Australian Politics
A new desalination plant for Southern Queensland?
The dog that didn't bark: What about securing the future water supply by building more dams or expanding old ones? That would certainly be much more energy-efficient than desalination. But the irrational Greenie hatred of dams means that it is not even considered
A multibillion-dollar desalination plant could be built on the Sunshine Coast amid cracks in the Palaszczuk government over how to secure the region’s water supply and avoid a controversial debate about recycled water.
The political gridlock at the highest level of the Palaszczuk government comes as Seqwater finalises a critical study that will warn of earlier-than-expected water shortages due to South East Queensland’s explosive population growth.
Seqwater’s report will urge the government to invest in new water infrastructure or face shortages within the grid, which was on the cusp of tough restrictions before flooding rain arrived in November.
However, a disagreement between Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk and her Water Minister Glenn Butcher over how to drought-proof the region is set to come to a head – and could result in billions of dollars being spent on a new desalination plant in Caloundra to avoid another public debate and the controversy of drinking recycled water.
Ms Palaszczuk is open to building the state’s second desalination plant on the Sunshine Coast, with sources familiar with government discussions declaring it “certainly an option” despite the cost likely to exceed $1bn.
However, Mr Butcher is understood to be sceptical about the significant investment and is instead a supporter of increasing the supply of recycled water.
Mr Butcher’s support is at odds with Ms Palaszczuk, who has publicly and privately hosed down the politically-sensitive issue.
A source familiar with Ms Palaszczuk’s position said she was “aware of the public perception” about recycled water, having experienced the debate as a Beattie government MP during the Millennium drought of the late 2000s.
Questions to Ms Palaszczuk’s office about her position were answered by a spokesman, who said her government was “not considering expanding the use of recycled water nor building more recycled water infrastructure”.
He did not respond to questions about whether the Premier supported a new desalination facility.
Mr Butcher did not comment on the desalination proposal or his support for recycled water.
He said the government had no plans to change the level of recycled water in the network while the South East Queensland water grid remains almost 90 per cent full.
“The government is not considering increasing the use of recycled water, or building more recycled water facilities,” he said.
“The SEQ Water Security Program is expected to be released this year.”
A site at Meridian Plains near Caloundra already owned by Seqwater is tipped to be the site of a new desalination plant.
It would be Queensland’s second after Tugun, which cost $1.2bn, was opened in 2009 in response to the Millennium drought.
That plant, while controversial at the time, permanently supplies water to the South East Queensland grid.
The second desalination plant could be built despite South East Queensland’s $2.5bn Western Corridor Recycled Water Scheme largely sitting idle.
The scheme, which also opened in 2008 in response to the drought, is supplying industry and large businesses with water that would otherwise be drawn from dams.
However, it can supply purified recycled water to Lake Wivenhoe once dam storage drops below 40 per cent capacity. However, its use remains controversial.
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Innocent NT cop shut out of his job
Killing an Aborigine is unforgiveable, regardless of the circumstances. Putting him back on normal duty would lead to an uproar from all the usual suspects. For cowardly PR reasons he had to be hidden away. How that affects him personally the police leadership does not care about. Violent Aborigines must be condoned, not their own officers doing their duty
Northern Territory policeman Zachary Rolfe – who has returned to work months after being found not guilty of murdering Kumanjayi Walker – remains banned from entering any police premises or performing normal duties.
Despite Constable Rolfe being reinstated as a serving member of the Territory’s police force, its executive has revoked the 30-year-old’s access to any police facilities and refused to return his police identification to him since his return to work on July 18.
The Weekend Australian understands Constable Rolfe has been relegated to desk duties at a nondescript government office building in Darwin as a result of formal complaints from other officers involved in his prosecution.
It is understood that one of the complaints is from Sergeant Julie Frost, who was the officer in charge at Yuendumu, 300km northwest of Alice Springs, on the night of the shooting and who had, that day, requested an Immediate Response Team (IRT) to arrest Walker.
Sergeant Frost has allegedly claimed she would be “triggered” if she saw Constable Rolfe at work.
During the trial, Sergeant Frost gave conflicting evidence to Constable Rolfe’s and that of his IRT colleagues.
The IRT members said their instructions were to arrest Walker as soon as possible upon arrival at Yuendumu, while Sergeant Frost testified that she had directed the team to arrest Walker at 5am the next day.
Constable Rolfe’s barrister, David Edwardson QC, also accused Sergeant Frost of concealing a five-page chronology of events she wrote in the days after Walker’s death.
Constable Rolfe refused to comment on Friday, but his father, Richard, has accused the NT police brass of trying to force his son to commit suicide by making his return to work difficult and his position within the organisation untenable.
“I believe (police commissioner) Jamie Chalker has done everything possible to push Zach to commit suicide by deliberately isolating him from his peers,” he said.
“He’s been locked away in a government building working without any contact with other frontline officers, while restricted to working on a computer.”
He said his son had gone on stress leave and would not return to work until the coronial inquest into Walker’s death starts on September 5.
Constable Rolfe is on the inquest’s draft witness list but has not yet been subpoenaed to give evidence.
NT police declined to comment other than to say that “the safety and wellbeing of all employees is an ongoing priority”.
“We do not discuss individual cases to maintain their privacy,” a spokesman said.
Northern Territory Police Association president Paul McCue also declined an interview. “Matters relating to the internal deployment of Constable Rolfe are confidential and we continue to assist him in his return to work after a long absence,” he said.
Constable Rolfe was immediately suspended from duty in November 2019 after he fatally shot Walker during an arrest at Yuendumu.
He had been one of four IRT members deployed from Alice Springs to Yuendumu to execute an arrest warrant for Walker on four charges, including assaulting police with an axe and breaching his suspended sentence.
During the arrest, Constable Rolfe shot Walker three times after the teenager stabbed him with a pair of stainless-steel surgical scissors and attempted to stab his police partner Adam Eberl. Days later, he was charged with the 19-year-old’s murder.
In June last year, alternative charges of manslaughter and violent act causing death were added to his indictment.
In March, a jury found Constable Rolfe not guilty on all three charges after a five-week trial in Darwin.
Hours after his acquittal, NT police directed Constable Rolfe to take leave while they dealt with dozens of alleged serious breaches of discipline that included excessive-use-of-force allegations, speaking to the media and the contents of private text messages found on his phone.
The 55-year-old female officer in charge of Constable Rolfe’s disciplinary matters has since been charged with assault and is due to appear in the Darwin Local Court on September 20. Constable Rolfe was cleared to return to work last month and all disciplinary matters have been resolved.
The West Australian also understands that he was forced, last Friday, to participate in a directed interview about the shooting.
A recent NTPA ballot of more than 1000 NT police found that 79.7 per cent of respondents did not have confidence in Commissioner Chalker; officers also expressed dissatisfaction with other issues including resourcing, staffing and morale.
On Friday night, former policeman and Territory politician Mark Turner called for a royal commission into policing in the Territory. The Labor MP, who trains with Constable Rolfe at a mental health boxing club for emergency first responders, said the survey results painted a “damning picture”.
“We must protect our protectors,” he said. “They’re hurting; we appear to have the highest attrition rate in the nation, a demoralised and deeply hurt police force, and they’ve been let down by those that they trust to protect them. Whilst commentary will swirl on the future of the Police Commissioner; I cannot see how his position is tenable.”
Commissioner Chalker responded to the survey by saying he had been “aware of the confidence sentiment for some time”.
“The job we do is incredibly demanding and the health and wellbeing of our members is our priority,” he said.
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Rise of the race shifters
One of the striking findings of Australia’s 2021 census, is the growth in the indigenous population. In the five years since the last one, the number of people identifying as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders has increased by 162,800 to 812,728. That is a staggering 264,328 more than recorded in the 2011 census. In other words, in just one decade, the indigenous population has exploded by 48.2 per cent, more than three times the rate of growth of the population as a whole. If true, this would take the Aboriginal share of the population from 2.5 per cent to 3.2 per cent.
But is it true? It certainly isn’t the result of natural increase. Indigenous women may have 12 children more per 1,000 than all Australian women, but that doesn’t account for the anomaly.
Because each census is conducted in anonymity and under strict privacy laws, it is impossible to know how many indigenous people have previously hidden their ancestry or, the number of non-Aborigines who engage in ‘race shifting’. But, as whiteness continues to be devalued and, as guilt for the dark side of colonisation gathers intellectual and political momentum, pretending to be of Aboriginal descent has become fashionable.
Michael Mansell, chair of Tasmania’s Aboriginal Land Council, has been outspoken on this and pointedly called on high profile author, Bruce Pascoe, to stop claiming Aboriginality. Pascoe has variously identified as non-Aboriginal, as a Yuin man and as being related to the Boonwurrung people. However, checks on his genealogy reveal no evidence to support his claims, and he refuses to produce documentation.
Mr Mansell’s disapproval is echoed by many prominent Aborigines. They point to a ‘growing cohort of fraudsters’ with non-indigenous background who are making dubious claims to Aboriginal heritage and are cashing in on indigenous scholarships, corporate sponsorships, top jobs and welfare benefits. All of them see race shifters as diverting attention from more meaningful forms of engagement.
They are right. Whatever the motivation, race shifting, and the popularisation and, appropriation of indigenous culture, devalues public understanding and become detrimental to Aboriginal ambitions.
Take the customary acknowledgement of traditional custodians ‘and their elders past, present and emerging’. Some Aborigines see this as ‘paternalistic’ and, ‘tokenistic’. Acknowledgement presumes a mostly absent welcome to country and undermines the very ideal of inclusivity and attachment to the land. Moreover, the concept of ‘future’ (as in ‘emerging’), has no place in Aboriginal culture where time is multidimensional and circular.
Tokenism and the misunderstanding of Aboriginal traditions of kinship, have led authors of a Tasmanian government-commissioned report to highlight:
palpable resentment, anger and frustration among many Aboriginal people about the burgeoning numbers of Tasmanians claiming Aboriginality and of allegations of government facilitation of this phenomenon.
Indeed, until 2016, the test for Aboriginality in Tasmania was stricter than that of the Commonwealth. At that time, the census counted 18,000 Tasmanian Aborigines, while the Tasmanian government recorded only 6,000. In the five years since, that number has exploded to 30,000 descendants.
The legal historian, John McCorquodale, observes that since the time of white settlement, governments have used at least 67 classifications, descriptions or definitions to determine who is an Aboriginal person.
Historically, different states have adopted different definitions. In Western Australia, the test was ‘a person with more than a quarter of Aboriginal blood’. In Victoria, it is ‘any person of Aboriginal descent’. The definition most commonly used by the Commonwealth is:
a person of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander descent who identifies as an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander and is accepted as such by the community in which he (or she) lives.
When consistency varies, even within jurisdictions, disputes over interpretation are inevitable. And, for many, having to prove descent is offensive. But that still doesn’t explain the census anomaly.
Inarguably, the number of people claiming indigenous status exceeds reality. Aboriginal academic Victoria Grieve-Williams says the ‘race shifting phenomenon is pervasive and well recognised by Aboriginal people…The race shifters hold the power; they stifle debate and resist scrutiny in various ways…’
Aboriginal playwright Nathan Maynard believes ‘This issue around identity is a result of the government not letting respective Aboriginal mobs determine who belongs to their communities’. ‘When we’re distracted fighting for control of our identity, we’re not fighting for our other rights like land rights and treaties.’
This is the Aboriginal dilemma. Enjoy modern day materialism or return to pre-European-settlement life.
Fortescue Mining chair Andrew Forrest says he has grown up among Aboriginal people and has seen the ‘wanton destruction of their culture and their livelihoods through welfare and royalties’.
Indeed, the evidence is in. Despite annual expenditure on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people of $45,000 per person, double that on non-indigenous people, their misery abounds. And that expenditure excludes the hundreds of millions of dollars received in mining royalties and the 40 per cent of Australia now covered by native title, both exclusive and shared.
Clearly, fiddling with census data, expanding already generous budget allocations, land rights and tokenism may be good for the heart of sanctimonious elitists and rent seekers but keeping Aboriginal people set in aspic and out of the mainstream of modern society has done little to alleviate their misery.
Now elitists want to institutionalise this segregation through a constitutional ‘voice’ to parliament. This will encourage envy and more race shifting with the majority of genuine Aboriginal people seeing few tangible benefits. Moreover, they risk the commoditisation of their culture and the inevitable loss of public goodwill. The 2021 census says it all.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/08/rise-of-the-race-shifters
*********************************************************Gender behind bars: Housing trans prisoners is not straight forward
Tanveer Ahmed
As a psychiatrist who visits jails, I’m concerned about biological men being placed in women-only facilities. We’ve been through heated debates about the trans issue in elite sport and in our schools, but prisoners are not a group that is flush with advocates.
Biological female prisoners are some of the most victimised people on Earth. The vast majority experience sexual abuse or physical violence, chaotic upbringings, foster care and many descend into drug abuse.
The policy self-declaration of gender identity hurts biological women. Yet it has been adopted in the bulk of Australian jails as an established norm in our criminal justice system, even though the principle has not yet been incorporated into common law.
This is not just the case in NSW, where the Daily Telegraph confirmed this month that there are three trans women in jails, but also in Victoria, Tasmania and the ACT. Western Australia has no clear policy whereas South Australia, the Northern Territory, and Queensland assess inmates on a case-by-case basis.
Definitive, uncontested figures about the size of the trans prison population are not available however a lawyer writing in Lawyer’s Weekly in November 2020 estimated that there may be as many as several hundred trans inmates in jails around the country. Whatever the number now, you can bet it will go up in parallel with the cultural zeitgeist. If referrals to a single gender clinic can go up by a factor of eighty, as they have done in Melbourne’s Royal Children’s Hospital between 2011 and 2021, you can guarantee some of these individuals will filter through into our jails, especially given the markedly higher rates of mental illness trans people suffer, which automatically put them at greater risk of committing crimes.
Although jails have mostly adopted the policy that an individual’s declared gender identity should take priority over their biological sex, this is widely contested. One reason the policy should not be adopted is because it prioritises the wishes of those who identify as transgender over the rights of others, particularly biological females, not least their right to single-sex facilities. Why should the interests of a trans minority be put ahead of biological women? Why should the trans tail keep wagging the dog?
Sex remains the single biggest predictor of criminality. Ever since such statistics have been collected, for over a century, males make up around eighty per cent of offenders. But when it comes to sexual crimes, the figure is above ninety per cent.
The evidence suggests overwhelmingly that biological males who identify as trans women retain male patterns of criminality including a much higher risk of committing acts of sexual violence in jails. Furthermore, recording trans women as anything other than biological males has the potential to skew future data on criminality.
Female prisoners can be physically violent but much like society in general, aggression in women-only prisons is more likely to be relational, taking the form of damaging gossip or exclusion.
The environment in jails, especially among males, acquires a primitive edge. Inmates often organise themselves into tribes, often linked to their ethnicity. There are the Lebs, the Kooris, the whites, and the Islanders. Those that don’t fit neatly into the designated tribes try to make changes to do so. Inmates feel under threat and act in more primal ways. Conversion to Islam is one such way to ensure a degree of protection.
While the NSW Department of Corrections says that it considers security risks and assault-related crimes of the inmate, reserving the right to overturn the policy, the probability remains that trans women are at a much higher risk of committing a sex-based crime in jail. Britain’s the Prison Service estimates that trans women are five times more likely to carry out attacks in women’s prisons.
I don’t suggest the issue is clear cut. It never is with the trans debate. The calculus changes further if the inmates have had or are planning to have reassignment surgery.
I have assessed several clients who identify as trans women. None were incarcerated. All were terrified of being placed in male prisons for fear of being attacked. I am sympathetic to such fears. International studies show higher rates of trans females being attacked in male-only prisons. As a result, civil rights groups, such as the Human Rights Commission, are usually at the forefront of those advocating for inmates to be incarcerated according to their gender identity rather than their biological sex.
Yet just last month, the state of New Jersey opted to alter its policy of treating its inmates on the grounds of their chosen gender identity in response to the discovery that a trans inmate, Demi Minor, had impregnated multiple inmates. Minor, who is serving thirty years for manslaughter, was housed in a women’s prison, following a court case mounted by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of another transgender prisoner who successfully sued the New Jersey prison administration in 2019 for preventing her placement in a women’s jail. Other US states and Britain are now reviewing their policies given the spiraling growth of the trans category in the wider population.
In a recent paper for British think tank, Policy Exchange, lawyer and feminist Maureen O’Hara outlined some of the risks I have alluded to, arguing in her conclusion: ‘All trans-identifying prisoners should be housed within the prison estate which aligns with their biological sex or housed in a separate unit which does not form part of the women’s estate if being housed in the general men’s estate is considered unsafe for them.’ Granted jails are overcrowded, and resources limit the extent to which the special needs of trans prisoners can be met with unique facilities, but such a recommendation should be strongly considered within our criminal justice system.
All people, even those who face serious charges or are guilty of serious crimes, should be treated with dignity and compassion but it’s time to reconsider housing prisoners based on their self-declared gender. By doing so we are the placing the rights of trans-identifying male-bodied offenders above those of women in fear of male violence.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/08/gender-behind-bars/
************************************Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM -- daily)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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Evelyn Rae, a conservative Australian political commentator
Margo Robbie -- a beautiful australian
My son Joe at ANU
One of the happiest pictures ever -- Cleo Smith, aged 4
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