher has publicly backed changing Section 18C, and the move also enjoys support in lower house. A change proposed would be for the words "insult" and "offend" to be removed from the act.

In Hobart, Mr Turnbull said his government was "considering" the proposal for an inquiry and that "nobody wants to encourage or condone hate speech of any kind".

However, the right balance must be struck between protections from hate speech and people's right to free speech.

"In this area, many people feel that the provisions of 18C oppose unreasonable restraints on free speech, or impose restraints on free speech over and above what is needed to prevent hate speech," he said.

"Parliamentary committees are a good way to examine issues of this kind because, of course, everybody with an interest can come and make a submission, can come and put their view, and the various arguments pro and con can be ventilated".

One Nation leader Pauline Hanson said on Friday before the judgment that "regardless of the court's decision today ... it has now become clear that there needs to be a parliamentary enquiry [sic] into 18C".

Nick Xenophon Team party leader Nick Xenophon has indicated concern about the delays in cases such as the QUT case, and could back an inquiry, but he continues to support strong protections from hate speech.

Opposition leader Bill Shorten criticised the Prime Minister for "looking at horse-trading away protections against hate speech".

"Old Malcolm would never have contemplated this," Mr Shorten said. "Every time the bullies on the backbench ask for something, Malcolm Turnbull gives it to them. They can sense his weakness and they will keep exploiting it."

Fairfax Media has been told by senior government sources the 18C inquiry week would probably be held by Parliament's human rights committee, though hearings may not get under way until next year.

Liberal senator Dean Smith first called for an 18C inquiry as the first step towards breaking the impasse over changing the act and negotiations are well advanced with the Senate crossbenchers over the terms of reference for the inquiry.

Liberal Democratic senator David Leyonhjelm, who has previously called for the repeal of 18C, told Fairfax Media he had discussed the inquiry with Mr Turnbull during a Thursday meeting and that the Prime Minister "is sympathetic to it ... I won't be surprised if it is announced next week".

Liberal MP Tim Wilson, a vocal critic of 18C and advocate for change, said the the QUT case shone "another bright light on 18C's dark nature".

"By continuing to oppose any change, Labor is ignoring reality and would rather Australians shut up than speak up," he said. "Students should never be hauled through the courts because they want to question university policy or stand up against segregation.

"The case is not the problem – the law is. This case was a disgrace from day one. Costs have been incurred, reputations tarnished and public money wasted. In its current form, 18C is a badly written law that has no place in a liberal democracy."

"The current law and process vilifies people for having opinions. Reform is overdue to end the culture of censorship 18C is breeding."

Liberal MP Andrew Hastie said after the judgment was handed down: "Sanity has prevailed; this should never have gotten to this point.

"The process has been the punishment – the anxiety, financial cost and personal cost to the three students involved can't be measured and that why we need to amend this act."

Conservative senator Eric Abetz said the ruling was good news but "irrespective of the outcome, the students will be the losers" and will forever be unfairly associated with the matter in Google searches.

"Sure, they have won but they have had their name trashed for three years by the Human Rights Commission. They've had uncertainty, denial of natural justice, the full force of the commission against them," he said.

He said the legislation should be amended urgently to stop the Human Rights Commission's "frolics" but welcomed the suggestion of a parliamentary inquiry and the Prime Minister's apparent openness to it.

Liberal senator James Paterson said: "Defenders of the law will no doubt argue that the dismissal of the case proves there is no need to change 18C."

"This shows callous disregard for the welfare of three innocent students whose lives have been damaged by a tortuous three-and-a-half year case," he said.He said an inquiry was "the best path forward" to achieve real and viable change.

Senator Leyonhjelm said that, at this stage, he would not back the government's industrial relations bills and that discussion about 18C had taken place in that context.

He said an inquiry was the way to move things forward and "I would support it".

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Lawyer criticises Gillian Triggs as 18C university case thrown out

The lawyer for one of the Queensland university students who has escaped a lawsuit for allegedly posting racist comments on Facebook has lashed Human Rights Commissioner Gillian Triggs.

Alex Wood, Calum Thwaites and Jackson Powell were being sued by Cindy Prior, an Indigenous administration officer, under the Racial Discrimination Act's controversial section 18C.

The case was thrown out by Brisbane's Federal Court Judge Michael Jarrett on Friday after he found Ms Prior did not have reasonable prospects of successfully bringing a case against the trio.

Outside court, Mr Thwaites' lawyer Tony Morris QC slammed Ms Triggs for allowing the case to get so far.

Mr Morris said everyone involved in the case was a victim, including Ms Prior, and the matter should have never come to court.

"I'm not going to call for her to resign but if the woman had any decency whatsoever, her resignation would be on the attorney-general's desk on Monday," he said.

Mr Thwaites said he was very relieved at the outcome. "I'm happy to be able to get on with my life," he told AAP.

Ms Prior argued she was unable to continue working face-to-face with white people following a series of Facebook posts made after Mr Wood was asked to leave an Indigenous-only computer lab at the Queensland University of Technology in 2013.

"Just got kicked out of the unsigned Indigenous computer room. QUT stopping segregation with segregation," he wrote.

Ms Prior was not in court for the judgment and is said to be facing a six-figure legal bill if the students recoup their legal costs from her.

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Why Climate Spending Does Nothing and Should Be Scrapped

The industrial burning of fossil fuels has released CO2 that is purported to be responsible for .7 degrees of planetary warming over the last century, and climate models predict it could be responsible for up to another 2 – 6 degrees over the next 100 years. Despite the fact that very few of the climate change predictions made since the late 80’s have come true (think empty dams, no more snow in the UK and an ice-free arctic) if a warmer earth is going to be problem, what can we do about it?

Mainstream thinking tells that leaving fossil fuels in the ground is the answer. According to the IPCC we must act now to reduce emissions substantially in order to reduce climate risks and increase our chances of adapting to a warmer world. Across the globe various carbon pricing schemes, taxes and renewable energy subsidies have been put in place in order to roll back the clock on global carbon dioxide emissions.

In Australia we have the Emissions Reduction Fund to which the government have allocated $2.55 billion in order to to help achieve Australia’s 2020 emissions reduction target of five per cent below 2000 levels by 2020. Then there is the $1 billion dollars pledged after the Paris Climate Summit last year, $200 million pledged over 4 years for the Global Climate Fund, and also $200 million dollars pledged to Mission Innovation, a multi-country group whose mission is to accelerate global clean energy innovation. It has been estimated that the overall gross cost of decarbonising Australia’s energy production over the next 20 years will be $60 billion.

But what will we get for those dollars and how much will it affect global temperature? With perhaps the exception of Mission Innovation, which focuses on more on ‘clean’ energy innovation and not carbon reduction, the dollars spent largely serve to increase energy poverty and slow economic growth, by making energy production more expensive. Together with the Renewable Energy Targets we are also heading towards a 23.5% reliance on unreliable renewable energy sources by 2020, and nobody can say with any accuracy exactly how many degrees of future warming these measures will mitigate. Seeing as Australia emits just 1% of the total global carbon dioxide emissions per year, and we are striving to reduce this to 5% less than our 2000 emission levels, we can assume it’s not very much. Meanwhile, worldwide there are 350 gigawatts of coal projects currently under construction, and 932 gigawatts of pre-construction coal proposals in the pipeline. Compare that to Australia’s annual coal production capacity of 29 GWe in 2014, it becomes apparent that our efforts are not only futile, but seriously undermined.

Consider also that global population will continue to rise until at least mid-century, meaning that in order for global carbon dioxide emissions to even remain stagnant, per capita emissions must continually fall proportionate to population growth. We are told that if fossil fuel use and carbon dioxide emissions stabilise at today’s levels, the climate will still warm by .6 degrees over the next 100 years. To achieve this continual reduction in per capita emissions, it means no new cheap energy for the developing world, and somebody would have to stop India, Indonesia and China from building new coal powered plants. A realist knows that this will never happen; it is more likely that globally we will continue on a ‘business as usual’ course. No number of carbon reduction schemes in the West will have any ability to stop this growth and they certainly won’t have any effect on the temperature.

But in rushing to decarbonise, are we on the right track? Alex Epstein, author of The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels outlines in his book just how much benefit fossil fuel use has been to humanity. By every measure human well-being is better than has ever been. We have cleaner air to breathe free from wood smoke, clean water, sanitation, sturdy homes, modern medicine and modern farming methods all due to the cheap reliable energy that fossil fuels provide. To him, the planet is here for us to modify and improve and in doing so we improve our lives. He even argues that fossil fuels improve the environment, evidenced by the fact that richer, industrialised nations have more measures in place to protect the environment than poorer, non-industrialised nations. By continuing to access cheap and plentiful energy through the burning of fossil fuels we are further equipping ourselves to withstand extreme weather events, and overcome and adapt to any changes a that warmer planet may bring. Mortality rates due to extreme weather events have actually declined by 95% since 1900, due, one can assume, to the protection modern fossil fuel powered technology affords, by way of satellite monitoring and more powerful modes of disseminating information.

Those who hark back to pre-industrialised societies as some sort of utopian existence where man is at one with nature, neglect to realise that without modern civilisation we would be faced with disease, hunger and very short and miserable lives. Those who demonise the ‘dirty fossil fuel industry’ naively forget just how much our modern lifestyles relies on it in order to function. They also forget that ‘clean’ energy sources have their own negative environmental impacts, and that fossil fuels and rare earths are required in order to produce ‘climate friendly’ solar panels and wind turbines.

What is comes down to is risk benefit analysis. No power source currently available is free from negative impacts. Fossil fuels can be polluting, but newer technologies are making it less so. Eventually fossil fuels are going to run out (but much later than the ‘peak oil’ scare had us believe) and at that point motivation to invest in alternatives will be at its greatest. Once alternative energy sources become viable under their own steam, demand for fossil fuels will decline. Our future lies in innovation, human ingenuity and an energy market free from government subsidies and incentives, that will provide us with the platform to develop new energy technology that works. It helps to remember that we don’t actually know with any certainty what the future climate will be; we need to be able to adapt to any future climate problems we may face including rapid warming or indeed global cooling.

Energy policies that attempt to push a move away from fossil fuel consumption before we are really ready have everything to do with ideology and nothing to do with common sense. The billions of taxpayer dollars Australia is spending in order to ‘do something’ about the climate is money down the drain and an example of government waste. It is money that could be better spent on any number of programs that would actually have a beneficial effect on our environment, or on our standard of living.  Our climate dollars will have next to no impact on the climate, and are instead just very expensive tokenism.

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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

Irresponsible peddlers of a Green/Left scare story get their just desserts

Fronted by Maryanne Demasi, the ABC "Catalyst" program aired  a scare story saying that mobile phones and Wi-Fi caused health impacts including brain tumours. That caused an immediate outcry from the scientific community who know the evidence on such a hoary old nonsense.

The Catalyst staff should have known better.  The effect of electromagnetic radiation on health has been a big boogeyman for many years but the contrary evidence is huge. Notably: From the early days of mobile phones until now there has been no upsurge in brain cancer.  Now that mobiles are very widely used, we should be swimming in brain cancer cases by now.  But we are not. High or low levels of mobile phone use and the resultant radiation makes no difference. It's all just attention-seekers big-noting themselves


Staff on the ABC’s Catalyst program staff have been told by the ABC’s director of television Richard Finlayson that they will all be made redundant.

In a meeting at Ultimo attended by TV management and human resources the presenters and producers were told the magazine style program was ending.

A last-minute bid by senior ABC staff on Wednesday to overturn the board’s decision to axe Catalyst failed, sources told Guardian Australia.

The board had been presented with reasons why the ABC should continue to cover science properly with an in-house science unit.

An internal review after Catalyst presenter Maryanne Demasi’s Wi-Fried? program was found to have breached the ABC’s impartiality guidelines recommended the program be axed and Demasi and all the other staff be made redundant.

Finlayson told staff that nine people will lose their jobs and that the changes to Catalyst were not driven by the Demasi incident alone.

“For 2017, Catalyst will move from the current half-hour, magazine-style program structure to a one-hour documentary format, focused on high-impact, single-issue programs or series,” he said.

“It will be presented by leading science experts, chosen for the various programs. This shift will align Catalyst with world’s best practice for science programming. An embedded digital capability will deliver short-form content around each program and throughout the year to increase the ABC’s digital science offering on ABC and third party social platforms.

“Finally, we must recognise that Catalyst and its team have served our audiences and the science community well for many years. However, we need to do what we believe is best for audiences, and that means adjusting our approach to best meet their needs and the realities of a changing market. We will work closely with those staff impacted by these changes to ensure they are treated respectfully throughout this transition.”

Under the baord’s plan the award-winning program will be replaced by 17 one-hour science specials, mainly from the independent production sector, commissioned by new staff the ABC is going to hire.

The ABC staff union, the Community and Public Sector Union, was holding meetings with management and staff on Thursday morning.

A letter from the ABC section secretary, Sinddy Ealy, to management fell on deaf ears.

“Catalyst fills a unique and important place in Australian science journalism and we share concerns that a longer-format replacement would mean important and exciting scientific work was ignored,” Ealy said.

“It would be a huge disservice to the Australian public if the ABC’s strategy is to intentionally dumb down specialist content in favour of ratings.

“The changing media landscape means the importance of ABC’s specialist content has never been greater. We recognise that ABC should review its programs regularly, but they also need to ensure that quality specialist content and the staff behind that content are retained.”

Senior ABC program makers warned that ditching the weekly half-hour program and disbanding the science unit would lead to a dumbing down of science programming and in effect kill off Australian science on television.

Demasi has been on leave since a review of her Wi-Fried? program – which linked Wi-Fi and mobile phones with health risks including brain cancer – was found to have breached the ABC’s impartiality guidelines.

The discredited program was the second Catalyst story by Demasi to be found in breach of the ABC’s editorial policies and to be removed from the website. In 2013 Demasi kept her job despite an editorial breach for a program about statins.

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Black girl raped at Townsville boarding school -- maybe

Interesting that the girl didn't tell her parents about it.  And some of the allegations have already been shown to be false.  I suspect it is only the racial aspect that has brought this case forward. The Left find racists under every bed.  Note that the testimony has not been tested in a court of law.

THE parents of a women allegedly raped at an indigenous boarding school in Townsville when she was 14, have told a royal commission they believe the school tried to cover up the attack on their daughter.

The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse is hearing evidence about an alleged sexual assault that took place at Shalom Christian College in Townsville in 2006.

The victim’s mother broke down this morning in the witness box, as she recalled the attack on her daughter and the long-term psychological consequences it has had on her family.

The woman, known to the commission as EAL, said she sent her daughter to the Townsville-based boarding school for indigenous students because she felt inclined to trust a school established to educate Aboriginal children.

“I thought Shalom would be more culturally appropriate than the other boarding schools around, so we decided to put our faith in Shalom and enrol her there,” she said.

But ELM told the royal commission that in late March 2006, she received a call, informing her that her daughter, a student in Year 10 known as CLF, had been raped.

She later learned four male boarders were involved in the alleged sexual assault which took place behind the back of the school.

The mother said she arrived at the Townsville school with her husband days later and met with the school’s then principal Christopher Shirley.

“From the moment (Mr) Shirley opened his mouth it seemed like he was trying to paint a picture of our daughter, that she was asking for what those boys did to her,” ELM said.

The mother told the royal commission that she believed the police had only found out about the rape of her daughter because they had attended the school on an unrelated matter.

She accused Mr Shirley of treating her and her husband like they were “dumb black people”.

“(Mr) Shirley told us the boys who assaulted CLF were from influential families in Townsville, my response was ‘so what’? My daughter has been raped by their sons,” she said.

The woman’s husband, known to the commission as EAM, said he formed the view that Mr Shirley wanted the matter swept under the rug, and discouraged the couple from taking it any further.

“Shirley made it crystal clear he wanted the matter covered up,” the father said.

But school counsellor Amy Bridson told the royal commission that Mr Shirley made a report about the sexual assault to both child protection authorities and to the police.

Ms Bridson said a meeting was arranged between police and the teenage victim, but it was cancelled at the request of the parents.

“It seemed off to me, it felt like they didn’t want us to report it, and I was very upset and confused about that,” Ms Bridson said.

The girl’s parents told the commission the police interviewewas delayed because they wanted to be there with their daughter and ensure a female officer or an indigenous liaison officer was present.

The mother said she also requested a meeting with the school’s board of directors, but quickly felt like they were just offering lip service to the distraught parents.

“The board was in damage control, they said they couldn’t do much because there was a police investigation, it felt like they weren’t taking any responsibility for what happened to our CLF,” she said.

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Hazelwood power station closure: Electricity bills could rise 8pc, Victorian Government modelling shows

A Greenie triumph.  They have been agitating to achieve this shut-down for a long time.  Why?  Because it is Victoria's "dirtiest" power station.  But Greenie dirt is different.  In this case the dirt is an invisible, tasteless and odorless gas that our bodies create all the time up until our death: CO2

Household power bills could increase by between 4 and 8 per cent following the closure of the Hazelwood power station, modelling released by the Victorian Government shows.

Hazelwood's majority French owner, ENGIE, is tomorrow expected to announce the plant will close in March next year.

Hazelwood generates up to a quarter of Victoria's energy supply, and the loss of its cheap, brown-coal fired electricity would push up power prices.

The ABC has obtained government-commissioned modelling that estimated the average residential power bill would rise by about 4 per cent in 2017, or $44 a year.

That's the equivalent of 85 cents a week.

The analysis, by Carbon + Energy Markets, is based on futures market wholesale price projections.

However a separate analysis based on assumptions by the Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning, predicted the average household bill would remain unchanged in 2017, then rise by about 8 per cent in 2018, or $86 a year. That's the equivalent of $1.65 a week.

"The reality will be that if Hazelwood closes there will be an impact on electricity pricing," Treasurer Tim Pallas said.

"How much that will be we'll need to continue to monitor."

However Mr Pallas said the closure of Hazelwood would not jeopardise Victoria's energy security.

With continued questions about the future of the Hazelwood power station, the next generation has its eyes set on renewable energy.

"We have been given absolute assurances that there is more than enough energy in the network to sustain and support the community's energy needs," he said.

Shadow Treasurer Michael O'Brien disagreed.

"Put it this way. Hazelwood provides 25 per cent of our electricity needs," he said. "If you're sitting on a four-legged chair and one leg falls off, it's not going to stay upright for very long."

Mr O'Brien quoted analysis by Frontier Economics which forecast retail prices for Victorian householders would increase by up to 25 per cent immediately after a Hazelwood shut down.

The closure of Hazelwood would cost about 800 jobs in the Latrobe Valley, which already has a high unemployment rate.

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You can trust the government with your information

Not when an error as simple as hitting CC can spew out heaps of personal details.  More proof that the last census was dangerous to privacy

Centrelink has apologised to hundreds of users of the myGov web portal after their contact details were shared with hundreds of strangers – twice.

The latest federal government data breach is being blamed on a rookie email error, someone at the giant Department of Human Services hitting the CC button on an email instead of the BCC button.

When the department realised it had disclosed the email contact details of hundreds of its customers on October 24, it tried to recall the email containing the information, but only succeeded in sending it again.

Despite the blunder, Human Services' service delivery boss Darren Box insists that myGov is the best way for millions of Australians to manage their dealings with the federal government.

Mr Box says that no myGov passwords or other potentially compromising material was disclosed by the blunder.

The email addresses that were made public belonged to clients who had been locked out of their account, a frequent occurrence, and asked for replacement passwords.

One user from regional NSW who did not wish to be identified, told Fairfax she was astonished to find eight pages of email addresses attached to what should have been a routine email from Human Services and to realise her own contact details had been shared.

"Privacy? Sent by their IT department," the woman told Fairfax.

"The mind boggles.  

"Just another mess from this department supposedly there to assist people."

On the day after the leak, Mr Box wrote to hundreds of myGov customers apologising for the "administrative error".

"As a result of an administrative error, your email address was unintentionally sent using the Carbon Copy (CC) rather than the Blind Copy (BCC) function in an email to a number of other individuals who had also requested to create a new myGov account," Mr Box wrote

"This meant that your email address was unintentionally disclosed to the other individuals to whom the email was sent.

"In an attempt to recall this email, regrettably, your email address was disclosed to these same recipients a second time.

"I sincerely apologise for any distress that may have been caused as a result of this incident.

"Please know that your myGov and linked member service information remains secure and has not been impacted by this administrative error.

"The department takes its privacy obligations very seriously and is implementing steps to ensure this does not happen again."

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Same-sex couples and single people are now allowed to adopt children in Queensland

Laws allowing same-sex couples and other previously-excluded groups to adopt children in Queensland have passed in the state parliament.

The changes, which were debated late on Wednesday night, will broaden the pool of potential adoptive parents to also include single people and those undergoing fertility treatment.

Same-sex couples are able to adopt children elsewhere in Australia, apart from in Queensland, South Australia and the Northern Territory.

'While Queensland may not be the first to break down this barrier, I am determined we will not be the last,' she said.

But Ros Bates, the Liberal National Party's child safety spokeswoman, opposed the eligibility expansion citing an insufficient demand for adoption in Queensland.

'Any expansion of the right to adopt to single people and same-sex couples will do nothing but create an unrealistic expectation amongst those Queenslanders that they will have an easy access to adoption,' she said.

Ms Bates said in 2015/16 there were only 21 Queensland adoption orders finalised, while the relevant department received less then 10 expression of interest applications for local adoptions per

'Adoption is not about appeasing someone wanting to adopt, but finding a child the best home in which to grow up happy and healthy,' she said.

Ms Bates said the bill had been rushed through the committee stage, despite a six-month consultation period described as 'extensive' by Ms Fentiman.

The LNP and two Katter's Australian Party MPs voted against the changes, leading to a heated interjection from Deputy Premier Jackie Trad. 'Disgraceful,' she said. 'Bigots.'

Ms Trad was forced to withdraw the comment after LNP MP Trevor Watts took offence.

The laws passed with the support of Speaker Peter Wellington and Independent MPs Rob Pyne and Billy Gordon.

Labour MP Grace Grace, the mother of an adopted daughter, also supported the new bill. Ms Grace said who have shown desire and capabilities of raising a child should be encouraged to adopt, in a report by The Courier Mail.

'That's exactly what I have done as the mother of a beautiful, wonderful and absolutely loved adopted daughter and it's what many other Queenslanders want to do but they are being held back from doing this under our current laws and that must change.' 

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

Politically correct Halloween directive points to an Orwellian future

FOR the first time ever, Halloween tonight will be genuinely scary. Not because of the costumes the kids will be wearing, but because of the costumes that they won’t be wearing.

The University of Florida, a bastion of sanctimonious political correctness worthy of our own quasi-Marxist tertiary institutions, posted on its website a fortnight ago:

“If you choose to participate in Halloween activities, we encourage you to think about your choices of costumes and themes. Some Halloween costumes reinforce stereotypes of particular races, genders, cultures, or religions. Regardless of intent, these costumes can perpetuate negative stereotypes, causing harm and offence to groups of people. Also, keep in mind that social media posts can have a long-term impact on your personal and professional reputation.”

Halloween is traditionally a time for terrifying kids, but this sinister censorship threat takes creepiness to a new level. In fact, it points to a totalitarian future that is scarier than the worst Halloween nightmare.

In the first sentence, “choose to participate” and “think about your choices” are weasel words that actually mean “we have made the decision for you”. This is made clear in the disgusting, unambiguous threat in the final sentence, which is tantamount to an Orwellian promise to keep tabs on you via social media and punish you and your entire career should you deviate from the politically “correct” path.

Wearing a Donald Trump mask might land you in hot water with feminists if there’s any mock groping involved.
But the truly repellent part of this Big Brother directive comes in the claim that costumes can be “offensive” to cultural identity groups, be they “races, genders, cultures or religions”. Sound familiar? This is the old 18C trick.

Here’s how it works.

I’d like to go along to the students’ Halloween fancy dress party as Frank N. Furter, the pansexual, cross-dressing mad scientist from The Rocky Horror Show. That’d be cool! Except it isn’t.

Some killjoy trawling students’ Facebook pages reports me for “mocking” the LGBTQI community.

Perhaps, instead, I’ll go along dressed as a Mad Mullah. Topical costumes are always fun. It’s Halloween after all, and what’s scarier than a bloke with a long black beard in a white robe wandering into your party clutching a copy of the Koran? (It’s actually just an old Bible but I crossed that out and wrote “Koran” on it instead.) Plus, it’s a pretty cheap costume and even better, my girlfriend decides to accompany me dressed in a giant black bin-liner with a slit cut out for her eyes. What a hoot.

Oops. Stupidly we allow ourselves to be photographed getting drunk, someone sticks it on Instagram, and there goes not only the rest of our education but our careers as well, because we have “offended” Muslims. This we did, they tell us, (a) by mocking their “cultural” clothing and religion and (b) by getting pissed while doing so.

OK, I need to be more imaginative. We’ve just been studying 12 Years A Slave in our cultural-political-media course, so why not go as my hero, Solomon Northup, in that scene where he survives getting lynched? That’s classic Halloween stuff! All I need is a rope around my neck, a bloody torn shirt, bare feet and to paint my face black …

Oh damn. There goes my career again.

Then how about I go as Donald Trump and my girlfriend goes as Miss Universe. Then, as we walk together into the party, I turn and grope her! That’d be funny. We’d be bound to win!

Unfortunately, the feminists report me and my girlfriend to the university.

The truly repellent part of the University of Florida’s Big Brother directive to “think about your (costume) choices” comes in the claim that they can be “offensive” to cultural groups.
You may think I’m joking, but this same self-censorship will be going through the minds of many Australians this year for the same insidious reason: political correctness gone creepy.

Remember, it was only recently that our own basketball star Alice Kunek was hounded by Australian Race Commissioner Tim Soutphommasane for wearing “blackface”. Her crime? Posting on Instagram a photo of herself going to a fancy dress party as her favourite singer, Kanye West.

Unless such intolerant commissioners are removed and the insidious 18C repealed, our kids can look forward to a very bleak future.

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No-offence culture of American campuses hurts Australia too

A chap in America, let’s call him the Bernard Salt of Rhode Island, recently wrote a grumpy little letter to his local newspaper about the poor sartorial choices made by women of a certain age who wear yoga pants. Boom. The cult of taking offence reared up, offended women gathered in their yoga pants to protest, social media lit up and the organiser took to radio stations, expressing outrage over “Bernard’s” criticism of her choices. Sure enough, it made news across the globe, from the BBC to the ABC and The Sydney Morning Herald with nary a question asked about the ramifications of the growing predilection to take offence.

To be sure, America is the home of the modern-day propensity to find offence. If this was a cult called Scientology, progressives would be carefully deconstructing its concerning presence in modernity. But the cult of taking offence is a slyer virus because it is largely unchecked. And it’s running rife on university campuses, where it threatens to do the most damage.

As Caitlin Flanagan wrote last year in The Atlantic, campus students who race to find offence are the inheritors of three decades of identity politics. In the lead up to Halloween this week, student fraternity leaders at Tufts University sent an email warning fraternity members not to wear: “inappropriate, offensive, or appropriative costumes”, or “outfits relating to tragedy, controversy or acts of violence”, or costumes that appropriate cultures or “reproduce stereotypes on race, gender, sexuality, immigrant, or socio-economic status”. Why? Because the dean of student affairs at Tufts warned of university and police investigations and the “wide gamut of disciplinary sanctions” if students engage in actions that “make others in our community feel threatened or unsafe, or who direct conduct towards others that is offensive or discriminatory”.

Indiana University’s Affirmative Action Office found a student guilty for reading Notre Dame v The Klan, a book that pays tribute to student opposition to the Ku Klux Klan, because a student was offended by the book’s cover. Oberlin College in Ohio released a list of areas that demand trigger warnings, everything from classism to privilege. Students at other universities have demanded trigger warnings for The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf and Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. And on it goes.

The cult of taking offence has become a determined game of what Jonathan Rauch has called the “offendedness sweepstakes”, and it keeps lowering the bar on what words, ideas and freethinking analysis are to be mowed down to protect the hold identity politics has over academe. Political correctness, the soul brother of identity politics, may have started out briefly in some quarters as a sweet-sounding search for a very civil utopia imbued with respect for minorities. Now it is the weapon of choice in the pursuit of power and control over ideas, words, books, teaching and much more.

Students seek “safe spaces” to avoid ideas they don’t like and even comedians are not welcome: Chris Rock no longer appears on campus because students are more interested in not offending anyone than sharp humour that may offend. Jerry Seinfeld has said he has been warned to stay off campuses too because they’re too PC.

And the result, best described by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, has been the coddling of the American mind where emotional reasoning now determines the limits of university debates. “A claim that someone’s words are ‘offensive’ is not just an expression of one’s own subjective feeling of offendedness,” they write. “It is, rather, a public charge that the speaker has done something objectively wrong” and must apologise or be punished for committing the offence.

This made-in-America phen­om­e­non is no longer an only-in-America one. Students studying archeology at University College London were recently given permission to leave class if they encounter “historical events that may be disturbing, even traumatising” — in other words, if they are freaked out by bones.

The coddling of the Australian student mind is under way too. Last week at the University of NSW a well-meaning lecturer teaching a class on 20th-century European history told his students he felt obliged to issue a trigger warning about material they would cover. At the same university last year, a lecturer teaching a course on terrorism and religion issued a trigger warning too. Isn’t the trigger in the title? Isn’t history replete with traumatic events?

The Australian asked UNSW, the University of Sydney, Melbourne University, Monash University, Queensland University, Queensland University of Technology and the Australian National University in Canberra about their policies, formal or informal, about trigger warnings. Those that responded issued bland comments about having no formal policy, with some offering statements such as this one from Melbourne University: “We encourage academics to be sensitive to student needs and some may choose to give warnings about confronting content.” Or this from Merlin Crossley, UNSW’s deputy vice-chancellor education: “Some of our academics and teaching teams may choose to provide trigger or content warnings depending on course materials and in some cases possible confidential sensitivities of their students.”

In 2017 Monash University will introduce what it calls “a radical and far-reaching reform of our education and pedagogy” involving an “optional inclusion of content warnings where appropriate”.

While Monash rejects any dilution of learning outcomes and multimedia introduces a new perspective, this is how the censoring of intellectual debate and the cosseting of student minds started in the US. Trigger warnings and safe spaces run counter to why universities exist: they are places where students should be encouraged to engage in open and robust debate, exercise free speech and test and challenge orthodoxies in the greater pursuit of knowledge and progress.

The anti-intellectual consequences of trigger warnings led the dean of students at the University of Chicago in August to send a welcome letter to each new student advising them that the university “does not support so-called trigger warnings”, it won’t cancel controversial speakers and “it does not condone the creation of intellectual ‘safe spaces’ where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own”.

The lack of intellectual diversity on American campuses has led scholars from the west coast to the east to form the Heterodox Academy, an advocacy group that seeks greater intellectual diversity on campus in the face of rigid ideological orthodoxies that discourage both academics and students from speaking freely.

Co-founded by Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University and author of The Righteous Mind — Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, the push for greater intellectual diversity has earned praise from New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof. Under the headline “A confession of liberal intolerance”, Kristof wrote: “We progressives … we’re fine with people who don’t look like us, as long as they think like us.” That could be the motto for our national broadcaster, sections of Fairfax media and much of academe here in Australia.

After all, try finding the Australian equivalent of Chicago University’s letter for new students entering Australian universities. Go looking for an Australian version of the Heterodox Academy or even a refreshingly honest progressive such as Kristof. You would have a better chance of finding a Tasmanian tiger.

The Australian asked each of the above-mentioned Australian universities whether they support the letter from University of Chicago to its freshers advising them of the university’s commitment to freedom of expression and opposition to trigger warnings because students are “encouraged to speak, write, listen, challenge and learn without fear of censorship”. Our leading universities responded with thunderous silence about that apparently thorny question.

Indeed, there are few signs of Australian academics trying to ward off the American-born disease taking hold on our campuses. Quite the contrary. QUT vice-chancellor Peter Coaldrake told this newspaper last month that the university did not choose to be associated with the current public debate about section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act. That’s unfortunate because section 18C, which makes it unlawful for someone to act in a manner that is reasonably likely to “offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate” someone because of their race or ethnicity, is the legislative extension of trigger warnings that stifle open debate and infantilise students.

Praise then for psychology professor Joe Forgas from UNSW who wants to see all universities, not just those in Australia, follow the example of the University of Chicago and strongly and explicitly reaffirm their commitment to freedom of expression and the diversity of views. “We have always taken this freedom for granted, but in the current climate of rampant identity politics and political correctness, it is important to give these values added and explicit emphasis,” Forgas tells The Australian.

The psychology professor is also opposed to trigger warnings because any “device that is designed to impose ideological self-censorship on academics can be hugely costly in terms of imposing limits on free speech and making lecturers hesitant to cover important but controversial topics”.

Forgas is a rare breed of scholar in Australia. One of very few Australian members of the Heterodox Academy, Forgas says he joined because defending the completely free exchange of ideas “is absolutely essential not only for the proper functioning of universities, but also for the long-term health of liberal societies”.

That some groups or individuals might find the discussion of controversial topics unpleasant cannot be a justification for limiting free speech on campuses, he says: “Quite the contrary, it is especially those issues that are controversial that need to be openly discussed and argued about if they are ever to be resolved.”

The alternative is the closing of the student mind, those same minds entrusted to universities to become our next generation of intellectually curious and emotionally resilient thinkers. As Flanagan asked, perhaps rhetorically: “O Utopia. Why must your sweet governance always turn so quickly from the Edenic to the Stalinist?”

But back to the bloke from Rhode Island. He would have been safer staying away from yoga pants and challenging the practice of yoga as a case of cultural appropriation. For seven years, yoga teacher Jen Scharf taught a free yoga class for students with disabilities at Canada’s University of Ottawa.

Until last year, when she was effectively shamed into shutting down her classes because Ottawa University’s student union was concerned over the cultural appropriation behind practising yoga.

Where does it end? That depends on where we start when it comes to freedom of expression, and currently too many self-indulgent Westerners are starting in entirely the wrong place.

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Flood of outrage over 'sexist' plan for men-only office space - but the founders claim it will 'stop men hitting their wives'

But "safe spaces" for women are fine, of course   

A pair of entrepreneurs planning to launch Australia's first male-only co-working space have been blasted on social media and branded 'sexist.'

Nomadic Thinkers is a Brisbane membership club set to open doors in January with a gym, café, barber for physio for men.

The founders, Samuel Monaghan and Matthew Mercer, claim the space will help tackle the issue of domestic violence as well as depression among men.

But social media users have taken the business model to task and accused the creators of perpetuating damaging sexist values.
Samuel Monaghan and Matthew Mercer believe their men-only Nomadic Thinkers space will help tackle the issue of domestic violence

Samuel Monaghan and Matthew Mercer believe their men-only Nomadic Thinkers space will help tackle the issue of domestic violence

When asked his inspiration for the plan, co-founder Samuel Monaghan told Junkee they both had a friend in a violent relationship.

'We both had a mate who ended up in a violent situation with his wife. He pushed his wife over.'

He said Nomadic Thinkers would help curb the problem by giving men suffering from depression a place to let off steam.

'Depression and suicide result from a lack of social support and community. Having a space where they [men] can be men is more of a preventative measure. Healthy, happy men don't hit their wives.'

Women could access the café and meeting room, but would be banished from the working space and knocked back if they applied for membership.

The startup reportedly has the backing of six investors, and they are listing a number of membership packages online including 'The Bear Grylls' and the 'The Musk Have'. 

Mr Monaghan said men have been robbed of their identity in present society, where women have 'tea parties' to embrace their gender.

'In other cultures you go out and hunt in a forest for three days. We just hit 15 and start drinking. There's a real loss of identity for men. We used to go to war together. Girls do it better naturally, they have tea parties and stuff.'

Brisbane startup network, Little Tokyo Two, were said to be backing the idea, however a spokesperson denied any involvement to Daily Mail Australia. 'Little Tokyo Two has no alignment with any single sex or single industry spaces.' 

A spokesperson from Nomadic Thinkers told Daily Mail Australia they apologised their message has been misunderstood.

'We believe that our space that combines mental, physical and social stimulation will be a catalyst for impact amongst the men of our community. Impact that is not reactive but also preventative.' 'We simply want to play a part in fixing a serious issue.'

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$1.2bn economic cost of environmental ‘lawfare’

Environmental groups’ legal challenges to development projects ranging from dams and roads to coalmines are estimated to have cost the economy up to $1.2 billion — an amount that is rising as more “vexatious and frivolous” claims are made.

The 32 legal challenges under the environment laws that went to court meant developers spent a cumulative 7500 days — or 20 years — in court even though 28 of the environmental cases were defeated and three required only minor technical changes to go ahead.

The Institute of Public Affairs estimates that the delays to the projects “cost the Australian economy as much as $1.2bn”.

The conservative think tank’s investigation into challenges to projects under section 487 of the Environment Act, which allows anyone with a “special interest in the environment” the right to challenge, found that environmental groups carried out “an ideological anti-coal, anti-economic development agenda” aimed at holding up projects to reduce profitability and investment.

“Given the high failure rate and frivolous nature of many of the legal challenges, it is clear it hasn’t been applied in the way ­initially intended and rather has been persistently abused by green groups whose primary motivation is an anti-coal agenda,” the IPA report says.

Drawing on Productivity Commission calculations, the IPA finds the use of section 487, which was introduced by the Howard government in 2000, “is estim­ated to have cost the economy ­between $534 million and $1.2bn”.

“This estimate is likely to underestimate the total cost to Australia, as it doesn’t capture all flow-on effects to employment, investment and higher capital costs,” the report says.

“Some projects never go ahead due to heightened risk of legal challenges and consequent higher capital costs.”

The Turnbull government is trying to amend the laws to prevent the delaying tactics of “green lawfare” in the courts, after it was revealed a highly orchestrated, ­secretly foreign-funded organisation of environment groups was trying to stop coalmining in Australia using the courts to undermine investor confidence.

The government is also looking at the tax-exempt status of ­environmental groups that are funded from overseas. Leaked emails, passed on to Hillary Clinton’s election campaign chairman, John Podesta, revealed that the groups wanted to hide its foreign funding.

The emails confirmed the co-ordinated campaign to stop the vast Adani coal project at Carmichael in northern Queensland and coalmining in Australia.

Resources Minister Matt Canavan said last night the object of environmental court cases was “not to win, but to delay” and so undermine investor confidence and halt development.

“These activists aren’t playing to win, they are happy to lose as long as it wastes an investor’s time and adds to their costs,” Senator Canavan said.

“They seek to subvert our legal system for political ends … If these disruption tactics aren’t stopped they will cause economic damage to our country through lost ­investment and jobs.”

Labor environment spokesman Tony Burke said yesterday the laws should not restrict who can launch a challenge because “for the matters that hit national environmental law it’s accepted that every Australian has an ­interest in them”.

“Every Australian does have an interest in a World Heritage Area, in the Great Barrier Reef, in a National Heritage Area or whether or not a species is going to be wiped out,” Mr Burke said.

He told ABC Radio National in relation to the Adani coal project that, subject to environmental approvals, federal Labor had supported it.

Mr Burke said complaints about foreign-funding of opposition to the Adani project went a bit far when the project was ­Indian and the Liberal Party wouldn’t oppose foreign funding of political parties.

On Sunday Queensland Labor Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk joined the condemnation of US funding of the campaign to block Adani’s project.

The IPA said total projects in the Galilee Basin in central Queensland were expected to ­attract more than $28bn in investment and create more than 15,000 jobs during construction and 13,000 jobs once operational.

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The race that stops a nation may not be our classiest moment

From what I have seen of it, Britain's Aintree meet is the most disgusting -- acres of drunken fat

Every year there is video and photo evidence of drunken debauchery, often engaged in by well-dressed Aussies in fascinators and smart suits.

Australians are accustomed to the aftermath shots, have a little bit of a giggle at the photo of the woman in smart racewear and net fascinator riding a bin.

But this year the US, the land of Trump, has discovered our annual day of anything goes, and an opinion piece which labels the event as “decadent and depraved” may well have served as a tourism ad for Australia.

The article which compares the US’s Kentucky Derby with the Melbourne Cup, believes Aussies come out on top when it comes to total debauchery.

“There is a lot of booze. There is a lot of littering. There is a lot of smiling. There is, for whatever reason, a whole lot of falling/lying on the ground,” writes article author Billy Haisley, tagging his story “white people are getting out of hand”.

He goes on: “It’s not until you see these photos of the Melbourne Cup, Australia’s most drunken and depraved horse racing event, that you can really understand just how out of hand the whites can get.”

The article has attracted a whole lot of attention with many Kentucky Derby goers a bit offended that Melbourne Cup could even be considered more depraved than them.

“Anyone who thinks this is MORE debaucherous than the Derby hasn’t done the Derby correctly. Or been invited to the right before and after-parties. Or done Oaks AND Derby both in one weekend. Tourists.”

Another proud Derby goer posted a video of herself mud wrestling at the race in a bikini.

Other commenters talked about booking flights and tickets for next year’s events. And many seemed suitably impressed and entertained by the photos.

He ended his article with a whole lot of other proud Australian moments with headlines like “Rugby Team Cuts Player For Photo Of Him Pissing Into His Own Mouth” and “Rioting Costumed Fans Halt Australian Darts Competition”.

What do you think of Australia getting that kind of publicity overseas - all publicity is good publicity or something that should cause us deep shame?

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

Liberal Party branch president calls for a complete ban on immigration in Australia - and says new arrivals are 'b***ards' and 'criminals'

A Liberal Party branch president has called for an end to all immigration into Australia because new arrivals are 'b***ards' and 'criminals'.

George Popowski, president of the Carlingford branch in north-west Sydney, has accused migrants of rorting the system with forged documents, degrees and visas while slacking on welfare at the same time as taking jobs, according to a motion obtained by The Sydney Morning Herald.

Mr Popowski will pressure the Turnbull government to 'shut the door now' at a party conference on Thursday, his preamble attached to the motion revealed.

'The last thing we need is foreign workers. Get the b***ards who are here, off their backsides,' he wrote in the preamble.

The hard-right branch president cited U.S. presidential hopeful Donald Trump warning migrants could be terrorists.

'Who wants criminals? As THE Donald said: ''We don't know who these people are!" And we don't! Today, when they can forge $100 notes, any documents can be bought,' he wrote.

'Also, all the jihadists here! Surely, this crap must stop! Shut the door NOW! Do we NEED these people??????'

Mr Popowski's motion called for an investigation into the 'risks and benefits' of immigration and refugee intakes on the country.

His surname is of Polish background, according to Ancestry.com.

Mr Popowski runs Lisbon Engineering, a fan and blower manufacturing business, in St Mary's in western Sydney.

The motion, which will be put forward at Parramatta RSL to about 400 division members, represents 'what everybody's thinking', he told Sydney Morning Herald.

An Essential Research poll released in September found 49 per cent of Australians want to ban Muslim immigration.

A similar poll by Roy Morgan released late October showed different results, with 58 per cent of Australians in support of Muslim migration and 33 per cent opposed.

In his motion, Mr Popowski said 'all the convicted jihadists were on benefits'.

He claimed 80 per cent of new arrivals were on welfare, and simultaneously complained of there being no work in Sydney and appeared to take issue with those studying training courses or university degrees.

'Simple: compulsory work for the dole – plus, prison for all the crooked quacks who've signed them up for the DSP [Disability Support Pension]!' he said.

About 26,000 asylum seekers in Australia have been denied the right to work and forced onto Centrelink to survive while they are slowly granted the right to work, The Conversation FactCheck reported.

A 2013 study of new migrants, most of whom had been in Australia for less than one year, found high rates of engagement in English language classes and other studies.

A longer-term study of refugees showed about a 33 per cent unemployment rate, according to Australian Bureau of Statistics.

Mr Popowski also accused 'single parents and carers' of taking welfare 'freebies' instead of working.

SOURCE





Liberal senator Cory Bernardi says he is perfectly comfortable with a broad-ranging parliamentary inquiry looking at free speech

Late last week, Malcolm Turnbull said the government would consider a proposal from Liberal senator Dean Smith to have freedom of expression looked at by parliament’s joint committee on human rights.

Smith told Guardian Australia last Friday he believed that inquiry should examine all dimensions of free speech, not just the curbs on expression imposed by section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act.

Bernardi has led the push within the Coalition since the election to reopen the debate on watering down the act, which the government abandoned after a politically disastrous effort spearheaded by Tony Abbott when he was prime minister.

In August, Bernardi brought forward a private member’s bill that would remove the words “insult” and “offend” from the act.

In the normal course of events, the Bernardi bill, which is narrowly focused, could go to a Senate committee for examination, but the Smith proposal would broaden the issue to ventilate debate about other restrictions on free speech, and would push consideration to a joint committee made up of lower house MPs and senators.

Smith said last week 18C was only one element of what should be a broad debate about free expression.

Some Coalition MPs believe the Smith proposal gives the prime minister a way to mollify the right faction of the party, which has been campaigning vociferously on the question, along with the Australian newspaper, but would broaden the issue beyond watering down the racial protections, which galvanised a significant community backlash during the Abbott attempt.

Speaking from New York, where he is on a parliamentary excursion to the United Nations, Bernardi told Guardian Australia he was comfortable with the Smith proposition.

“If this inquiry is what it takes to get the government and Nick Xenophon to accept that 18C needs to be reformed, it will be an important inquiry for the country,” Bernardi said on Tuesday.

“Reform of 18C is a no-brainer and an increasing number of Australians are coming to that conclusion,” he said.

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How the GAMSAT is Raising the Bar on Aussie Talent in the Scientific Field

The GAMSAT was originally designed to aid the selection process for students looking to enrol in graduate-entry courses in Australia. Split into three sections, the test evaluates students on Reasoning in Humanities & Social Sciences, Written Communications, and Reasoning in Biological & Physical Sciences.

All of this will ultimately determine a candidate’s capacity to commence a high-level intellectual course in either a medical or health professional related field. By effectively serving as the gate-keeper for high level graduate-entry courses, the GAMSAT is maintaining a minimum level of competency across the board and acting as a quality control measure for the scientific field as a whole.

Mayank Nagory, owner of Acamedica Coaching, said that the GAMSAT ensures hopeful applicants are kept accountable and work hard to get into the courses they’re passionate about.

“Many students spend countless hours studying and expanding their knowledgebase in preparation for the GAMSAT,” said Mr Nagory. “Majority will seek out specialised preparation courses to make sure they’ve truly mastered their skills and filled any knowledge gaps.”

This, in turn, has a direct impact on the quality of applicants sitting for the exam and will inevitably lead to an influx of highly skilled, and qualified professionals in the health and medical industries.

GAMSAT is not exclusive to those who have previously completed scientific-based fields of study. Candidates who have attained academy excellence in social and humanities sciences are also encouraged to apply.

“While a certain level of knowledge on biological and physical sciences is a big component of the exam, it is not the only consideration candidates should be worried about,” said Mr Nagory. “Successful applicants also need to possess a firm grasp of critical thinking, problem solving and writing ability.”

The exam will ultimately evaluate candidates’ knowledge and skills acquired via prior learning and experience. Preparation for the exam typically involves individuals reading widely and seeking professional guidance from a specialised tutor who understands the level of preparation necessary to excel. 

“The exam can pose as a challenging endeavour for any prospective student, but it plays a big role in determining the overall standard for Australia’s science-based fields,” said Mr Nagory.

 Via email




To be required to provide an explanation or, worse, an apology for your opinion, however repellent, insults all the principles of free speech

Let me make two completely irrelevant points in relation to Leak’s cartoon about dysfunction in some Aboriginal communities: first, I have known Bill as a colleague and good friend for more than 20 years, and have never seen the slightest hint of racism in him; second, I have been to Wilcannia, Halls Creek and other, worse, places and seen tiny Aboriginal children wandering the streets in the middle of the night whose parents would seem unaware of their existence, let alone their names.

Though I hope those observations provide some small balance to the vicious attacks Leak has suffered, I say they are irrelevant because no defence should be offered to Section 18C.

It is a dreadful, ill-conceived piece of legislation and needs to go. To be required to provide an explanation or, worse, an apology for your opinion, however repellent, insults all the principles of free speech.

And in their hearts everyone, including the members of the HRC and the anonymous snipers on the internet, knows that. How many people have given their lives to demand and defend our right to free expression, and how meekly have we allowed it to be erased by meddling social engineers?

History and common sense show you do not defeat bad ideas by forbidding their expression; you destroy them with better ideas and vigorous debate. Unless that debate overflows into the clearly marked territory of defamation or criminal incitement, roar away. People may give offence, but no one is obliged to take it.

If I had Leak’s talent I’d create an image to highlight the sinister absurdity of this attempt to bully him into silence — indeed it’s a pity so few of his fellow artists have done so

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

Walgett Community College, the 'worst school in the state' gets a fresh start

Wotta lotta ... !  How are new buildings going to solve behaviour problems?  Politicians don't or won't understand Aboriginal behaviour problems so they do the one thing they can: Build things

A school with a long and troubled history of violence and disadvantage has been given a fresh start as students moved into brand-new $9.2 million school facilities.

A viral video of teenage girls fiercely attacking a classmate in a classroom last year brought infamy to the remote north-western NSW school, Walgett Community College.

Students at Walgett High say their school has seen a dramatic turnaround since a time when regular fights left them feeling unsafe.

There were crisis meetings with the minister and education bureaucrats, more student fights during their visits and police were stationed in the school, which found itself thrust reluctantly into the media spotlight.

This was after Education Minister Adrian Piccoli​ had declared it "the worst school in the state" over the ruinous state of its buildings and facilities.

It wasn't just that. Attendance rates were abysmal, violent fights were common, teachers were subject to verbal abuse by students and the high turnover of principals had left a leadership gap and sour relations with the mostly Indigenous population in the town.

The students were hurt by the video and the media coverage. "That was just embarrassing," year 9 student Abbey Ashby, 14, told Fairfax Media this week. "It was pretty sad. It just made Walgett look bad."

But the school community celebrated a rare bright spot this week as they moved into brand new facilities built by the Department of Education under its Connected Communities Strategy, after what department officials say has been a stabilising year under new executive principal Karen McKinnon.

Year 9 student Raylene Kennedy, 14, said "It's better than how it used to be, it's safer. The learning, it's getting better. Nobody used to feel safe, 'cos there used to be so many fights. But now there's none."

The students are still the same, she adds, but they're behaving better.

Abbey, who wants to study nursing at university when she finishes school, said the new buildings were a major improvement on the old school. "It's just more like a learning space, [compared with] over there. You felt real crowded in."

The executive principal Karen McKinnon, who took over in October 2015, is being credited by the department for turning things around
in the school. She has worked in several remote and Indigenous schools, mainly in Queensland and the Northern Territory.

Making the school safer, she said, is "about expectations and being consistent. There are rules and students know the rules and they know there are consequences if those rules aren't followed, and they know there's a consistency in the follow-up.

"So in this school, fighting has been reduced almost to none this year. That's because the consequences are out there, kids know, and they don't like to be suspended. In the end they recognise fighting isn't the answer."

The victories are small – Mrs McKinnon cites a year 10 student who was virtually never at school last year, who shows up "almost" every day now. They have been given the budget to hold a breakfast club every day at the primary school to make sure kids get a decent feed so they can concentrate in class. Staff say they are committed and feeling positive. And overall attendance rates have lifted a little from 68.9 per cent last year to an average of 72.5 per cent for 2016.

There are just 98 students enrolled in the gleaming new school which could house three or four times the number. But there are hopes for a resurgence. Walgett has a potential high school population of around 350 according to a census by the department last year, most of whom attend high schools elsewhere, driven away by the school's terrible reputation.

Signs of the old problems were scarce for Education Minister Adrian Piccoli's visit on Wednesday – his fifth as minister – but a groundsman let slip he'd been hard at work the night before scrubbing off graffiti and laying neat astroturf in the outdoor learning area.

New buildings can't fix everything, the minister conceded, but they make a difference. "I think you would walk in here as a student and feel like the system values you," he said.

"Aboriginal people on many occasions have been treated like rubbish and when you saw this school in its original state, given the vast majority of students were of Aboriginal background, you can't not make that conclusion.

"So here we've turned that around. I'd like to think that the students see this is an investment in them."

The minister said needs-based funding in NSW had seen an extra allocation of essential resources to schools like Walgett.

"They'd been able to get out of this crisis mode they've often been in. Lots of drama comes into these schools because of what's happening in children's homes and a lot of the time was taken just dealing with that stuff.

"A principal said to me recently we've been able to get out of our welfare mentality and into a teaching and learning mentality. That's music to my ears."

Trent Graham, the acting head of teaching and learning, said the staff saw the new buildings as an "positive opportunity to continue the change" they'd been working for. Time will tell if they can maintain it.

The intensive, individual approach is a lot of work for the teachers, he conceded. "But the kids are worth it."

SOURCE





Foreign-funded green groups could take whole swathes of Australia out of the productive economy

Hillary Clinton and Julia Gillard have a lot in common — and it’s not just the ladylike shoes and matching pearl earrings.   

They both love to play the gender card, turning their immense privilege into victim status and ­dividing the electorate by sex.

Thus, Gillard nobbled Tony ­Abbott with her fabled misogyny speech and Clinton’s machine manages to drown out every Wikileaks embarrassment with a new Donald Trump bimbo eruption.

The other thing the two ladies have in common is the Clinton Foundation, which Wikileaks emails now show is an influence-peddling political slush fund.

And guess which country was one of its biggest donors? Australia. Yep, we’re up there with Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

The Australian taxpayer shovelled at least $88 million into the Clinton Foundation and associated entities from 2006 to 2014, reaching a peak of $10.3 million in 2012-13, Gillard’s last year in office.

On the Clinton Foundation website, AusAID and the Commonwealth of Australia score separate entries in the $10 million-plus group of donors, one rung up from American teacher unions.

In 2009-10 Kevin Rudd handed over another $10 million to the foundation for climate research, part of $300 million he squandered on a Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute.

Gillard also donated $300 million of our money to the Clinton-affiliated Global Partnership for Education.

Lo and behold, she became chairman in 2014 and has been ­actively promoting Clinton as president ever since — in a campaign video last December slamming Trump, in opeds trumpeting the next woman president and in appearances with Clinton spruiking girls’ education.

The Abbott government topped up the left-wing organisation’s coffers with another $140 million in 2014, bringing total Australian largesse to $460 million, according to a press release from Foreign Minister Julie Bishop.

And yet, apart from the beautiful friendship with Gillard, what did Australia get from the Clintons for all that cash? A whole lot of trouble is what.

The latest treasure trove of Wikileaks emails released last week shows that Australian green groups have been secretly funded to destroy our coal industry by environmental activists connected to the Clinton campaign.

The email account of Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta reveals extraordinary details of the sabotage of the $16 billion Adani coalmine in Queensland, which has damaged Australia’s national interest and denied cheap electricity to millions of poor Indians.

Last August John Hepburn, former Greenpeace activist and founder of Australian anti-coal group the Sunrise Project, sent a crowing email to his American paymasters, the Sandler Foundation, which is also a major donor to the Clinton Foundation. (Founder Herb Sandler and mate George Soros funded another Clinton-aligned progressive group, the Centre for American Progress, previously chaired by Podesta.)

“The Adani Carmichael mine and the whole Galilee Basin fossil fuel industrial complex is in its death throes,” Hepburn wrote in the email forwarded to Podesta.

“I am going to buy a few bottles of bubbly for a celebration with the (Environmental ­Defenders Office) legal team, our colleagues at GetUp, Greenpeace, 350.org, ECF, Australian Youth Climate Coalition, Mackay Conservation Group, Market Forces and the brilliant and tireless Sunrise team.”

In another email forwarded to Podesta, Hepburn panics about an Abbott government inquiry into environmental charities and discusses hiding Sunrise’s sources of funding to safeguard its charitable tax status.

Hepburn boasts about the latest legal blow to Adani, when the Federal Court overturned its approval and the Commonwealth Bank quit the project. In it he now wants to “escalate the campaign ­towards the other 3 big Australian banks”.

And he mocks miners who “try to claim that there is some kind of foreign-funded and tightly orchestrated conspiracy to systematically ­destroy the Australian coal industry. (I seriously don’t know where they get these wacky ideas from!)”

As if it’s not bad enough that foreign-funded activists are meddling with our largest export earner, Podesta’s emails also detail their insidious influence on indigenous land owners who blocked the Adani mine using powerful native title rights.

This alliance of green groups with native title owners is a frightening development detailed in a new book by historian Keith Windschuttle, The Break-up of Australia: The Real Agenda behind Aboriginal Recognition.

He reveals the imminent expansion of native title claims, either ­approved or quietly being processed, stretch across a whopping 60 per cent of the Australian continent, an area twice the size of Western Europe.

Already 6000sq km of the Kidman cattle empire in the Kimberley has been given, via native title, to green activists to be converted from productive cattle country to a wildlife conservation area.

“In return, the Yulumbu people get a paltry $50,000 a year royalty,” Windschuttle writes. “As a flora and fauna sanctuary it is economically defunct for the foreseeable future.”

At worst, writes Windschuttle, the upcoming referendum for indigenous constitutional recognition, proposed by Gillard in 2012, could pave the way for a separate Aboriginal state on native title land, funded by taxation, royalties and lease payments — passive welfare in another guise.

At the very least, the ­alliance between foreign-­funded green groups and ­indigenous owners gives ­environmentalists the opportunity to take whole swathes of Australia out of the productive economy and shut down industries they don’t like, from coal mines in Queensland to cattle farms in Western Australia.

Thanks for nothing, Hillary and Julia.

SOURCE






Open borders inevitably stoke xenophobia

JENNIFER ORIEL

The Western world is edging towards a precipice. The postwar consensus that cast internationalism as a global ideal is unravelling. The Muslim migrant crisis has revealed that the political ideals of the West’s ruling elite and the people they govern are not simply different but apparently opposed.

Historically, such a clash of ideals between the governing and the governed tends to produce the mass suppression of dissidents by the elite, or a grassroots revolution from below. Each tendency has become amplified in the battle ­between sovereign citizens and supranational elites over border policy.

In previous centuries, mass revolt usually has been caused by a combination of economic inequality and political disenfranchisement. The modern trust deficit between the rulers and the ruled is civilisational. It arises from a widespread belief that Western elites are ruled by and ruling for foreign interests against the sovereign wealth of their states and the sovereign interests of their people.

Historian John Fonte offers a scholarly account of the development of supranational elitism in his book Sovereignty or Submission. He analyses the emergence of a transnational system of unelected officials populating the UN, the EU and NGOs, who believe in imposing rule from above on sovereign states and citizens.

Recent evidence supports Fonte’s analysis of emergent supranational rule. Documents published by WikiLeaks and DCLeaks have exposed the influence of unelected elites, NGO networks and so-called human rights activists on Western politics. In particular, the leaked files illustrate a pattern of supranationalists funding Western political parties and civil society organisations that back open-border policy, complemented by the organised mobbing of freethinkers who dissent from the Left party line.

The old term used to punish Western dissenters from the UN’s porous border policy and PC politics was Islamophobia. The new thought crime is xenophobia.

At the September UN meeting attended by Malcolm Turnbull, the General Assembly adopted the New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants. The UN aims to develop a global compact for migration in coming years. The declaration’s introductory paragraphs outline the contours of the new thought crime: “in many parts of the world we are witnessing with great concern increasingly xenophobia and racist responses to refugees and migrants. We strongly condemn acts and manifestations of … xenophobia and related intolerance against refugees and migrants … we deplore all manifestations of xenophobia.” To solve the UN’s problem, its members endorsed a new global campaign to “counter xenophobia”.

There should be no need to state the obvious truth that immigrants make great economic, social, intellectual and cultural contributions to their nations. There are innumerable examples in Australia including last week’s heroic act by taxi driver Aguek Nyok, who saved passengers from a burning bus. Nyok is an immigrant from Sudan. However, it would benefit social cohesion to celebrate the contributions of immigrants not as immigrants, but as citizens who have an equal share in advancing our great country and the civilisational values that sustain the free world.

The problem with the UN’s demand that only positive stories about migrants and refugees should be promoted as a part of its anti-xenophobia campaign is that it requires the censorship of truth, thereby deepening the trust deficit between supranational organisations and sovereign citizens. By permitting only positive reports about the effects of porous border policy, the UN has become a propagandist of PC ideology.

The politically incorrect truth is that people entering the West as asylum-seekers also commit serious violence against our citizens and undermine our civilisational values.

Soeren Kern, senior fellow at the Gatestone Institute, has reported on several rapes of German women and girls by migrants, including teenage boys. In October, a 19-year-old Moroccan migrant was arrested on suspicion of raping a 90-year-old woman as she walked home from Sunday mass.

Speaking to Britain’s Sunday Express newspaper, German police union chief Rainer Wendt notes that criminal migrants from North Africa “despise our country and laugh at our justice”.

Journalist Ingrid Carlqvist has documented a shockingly high number of arrests and convictions of asylum-seekers in Sweden during May. Their crimes include extraordinarily brutal rapes of women and children.

Norwegian police inspector Thomas Utne Pettersen reports that mass immigration has led to an increase in the rape of women and children. Speaking to Breitbart media, he cites the high incarceration rate of some migrant groups and cases of rape committed by asylum-seekers from Afghanistan and Syria, concluding: “People’s xenophobia in relation to this group is highly rational and justified”.

Despite the reports of horrific violence against Western citizens arising from open-border policies, the UN and activist groups continue their campaign to demonise sovereign governments that support a rational immigration policy.

The Australian’s associate editor Chris Kenny analysed open-border activists’ response to Australia’s offshore immigration processing on Nauru. In short, green-Left politicians backed by the activist press lie by portraying offshore processing as “torture” while demonising Nauru’s decent citizens. Like their supranational comrades at the UN, Australia’s open-border activists are shameless propagandists for PC ideology.

The Australian Human Rights Commission has a history of agitating against the Coalition government’s immigration policy. However, the commission’s supposedly landmark report on children in immigration detention was methodologically unsound and biased. Documents revealed the inquiry’s main conclusion that Australia’s immigration system is non-compliant with UN conventions was stated in a 2013 work plan before the main investigations had commenced. Yet the Left media continues to laud AHRC opinion on border security and immigration policy.

Popular support for Brexit and figures like Donald Trump is driven by the lies and propaganda of supranational elites. Their hostility toward the creed, culture and citizens of the free world is evident in their campaign to enforce open-border policy on Western states and demonise dissenters.

Politicians who believe in democracy, human rights and the rule of law should resist the corrupted ideology of a once great UN. Instead, they should fulfil their primary duty of care to citizens by defending their peoples’ sovereign right to safety and security against the elitism of unelected ideologues.

SOURCE






Corruption in high places?  NSW Police dropped drug charges that allowed a violent criminal to kill

Glen Roberts served in the Cronulla riots and survived being mowed down twice by the same car during a dramatic police pursuit.

Yet his professional career – and his personal life – will forever be defined by a drug exchange he wishes he had never, by chance, witnessed.

One of the two people he arrested and charged that night in April 2011, Wayne Edward Jones, was a major crime figure who, already serving parole, was sent straight back to jail – where he should have remained for several years.

Yet for reasons known only to a select few officers within the NSW Police Force, he did not.

Michelle Reynolds with one of her young sons. © Janie Barrett Michelle Reynolds with one of her young sons. Six months later, the charges against Jones were inexplicably withdrawn and he was freed - with deadly consequences.

Jones later booked into a Coffs Harbour motel where, high on ice, he hogtied, tortured and strangled to death a mother-of-four, Michelle Reynolds. He then ordered take-away pizza beside her broken body before dumping her in bushland the following day.

Senior Constable Roberts, meanwhile, found himself charged with having fabricated "false evidence" in the drug case against Jones.

A Fairfax Media investigation has now found that the force appeared so determined to discredit the officer over what he saw that night, it broke the law by withholding two crucial pieces of evidence from the Department of Public Prosecutions (DPP) and Senior Constable Roberts' defence lawyers which proved his innocence.

As a magistrate was still getting his head around the prosecution's case against Senior Constable Roberts, which he later remarked "should never have started", the worst possible news surfaced in court.

The same violent offender whose drug supply charges had strangely evaporated 14 months earlier had since become the subject of another serious criminal case at Coffs Harbour.

"Sorry your honour … I just have a question," said a court assistant about what first appeared to be a mix up with files. "The case … is for a murder charge."

"We all looked around in disbelief," recalled Senior Constable Roberts.

"The man whom I had charged, who should still have been inside, and for whom I was now in court, had killed someone. I was absolutely devastated."

On April 4, 2011, Senior Constable Roberts and a colleague were patrolling Sydney's Kings Cross where they observed Jones and three young women in a situation that prompted concerns of underage prostitution. Senior Constable Roberts then observed Jones "clearly and without obstruction" place both his hands down the front of his pants and remove "a plastic item" before transferring the object into the co-accused's hands" which she swiftly stuffed down the front of her shorts.

They called for back up and a a female officer searched the girl and located the package inside her pants which contained bags of heroin, ice and marijuana.

However, back at the station, the seemingly straightforward arrest started to unravel when the 21-year-old woman divulged that she had been assisting Newcastle-based detectives with classified intelligence about Jones and his bikie gang associates, describing scenes involving big silver cases and "pounds of drugs" laid across tables. "He is part of the Nomads ... they all are," she said. The woman went on to explain how the previous evening Jones had rounded her and two teenage girls up, conducted an ice deal at a service station and then bashed her and forced her to drive, unlicensed, to Sydney for the purpose of prostitution.

"He had sexual intercourse with me even though I tried to stop him ... and then after that he forced me to do two jobs …otherwise he was going to do it again." She also alleged he had raped one of the other girls.

Throughout the interview, the woman said she was "scared", adding: "Once he overdosed me on heroin and just left me there. Other days he just belts me."

The drugs that led to the arrest of Wayne Jones in 2011. © Supplied The drugs that led to the arrest of Wayne Jones in 2011. Years earlier, Jones had smashed a woman so hard with a car "club lock", it caused the left side of her face to collapse. He received a seven and a half year sentence with a non-parole period of four and a half years.

He was still on parole for that horrific attack when the drug exchange took place. He was now served with three drug possession charges, one count of dealing with suspected proceeds of crime and an additional charge of supply of an indictable quantity of drugs, which carries a maximum 15 year prison term.

Yet six months on, some shadowy element in the police force set wheels in motion to withdraw all those charges and have Jones freed.

In turn Senior Constable Roberts was suddenly accused of lying about what he'd observed on the night and was charged with "fabricating false evidence with intent to mislead judicial tribunal".

When the case was heard in Sydney's Downing Centre in April 2013, it emerged that the prosecution's case against Senior Constable Roberts hinged on one statement from a senior constable who said Roberts had told her he "hadn't actually seen" the drug transaction that led to Jones being charged.

Yet two pivotal pieces of evidence, which the force had failed to produce for two years, proved otherwise. The first, an official record of interview in which Jones' co-accused acknowledged she personally saw Senior Constable Roberts witness the exchange. "I know you saw me," she said, adding: "I spotted that."

The second testimony came from the female constable called to the sceneto search the three women. In her statement, which police did not disclose, the officer recalled Senior Constable Roberts saying: "I've seen her hug the accused and possibly put something down the front of her pants."

Under the Director of Public Prosecutions Act 1986, police are legally bound to "disclose" to the DPP "all relevant information, documents or other things obtained during the investigation" that might reasonably be expected to assist the case for the prosecution or that of the accused person.

Magistrate Graeme Curran said it was that "critical" evidence that not only favoured the "truthfulness" and "accuracy" of Roberts' observations, but "founded" the supply charges then laid against Jones.

"For reasons which just remain completely inexplicable and quite strange … this document was not provided to the DPP. This is despite a request that it be made available to the DPP."

Michelle Reynolds was dumped in bushland by Wayne Jones. © Frank Redward Michelle Reynolds was dumped in bushland by Wayne Jones. He added: "It seems quite exceptional, quite unacceptable, and as far as I am concerned, quite inexcusable in relation to the conduct of this matter before the court."

NSW Greens justice spokesman David Shoebridge said on Saturday: "This was either the grossest incompetence or, these actions were conducted with the clear intent of delivering a serious miscarriage of injustice. Either way, the consequences have been deeply tragic."

Senior Constable Roberts has had plenty of time to speculate on why someone in the force freed Jones and then attempted to "throw him under a train". But central to the grief that still consumes him is the question of what might have unfolded, had he never made the arrest that night.

"I'm still plagued by the thought that I may have saved the lives of those three young girls, but I cost another woman hers."

On Saturday, the force released a statement to Fairfax Media acknowledging "the seriousness of this issue."
How the bizarre sequence of events unfolded

Feb 2003: Wayne Jones bashes a woman so hard with a car "club lock", the left side of her face collapses. He already has convictions for armed robbery, possession of a pistol and numerous drug-related charges. At the end of the year, he receives a 7year sentence with a non-parole period of 4years.

Apr 2011: Kings Cross Senior Constable Glen Roberts witnesses a drug exchange involving Jones and a woman who he allegedly brought to Sydney to prostitute. Jones' parole is revoked and he is returned to jail. It emerges the woman has been forwarding classified intelligence about Jones' involvement with a major drug supply and the Nomads motorcycle gang.

Oct 20: All charges against Jones are withdrawn. He is freed.

Nov: Within weeks of being released, Jones is charged with possessing a knife in public, driving while disqualified, dealing with proceeds of crime and possessing identity information to commit an indictable offence. He again avoids jail and is placed on good behaviour bonds, the last of which expires on November 18, 2014.

October 10, 2012: Senior Constable Glen Roberts is charged with "fabricating false evidence with intent to mislead judicial tribunal".

December  11-17: Jones tortures, bashes and strangles Central Coast mother Michelle Reynolds in a Coffs Harbour motel room, then dumps her battered body in bushland.

June 6, 2013: A judge dismisses the case against Senior Constable Roberts and is scathing of police after they were found to have concealed "critical" evidence from the DPP that verified the detective's "truthfulness" and the case against Jones.

October 2014: Jones is sentenced to minimum 20 years jail for murder.

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