The pot calls the kettle black

A violent brawl between four men has been captured by a passenger on a train in Melbourne.  The footage shows a group of men arguing on a Sunbury line train, before three men appear to attack one man who is left slumped on the floor, reported 7 News.

A witness who spoke to 7 News however, said there was more to the scenario than it appeared. The witness said the man on the ground who was being attacked was the one who initiated the fight.

'He was bleeding from his lip because he suffered a lot of punches. And he deserved it too,' the witness said.

He explained the altercation began with insults between the three Arabic men and the African man.

'He (the African man) said ''Go back to where you came from'' and ''All immigrants are a problem to this country and you bring all the crime here'',' the witness said.

After this, the insults turned to terrorism.

The witness said the African man told the three other men that all Arabic people were part of ISIS, and that's when the physical fight began. He said: 'They just wanted to beat she s*** out of him and they did.'

Other passengers sought help from transit guards when the train pulled into Tottenham station.

One man was seen getting off the train and yelling 'Look here, they're fighting on the train. There's one down on the ground now. They seem to be affected by alcohol.'  Transit guards are then seen rushing into the carriage.

According to 7 News police and transit guards spoke to the four men but none of them wanted to press charges or take the incident further, with each group blaming each other for the violence.

The witness to the incident said he thinks public transport needs more security.

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Qld. Police 'too busy' to answer TWO domestic violence calls for help as 'woman is repeatedly knocked to the ground'

The Gold Coast cops are notorious.  They were probably just sitting in front of their computers

A Gold Coast man who twice called police to report domestic violence was both times told officers were 'too busy'.

A man, only identified as Marcus, had been walking along Surf Parade just after midnight earlier this month when he saw a man and woman fighting. Footage taken on his phone and shared with 7 News showed the man push the woman down, and grab her handbag when she didn't get up.

He says he made two phone calls to police - one at 12.32am and one at 12.49am, each lasting about two minutes.

Each time, he says he was told officers could not immediately attend as they were busy. 'To get the reply that I got was just beyond belief,' he said.

The video also shows Marcus approach the woman and ask if she is okay. 'Yeah I'm okay, please just keep walking, please,' she responded.  'I could tell that she was scared that her life might have been in danger,' Marcus told the broadcaster. 'I waited a further 20 minutes and no police arrived.'

A spokesperson for Queensland Police confirmed to Daily Mail Australia no officers were available on the night to attend the scene immediately.

'Police were tasked to several other urgent jobs, and a primary response unit was not immediately available,' they said. 'A crew was tasked at 1.58am and patrolled the area shortly afterwards.'

John-Paul Langbroek, the Member for Parliament for Surfers Paradise, told 7 News it was an issue that required an investigation.  'No-one should ever be told when you ring 000 we're too busy to help you,' he said.

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Schools program promoting homosexuality to be dumped by NSW Government

THE controversial Safe Schools program is set to be axed with the NSW government replacing it with a ­broader anti-bullying program.

To be implemented in the third term, the proposed new resource will equip teachers with tools to target all kinds of bullying and discrimination, while also empowering vulnerable students from becoming radicalised.

State Education Minister Rob Stokes has already sounded out stakeholders, including in the Catholic Schools sector, about the design of the new program that will be peer reviewed over the coming weeks.

Unlike the sexual diversity and gender fluidity focus of the Safe Schools program, the new resource will aim to equip teachers with tools to target all kinds of bullying.

A government source said the shift to a broader-based program was being done in recognition that homophobia was not the sole cause of bullying in the playground. “The new program is about stopping all kinds of bullying,” the source said.

“It could be bullying ­because someone is overweight, or wears glasses, or is transitioning sex, but the overwhelming message is that it is not OK (to bully). The program will include lesson plans and material that can be tailored by teachers as required.”

Dedicated funding for the anti-bullying strategy is ­expected to be put aside in the next state Budget, with federal funding for Safe Schools due to run out on June 30.

Still in draft form, the NSW program will be peer reviewed by child psychology experts such as Dr Michael Carr-Gregg, retired school principals and various education stakeholders.

However, the State government faces a battle with the Commonwealth government, with federal Education Minister Simon Birmingham understood to have refused to decommission the Safe Schools website.

The move to a broader anti-bullying program in NSW comes as the Victorian government expands on the existing Safe Schools models for continued use in its schools.

The Victorian model retains the focus of the original program of ensuring schools are safe places for all students, ­“including LGBTI students”, and are “free of homophobia and transphobia”.

The Safe Schools program was widely condemned for the appropriateness of its teaching material, such as The Gender Fairy story where primary schoolchildren as young as four were advised that only they could know whether they were a boy or a girl.

Supporters of the Safe Schools program accused its critics of being “homophobic” and “transphobic”.

Mr Stokes declined to comment last week.

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A Dead Man Warns of a Dying Grid

Not long before his sudden and premature death, Australian Energy Market Operator chief Matt Zema spoke candidly at a private conference of power-industry executives. The enormous subsidies heaped on renewables, he said, mean one thing and only one thing: “The system must collapse”

Matt Zema, inaugural head of the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO), attended a meeting a year ago of the Regulation Economics Energy Forum at which a number of prominent electricity industry executives were present. Proceedings at the meeting were private, but the need for confidentiality was removed with Matt’s sad death three months later. The following were among his remarks:

“The renewable developments and increased political interference are pushing the system towards a crisis. South Australia is most vulnerable with its potential for wind to supply 60% of demand and then to cut back rapidly. Each new windfarm constrains existing ones and brings demand for more transmission. The system is only manageable with robust interconnectors, but these operate effectively only because there is abundant coal-based generation in Victoria…

… wind, being subsidised and having low marginal costs, depresses the spot price and once a major coal plant has a severe problem it will be closed…

… wind does not provide the system security. But the politicians will not allow the appropriate price changes to permit profitable supply developments from other sources. And the original intent of having the generator or other beneficiary pay for transmission and services over and above energy itself has now been lost so there are no market signals, just a series of patch-ups that obscure the instability and shift the problem to include Victoria. In the end the system must collapse…”

A month later South Australia’s coal-fuelled Northern Power Station was disconnected from the network because it was unable to operate profitably against subsidised intermittent renewable energy that has priority over other supplies.

In September, 2016, as a result of this capacity reduction, South Australia lost all its power when storms triggered outages and several wind generators were unable to “ride through”, causing the main interconnector with Victoria to shut down. A more limited loss of power took place in February, 2017, when wind supply dropped from 800MW to under 100MW in four hours.

The September, 2016, blackout is estimated to have cost the state $367 million. BHP, whose senior executives have long engaged in virtue-signalling in favour of carbon taxes and exotic “clean” renewables, reported a loss of $US105 million with their Olympic Dam project — a loss magnified by the company being forced to suspend its proposed doubling of the mine’s capacity as a result of power uncertainties.

Engie, the owners of Hazelwood announced in November, 2016, that the 1600 megawatt facility (supplying between 20% and 25% of the state’s power) will be the fourth big coal-fired power station to close. Hazelwood had been allowed to deteriorate as a result of subsidised wind making the plant unprofitable, which did not stop Engie being ordered to complete major repairs to at least five of the eight boilers in order to meet occupational health and safety regulations.

The bottom line is that the loss of the coal-powered stations has resulted in at least a doubling of the wholesale electricity price in the southern states and the concomitant loss of reliability.

Blame shifting between politicians has characterised the various events. Reliable coal plants are being forced to close due to competition from renewables which currently enjoy a subsidy of $84 per MWH, double the actual price received by coal plants. The forced closure of these plants has compounded the cost impost by forcing up pool prices. The subsidies favouring renewable energy include several put in place by state governments, but the most important regulations are at the Commonwealth level — especially those requiring increasing shares of wind and solar within the supply mix. These regulations give rise to the current subsidy for wind and solar, currently at $84 per MWh and capped at $92.5 per MWh.

The roll-out of new subsidised power is on-going. And various schemes are being floated for buffering and overcoming wind’s intrinsic lack of reliability. Among these is the mooted South Australian battery investment using the technology developed by Elon Musk and the proposal floated by the Prime Minister to augment the Snowy hydro system with “pumped storage”. These measures, should they go ahead, allow the transfer of power over time and, in doing so, reduce the gross power available.

New “solutions” using subsidised wind and solar abound.

Last week, for example, South Australian Premier Jay Weatherill announced a new solar-battery combination, Lyon Solar in the Riverland, which promises 300 Megawatts of capacity. This is the equivalent of perhaps 80 megawatts of coal fuelled electricity and comes at a cost of one billion dollars.

The now-shuttered Northern Power Station had 540 megawatts, yet Weatherill declined to take up an offer that would, for a mere $25 million, have kept it open. Instead, he plumped to spend $500 million-plus on a gas generator of half that capacity and, plus Elon Musk’s much bally-hooed batteries!

On paper, the new Lyon Solar facility is profitable only because of the penalties imposed on coal. These include the subsidy under the Renewable Energy Target of $84 per MWh. In addition, the facility benefits from the forced closure of the coal-fired stations. This has resulted in the wholesale price of electricity rising to a new norm of $130 per MWh, compared with the average price in the four years to 2015 of $50 per MWh. The bottom line is that the consumer will pay $214 per MWh for $50-per-MWh worth of electricity from the new facility.

With that sort of money being littered around the industry for gee-whizz exotic projects it is little wonder that moochers are circling the state like moths round a candle. In the end, renewables require at least three times the price of the supposed dinosaur facilities they are displacing; consumers and industry will need to pay this and, in addition, fork out for grid additions to offset some of the inevitable deterioration of reliability the brave new energy world entails. Obviously many outfits, especially those in the energy intensive mining and smelting and agricultural processing sectors will not find it profitable to remain in an Australian market where wholesale electricity prices have more than doubles and the system’s reliability has deteriorated.

We are seeing the future with these renewable energy facilities and it is not working. The contagion that is undermining the South Australian economy and impoverishing the state’s households is spreading to Victoria.

Ominously, on the very day that Hazelwood closed, Victoria evidenced what will be the new norm.

Incredibly, with no heatwave or any other factor to inspire a spike in electricity demand, it had to import electricity from New South Wales and Tasmania.

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