Bitter woman told her online lover she would falsely tell police he had raped her unless he coughed up $30,000

A vile fraudster threatened to tell an online lover that she'd falsely report him for raping her if he didn't come up with $30,000.

But Beatrice Hinton claims it is she who has been hard done by.

The 61-year old, who migrated to Australia from Kuwait after marrying an Aussie she had never met, claimed she had been ripped off by males all her life.

First it was a bogus photographer in the 1990s who ripped-off her life savings.

Then when her husband died, she squandered their savings on various men she met online - none of whom she ever actually met or even spoke with.

She had tried a couple of dating sites before - Spice of Life and Widow Singles Near Me - but it was on Oasis Active where she found her mark.  Two days after meeting him in person, Hinton hit the man up for $20,000, which she claimed she would pay back.

The man refused and days later she asked him again, this time asking him to marry her because she refused to have sex before marriage.  She had sex with him anyway at his beach house, but the court heard this is when his real troubles began.

Days later she called the man a rapist and demanded $6000.

She told her victim she had medical tests done after their sex sessions and planned to use the results to make false rape reports against him if he didn't pay up. 'Either give me the money or I go to the cops,' she texted.

When that didn't work, Hinton got her soon-to-go-missing Italian online friend to threaten the man. This time Hinton demanded $30,000 or the rape would be reported.

The man called police, who arrested Hinton in July last year.

She admitted she had tried to get the money out of her victim.

County Court Judge Felicity Hampel warned she may jail Beatrice Hinton for blackmailing her victim

While Hinton hopes to escape jail on a community corrections order, Judge Hampel said she would consider jailing her.

'It's conduct that perpetuates the myth on women rape claims,' she said. 'It's the sort of conduct where one bad act like this undermines so much work ... It's a particularly insidious thing to do in (the victim's) situation.'

Hinton, who has pleaded guilty to blackmail, will return to court for a further pre-sentence hearing next month.

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Yes, Ministers – collaboration is the answer

Public confidence in Australian school education may be low, but no one could complain about a shortage of official reviews and reports.

High-powered panels and prominent figures continue to produce lengthy publications recommending various strategies to achieve one mighty goal: improve the academic performance of students.

The long list includes the Review to Achieve Educational Excellence in Australian Schools (Gonski 2.0), the Independent Review into Rural, Regional and Remote Education and the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Education Strategy 2015.

From the start of this year, all states and territories have signed up to a National School Reform Agreement that has the overarching objective of ensuring that Australian schooling provides a high quality and equitable education for all students. That Agreement will expire on 31 December 2023.

Success will depend on what the Agreement refers to as ‘the long-standing practice of collaboration between all governments to deliver school education reform’.

But wait, there’s more! One of the most important — albeit most abstract — documents guiding Australian school education since 2008 is also being reviewed.

The Melbourne Declaration on Educational Goals for Young Australians, signed by all education ministers serving at the time, has steered the development of the Australian Curriculum and other reforms. It followed the Hobart Declaration (1989) and the Adelaide Declaration (1999).

All these national frameworks have stressed the importance of collaboration. As the Hobart Declaration put it, working together “to enhance Australian schooling” would be the key to success.

But collaboration isn’t easy in a federal system where each jurisdiction has separate responsibility for schools, teachers, curriculum, assessment, student credentials … and so on. There are still far more differences than areas of common practice. Notwithstanding the flexibility states and territories need to do their best work for their own schools and students, this is not leading to the best results.

As ministers consider the review documents landing on their desks, collaboration should be at the very top of the subsequent list of action items. They should insist on an honest assessment of the cost and benefits of education between 1989 and 2019 — particularly as seen through the lens of national agreement and the goals of the three documents.

If nothing else, better collaboration would set a great example to young Australians. After all, isn’t this one of the exciting new 21st century skills they are supposed to be learning?

Ministers would be wise to tread cautiously with regard to all proposals for solutions. Australian education has been all too vulnerable in the past to a range of fads and trends, much of which explains the challenges we face now.

It would be good to think that 30 years of talking about teamwork won’t be wasted.

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New United Nations appointment for Gillian Triggs

I loathed the supercilious Leftist bias of this woman when she infested the Australian bureaucracy and the sarcastic writer below thinks similarly.  She and the U.N. are a good fit for one-another, though

She is our lady with the lamp and may her light shineth ever so bright in exposing human rights abuses. Now that illumination will be amplified a hundredfold across the world. Naturally I speak of emeritus professor Gillian Triggs, former president of the Australian Human Rights Commission, and soon to be the United Nations Assistant High Commissioner for Protection as announced this week.

Describing her new role as a “huge job with massive implications,” Triggs spoke of the “71 million displaced people and refugees around the world”. She added, however, this job is “largely diplomatic in function”, which presumably explains why she will be based in Geneva, Switzerland, well away from the arse end of the world and the displaced people in question. For those of you who have not been to Geneva, let’s just say she will be unlikely to rub shoulders there with the rubes of Koo Wee Rup.

Now I know Australians think we lead the world in appointing human rights luminaries to lucrative taxpayer-funded positions, but we are talking Top Gun school for tribunes here, the best of the best. Unlike her time at the HRC, she will not have to suffer the indignity of answering to elected representatives on Senate committees. Nor is it likely impertinent journalists will continue to accuse her of incompetence, untruthfulness, and bias.
Gillian Triggs was immortalised by for the Archibald Prize in

As ever, her pronouncements are full of confidence. “Most refugees overwhelmingly want to go home; one task will be finding and helping their safe transit passage back to their homes and villages,” said Triggs this week. “They want to return home, but safely, and that’s the key thing.” That was news to me. But if she really believes this is the case and that Afghan, Sudanese and Sri Lankan asylum seekers are busting to get back to their country of origin, why was she so opposed to the reintroduction of Temporary Protection Visas during her time at the HRC?

Triggs must have missed media reports of hundreds of asylum seekers demonstrating on Monday outside the Home Affairs offices in Sydney, all of whom were demanding permanent visas and the end of TPVs. Among their number was Iraqi refugee Ali Nayyef. “We are part of this country,” he insisted. Far be it from me to question a soon-to-be UN Grand Poobah, but it doesn’t sound like Ali or any of his fellow protesters “overwhelmingly” want to go back to their old countries.

As is typical with human rights advocates, Triggs still obstinately denies the success of Australia’s border protection policies. In 2017, she stated there was “not a scintilla [of] evidence” behind the claim that indefinite detention stopped unlawful vessels or saved lives at sea. The former speaks for itself; as for the latter, there is no better example than the absence of numerous floating bodies off Christmas Island.

“It is obviously very worrying that some countries are pointing to Australia as having an [immigration] approach that they think is worth emulating,” she told The Guardian this week. Indeed, just think of the many terrible things this country has done in that regard: disrupting criminal people-smuggling syndicates, refusing to kowtow to Indonesia, turning back boats that enter Australian waters unlawfully and admitting asylum-seekers here on our terms. It is called insisting on sovereign rights while offering one of the more generous resettlement programs in the world. Truly dreadful I know.

But it seems that in the two years since leaving the commission Triggs has experienced an epiphany. She is now a champion of free speech. Yes, the same woman who only in 2017 publicly lamented that people could say what they like around the kitchen table wrote in The Conversation this week of the “national urgency” to safeguard “common law freedoms”. What could explain this remarkable turnaround? Answer: when the free speech threatened is that of a public servant who uses social media to publicly condemn the government’s policy of detaining asylum seekers offshore.

Triggs took issue with the High Court’s judgment last week in the case of Michaela Banerji, a former departmental public affairs officer who in 2013 was dismissed from the then Department of Immigration and Citizenship after a finding she had breached the Australian Public Service Code of Conduct. Among those she criticised via an anonymous Twitter handle were her then-boss and manager of the department’s communications branch, Sandi Logan; then Minister for Foreign Affairs, Senator Bob Carr; and then-immigration shadow minster and now Prime Minister, Scott Morrison. She claimed in her tweets that “offshore processing is unlawful” and also used the hashtag “nodetention”.

The full bench of the High Court unanimously found Banerji’s dismissal “did not impose an unjustified burden on the implied freedom of political communication”. It is difficult to disagree with this ruling, especially given the enormous conflict of interest if public servants were allowed not only to publicly undermine their managers, but also to disparage government policy, effectively fracturing the executive.

But according to Triggs, the judgment was “highly technical”, based on a “narrow interpretation” of the law, and one that “failed to recognise Australia’s international treaty obligations”. And here comes the best bit: this precedent is “likely to have a chilling, if not freezing, effect on the liberty of public servants to speak up fearlessly when governments abuse their powers or trample on fundamental freedoms”.

Maybe we should just forget the High Court has already found that offshore processing of asylum seekers is lawful and leave it to activist public servants to be the moral arbiters of the government’s immigration policies. Public servants like Banerji, for example, who as the Canberra Times revealed in April is a Port Arthur and Christchurch massacre truther. For good measure, she also tweets obsessively about Zionists infiltrating parliament and taking over the world. Just the sort of person you would want to be the voice of the public service in the Triggs-envisioned role of it holding the government to account, wouldn’t you say?

In her defence of free speech in this latest opinion piece, Triggs cites cases such as Rugby Australia’s dismissal of Israel Folau, the Australian Federal Police’s search warrant on the ABC, and the prosecution of ‘Witness K’ and lawyer Bernard Collaery for allegedly conspiring to reveal secret information. Fair enough. However, Triggs is silent on section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, which makes it unlawful to offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate another person on the basis of race, colour, or national or ethnic origin.

This is not surprising, given the HRC’s lamentable role in the appalling Queensland University of Technology case, in which seven students were the subject of an 18C complaint arising from some of them objecting over being denied entry to an ‘indigenous only’ computer lab. The students were denied natural justice because of the HRC’s year long delay in notifying them (one was not even notified). Consequently, several students were forced to negotiate an expensive settlement; the others had to defend a $250,000 civil suit in the Federal Court and were only able to do so successfully thanks to barristers Tony Morris QC and Michael Henry who represented them pro bono.

Consider the hypothetical case of a dissenting public servant in the HRC merrily tweeting about the agency’s — and its president’s — numerous failings during Trigg’s tenure. What do you think would have been the likely outcome: Triggs serenely permitting this in the name of holding a statutory appointee to account, or the suspension and likely termination of employment if the public servant did not desist?

As for Triggs’s concerns about the “chilling effect”, she might remember the late artist Bill Leak did much to illustrate that phenomenon in his brilliant cartoons for The Australian. I do not recall her citing artistic freedom or the need to reveal uncomfortable truths when he was hit with an 18C complaint — later withdrawn — after drawing a cartoon depicting a deadbeat indigenous father who did not know the name of his delinquent teenage son.

However, I do recall Triggs freely admitting in her autobiography that after her tenure had ended she dined with the complainant, Melissa Dinnison, and her family, remarking this woman “had stood up against the racist implications of the Leak cartoon”. Bear in mind Triggs had a statutory responsibility for conciliating Dinnison’s complaint impartially, and that Leak was never found to be in breach of 18C. What was Triggs saying about officials abusing their powers and trampling over fundamental freedoms?

Although it grates that Triggs will once again be occupying a lucrative position at our expense, I say we should count our blessings. We should be forever grateful the former law professor will be sitting in a plush UN office and not on the bench of the High Court.

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CLIMATE POLICY DISAGREEMENT BETWEEN AUSTRALIA AND NEW ZEALAND: ROUNDUP

Three current articles below

Australian radio jock blasts 'clown' New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern for lecturing Australia's PM on climate change

During the Pacific Islands Forum in Tuvalu - an independent island nation in the South Pacific - Ardern warned that the Morrison Government 'will have to answer to the Pacific' on global warming.

Morrison is under pressure from the 18 members of the forum to sign a statement which calls for the world to quickly stop using coal to fight global warming.

But the 2GB radio host urged Mr Morrison to fire back at New Zealand's leader, branding her a 'complete clown' after she pledged her nation would have a carbon neutral economy by 2015.

'She is a joke this woman, an absolute and utter light-weight. These people are an absolute joke and Jacinda Ardern is the biggest joke.'

This morning, Jones said of Ardern: 'Here she is preaching on global warming and saying that we've got to do something about climate change.

'If you want to talk about the figures… the fact is New Zealand's carbon dioxide has grown by 10.8 per cent per capita since 1990. Ours has grown by 1.8 per cent.'  

Many of Jones's listeners on Facebook were on board with his comments called Ms Ardern a 'lightweight'.

One fan said: 'Couldn’t agree more with Alan Jones. Tell it like it is. NZ must DUMP Ardern ASAP before the country loses all credibility.'

Jones doubled down on his position on climate change on Facebook, going on to accuse Ms Ardern of excluding agriculture and methane from her calculations, because they 'contribute half of New Zealand's greenhouse gas emissions.'

'When it comes to fossil fuel power generation, coal, oil, gas, biomass - which is dirtier than Australian black coal - New Zealand gets 67.2 per cent; we get 84.8,' Jones said.

'But when it comes to wind and solar which she's in love with, we get 12.1 per cent, New Zealand 0.93 per cent.'

Jones claimed neither Australia or New Zealand slashing emissions would stop climate change. 

'The point is, no matter what either of us does, there will be no impact,' he said.

Ardern said New Zealand was committed to helping ensure the global temperature increase was kept to 1.5 degrees.

In Tuvalu on Wednesday, Morrison vouched that Australia would be a 'champion' for the environment in the Pacific.

However, reports have claimed the country's negotiators are working to water down an official communique about climate change. 

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NZ Foreign Minister walks back Jacinda Ardern’s carbon challenge

Ardern depends on the support of Peters to stay in office so she will have to listen to his realistic comments and tone down her virtue signalling

NZ Foreign Minister Winston Peters has walked back his prime minister’s challenge to Scott Morrison to explain Australia’s position on climate change, saying Pacific nations need to look at the “big picture”, including China’s massive coal-fired economy.

The NZ deputy PM told ABC radio this morning that calls for Australia to “step-up” on climate change were a “bit of a paradox” as many Pacific countries were seeking cheap loans from China “on the back of coal-fired everything”.

Mr Peters’ comments came after PM Jacinda Ardern said every nation needed to “do its bit” to fight climate change, and “Australia has to answer to the Pacific” for its own emissions policies.

“There’s a big picture we have to contemplate where we have to ensure that when we act in this big picture, we act with consistency and integrity,” Mr Peters said.

The Foreign Minister acknowledged that the island nations were desperately concerned about their long-term longevity, but said China’s emissions also needed to be factored into the discussion.

“You need to look at everybody, not just Australia, but also who is getting that coal and what things they are doing with it.”

He encouraged Pacific Islands Forum leaders meeting in Tuvalu to “look at all the details”, and downplayed concerns Mr Morrison was out of step with his counterparts.

In conciliatory comments after Ms Ardern said Australia would be held accountable by the Pacific for its emissions policies, Mr Peters said he was “slightly worried” there was an outward perception Mr Morrison was “somehow acting incorrectly” when that wasn’t the “real picture at all.”

PIF leaders this morning went into a retreat to negotiate the final wording of the Fanufuti Declaration, which small island states want to include a strong statement about transitioning away from coal, limiting temperatures to 1.5 degrees, and replenishing the UN’s Green Climate Fund.

Mr Morrison, who is pushing back against all three demands while simultaneously defending his “Pacific step-up”, told counterparts the nation’s “coal dependency has been falling”, and “record renewables investments” was underway across Australia.

It’s understood he will contrast China’s environmental performance, including its massive reliance on coal-fired power, to that of Australia.

China has 981,000MW of installed coal generation capacity, compared to Australia’s 25,150MW.

Mr Morrison has committed an extra $500 million this week to Pacific climate change resilience projects, on top of $300 million announced by the Turnbull government.

Ms Ardern today announced she would set aside $150m of New Zealand’s $300m global climate change development assistance to the Pacific, but did not provide additional funding.

When asked whether Australia was at risk of alienating Pacific nations because of its climate change stance, Mr Peters said the island countries should remember Australia has been a “great neighbour” to the Pacific. “They should remember who has been their long term and short term friends,” he said.

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Easy for NZ PM to point the finger at Australian climate policy

Demanding Australia abandon its coal production and exports for the good of the climate in the ­Pacific is akin to asking New Zealan­d to give up its love affair with sheep.

New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is naive if she believe­s such moves would be economically feasible or in the best interests of regional stability.

New Zealand under Ardern may be a poster child at this week’s Pacific Islands Forum for setting a 2050 ambition for her country’s carbon neutrality.

But it has only been possible because less than 20 per cent of New Zealand’s electricity comes from fossil fuels and its biggest source of emissions, agriculture, has been given a free pass.

Most New Zealand power comes from hydro, geothermal and, increasingly, wind.

In terms of historic performance, New Zealand just scraped through the first Kyoto round of emissions cuts and failed to sign up to a legally binding target for the second. New Zealand parted company with Europe and Aust­ralia and instead joined Japan, Canada and Russia in a non-binding commitment for 2020.

In 2015, after barely securing a surplus in credits for Kyoto’s first ­period, New Zealand said it would apply the 123.7 million unit excess to its non-binding 2020 emissions reduction target — something it now criticises Australia for wanting to do with the Paris Agreement. Greenhouse gas emissions figures are notoriously difficult to compare because of different treatments of land-use contributions. But without taking these into account it is clear that ­Australia’s challenge is 10 times bigger than that of New Zealand.

Figures compiled by the European Commission show Australia’s emissions without land use rose to 402 million tonnes in 2017, up from 275 million in 1990. New Zealand’s comparative emissions were 36.8 million tonnes in 2017, up from 24 million tonnes in 1990.

For perspective, China’s emissions were 10.9 billion tonnes.

The UN Green Climate Fund is another case in point. Australia gave the body $200 million between 2015 and last year but has pulled out after a meltdown in governance and confidence.

Climate groups are asking Australia to up its contribution to $400m a year. But Scott Morrison has made clear he would prefer to ­direct spending through the ­Pacific region.

New Zealand’s contribution to the Green Climate Fund was a tiny $3m by comparison, but Aust­ralia’s $500m contribution to regional projects, through a partia­l rebadging of foreign aid, did not win it any points.

The hard fact for Australia is that Pacific neighbours represent a potent force in the geopolitics of global climate change negotiations and enjoy a close alliance with non-government groups.

WWF said Australia’s $500m in Pacific funding must be accompanied by a plan to reach net zero emissions by 2050. This means ­reducing domestic emissions by 45 per cent on 2005 levels by 2030 and phasing out thermal coal export­s by the same year.

Including a ban on coal ­exports, the nation’s biggest export­ earner, would make the challenge all the more difficult for Australia. As a result, Australia’s strategic ambitions in the Pacific region more broadly have been caught up in other concerns.

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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