Monday, August 29, 2022



Crime coverup on behalf of a well-connected Leftist?

Many moons have passed since Kristina Keneally’s son, an officer with the NSW Police Force, was confirmed to be under investigation for allegedly falsifying evidence against a civilian who wound up being sent to prison.

In a case that could defy the limits of what is definitionally corrupt, Senior Constable Daniel Keneally accused the young man, Luke Moore, of threatening to kill a detective during a telephone conversation held in February last year, a call which Moore fortunately recorded.

His house was raided the next day and he was chaperoned to Nowra Correctional Facility where he spent the next three weeks imprisoned with bail refused until the recording was uncovered and the charges withdrawn.

A letter of apology arrived a few months later on behalf of the state of NSW. It said: “The State accepts that SC Keneally was in error when he said that you wanted another police officer ‘dead’.” Moreover, the State equally regretted that Moore’s declarations of innocence were not examined “more expeditiously”, the letter stated.

Yes, what a great pity. Moore has already rejected several offers of compensation and is continuing to sue the NSWPF for upwards of $800,000.

Meanwhile, the NSW Law Enforcement Conduct Commission confirmed in December that it would investigate Keneally’s conduct but the matter has hitherto disappeared into a bottomless black hole without a syllable of further information.

But Margin Call can reveal that the LECC, which disgracefully refused to touch the matter in the first instance, has dispatched a brief of evidence to prosecutors seeking to know if criminal charges should be laid against Keneally.

The Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions declined to comment, but we’re reliably informed that a leading official has completed an assessment of the LECC’s case, with their report currently undergoing review at the upper managerial levels of the agency.

A final decision is likely to be made by ODPP Director Sally Dowling SC.

The LECC confirmed in response to questions it had “taken a number of steps to progress the investigation with the matter remaining under consideration”, a response nearly as mystifying as what its officials actually do during their working hours.

This is the same agency that formally refused to investigate Moore’s complaint in the months after he was released from jail because, in their own words, “it is not a matter justifying investigation”.

Come again? If allegedly loading up a civilian on a false charge that leads to their imprisonment does not reach the threshold for LECC’s examination then we can only wonder what levels of depravity are required to pique their interest.

Does someone still need to be beaten with a bag of oranges, or a phone book, to get LECC’s attention these days?

As for Keneally, he remains employed by the NSWPF although a spokeswoman declined to formally confirm his status. The DPP has been given six months to provide their response, a time frame due to expire in the coming weeks.

It also appears that its deliberations skirted the mayhem of the federal election, where former senator Keneally stood for the Sydney seat of Fowler.

Then again, who can really say whether this matter would – had it come to light – have damaged her prospects, given they were so bad to begin with.

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More Leftist racism

As Neil Brown points out this week, the Victorian government has now embarked on the insanity of ‘our very own third chamber of parliament, the Orwellian-named Aboriginal Representative body and its stepchild, the Treaty Authority that will negotiate treaties between the Victorian government and aboriginals’.

Neil Brown QC, apart from being a brilliant writer, was of course deputy leader of the federal Liberal party and a shadow attorney-Ggneral. Which is our way of saying he knows of what he speaks when he writes:

‘The two bodies created by the Victorian legislation are clearly racist because the electoral roll and the qualification for standing as a candidate for election can be reached only by members of one race, the aboriginal race; all other races are excluded. Moreover, their function is to confer benefits and privileges on the members of one race, but not of any other race, and to compel compliance with the race laws by the rest of us.’

Part of the process that Victorians will be subject to in coming years, as will all of us if the referendum on the Voice succeeds, is the equally Orwellian named ritual of ‘truth-telling’.

‘Truth-telling’ – ironically – first came to prominence during the end of apartheid in South Africa. Part of Nelson Mandela’s idea to heal his bitterly divided nation was the concept of all the old ills being aired for future generations to fully understand the depths of evil that apartheid had spawned. But a key component of Mandela’s plan was that once the ‘truth-telling’ process was over, that was that. Forgiveness and reconciliation would automatically replace racial hatreds and tribal conflict. Peace and love would fill the South African skies.

To what degree the South African ‘truth-telling’ helped or hindered unifying blacks and whites is a matter of conjecture. But regardless of outcome, the intent was clear: this was to spell the end of apartheid.

How depressing and how bitterly ironic that indigenous Australians, the Labor party, the Greens and leftist activists are desperate to embark on an Australian version of ‘truth-telling’ that will usher in, as opposed to usher out, our very own uniquely Aussie form of apartheid.

More depressing of course is the fact that in this post-modern, neo-Marxist world – where according to the likes of Oprah Winfrey and Meghan Markle ‘your truth’ is as valid as ‘my truth’ even if they are self-contradictory – it is highly unlikely that there will be much genuinely objective historical truth in the much-touted telling. Expect a plethora of poisoned blankets, massacres, lynchings, slavery and so on that fits the leftist narrative regardless of whether the stories have much historical validity or credibility.

Also expect a howling silence from the Left when it comes to ‘truth-telling’ about how dire and desperate were the conditions many aborigines lived in prior to settlement and how for many individuals and their offspring the white man’s arrival, accompanied by health, modernity and industrial power, was to prove a blessing rather than a curse.

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Coal mine would ‘improve’ Barrier reef, mining company claims

Clive Palmer’s Central Queensland Coal Project would actually improve the quality of the Great Barrier Reef, would help retain Marlborough’s sole remaining paramedic and create “more jobs per hectare” than the reef does, the billionaire’s company claims in a surprising official response to mine’s rejection.

Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek earlier this month refused the coal mine on a number of reasons, including that it is only 10km from the Great Barrier Reef.

In its official objection to the mine’s refusal, obtained by The Courier-Mail, Mr Palmer’s Central Queensland Coal Project claims this reason is “emotive and misleading”.

“Singling out our Companies and Directors within our group is unfair treatment by the Government and in particular the Labour (sic) Governments within the Commonwealth and the State,” the document stated.

It stated that while the mine is 10km from the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area, it is 192km from the actual reef itself.

In a unique argument, it says that while the reef generates $6.4 billion a year to the economy of 64,000 jobs, the objection says this is spread out of 3.44 million ha.

“The CQC proposed mining lease extends over 1915ha and generates up to $3.1 billion per year and 500 full-time jobs,” the document stated.

“This equates to the Great Barrier Reef generating $1858 per ha, whereas CQC generates up to $1,618,799 per ha being an 871 times multiplier.

“Similar logic applied to jobs presents a 14 times multiplier.”

Levees to be constructed as part of the mine mean there will be less sediment run off and “the current Great Barrier Reef will be protected and water quality improved”, the document claimed.

Earlier this week, Special Envoy for the Great Barrier Reef Senator Nita Green said Mr Palmer had to pass the same environmental approvals as anyone else.

“I have not seen the reasons for the proposed decision, but I am fully aware that poor water quality is an ongoing risk to the Reef and the jobs it supports. It’s up to any proponent to show how they can mitigate such risks,” Senator Green said.

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Warmist deceit in Australia

‘Global heating pushing Australia’s Platypus towards extinction’. So reads a recent headline in Oceanographic magazine reporting a study released by researchers from the University of New South Wales and the University of Melbourne.

Relying on alarming projections of worsening, more frequent droughts, the researchers concluded ‘platypuses face increased local extinctions’, with numbers plummeting by up to 73 per cent.

But then, apocalyptic premises will inevitably result in catastrophic conclusions even when weather patterns are not unprecedented. Indeed, the five worst single years of recorded drought occurred before 1900. And, despite the latest floods, 2021 was only the wettest year since 2010 and, the sixth-wettest year since national records began in 1910. This was well before humans began emitting ‘dangerous levels’ of CO2.

But for catastrophists, if droughts and floods don’t do it, the Bureau of Meteorology’s ‘homogenised’ average land temperatures, which can’t be independently verified, are always a safe bet. They consistently record higher temperatures than more accurate lower-troposphere satellite observations. Satellites have been measuring temperatures since January 1979 and have observed no statistically significant global warming for a decade. No matter. The BoM knows there is a ready market for warming data.

But wait. Haven’t platypuses been around for 16 million years and wouldn’t they have survived more hostile climatic conditions than modern times? And, despite all the panic, isn’t the reality that the actual global rate of temperature increase is about one-third the projected centennial rate?

Still, studies which conclude climate change threats to wildlife survival, not least cuddly koalas, are career enhancing. But, as researcher Maria Nilsson and colleagues at the University of Münster, assert, Australian marsupials have also been around for a long time. They ascribe a migration scenario whereby possibly one group of ancestral South American marsupials migrated across Antarctica to Australia. This occurred prior to the landmasses separating during the warm Cretaceous period, some 80 million years ago when the poles were ice free. Volcanic eruptions and an asteroid put an end to that. Sea levels began to fall and temperatures started to drop. So extreme was the fall in temperatures that dinosaurs became extinct. But not marsupials.

And, it’s not just our fauna. The Great Barrier Reef has been a popular focus of climate catastrophists. Not as ancient as many wildlife species, the reefs have grown on Queensland’s south continental shelf for about two million years and for up to eighteen million years in the north. In their current incarnation they are probably 12,000 years old.

Over their entire existence, sea levels have changed many times. During the last ice age, which began around 2.6 million years ago, the sea level dropped more than 100 metres, making it possible to walk to the outer reef. When the ice age ended around 15,000 years ago, sea levels rose rapidly and new corals grew to form today’s reefs.

Despite this extraordinary record of survival, since the early 1970s activists have been predicting the end of the reef. The latest warning came in a study from James Cook University’s ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies. It claimed the reef had lost more than half of its corals since 1995 due to warmer seas driven by climate change. The study’s lead author predicted ‘The northern Great Barrier Reef will never look quite the same again…. There is no time to lose – we must sharply decrease greenhouse gas emissions ASAP’.

This call to arms was enthusiastically joined by the ultimate global warming cheerleader – the United Nations. It warned that should temperatures reach 1.5 degrees celsius above pre-industrial times, 90 per cent of corals will be wiped out. It called for the reef to be put on a list of world heritage sites that are ‘in danger’. Its Unesco agency lectured Australia to take ‘decisive and immediate action to mitigate the impacts of climate change’.

Both JCU and the UN seem ignorant of the fact that Australia already spends per capita ten times more on renewable energy than the world average and four time more than China, Europe, the United States and Japan. And by making Australia a convenient scapegoat, they cravenly avoid exposing the real villain – Beijing, whose emissions in the last decade alone have grown by 25 per cent and now exceed all developed countries combined, almost matching them on a per capita basis.

Which makes the latest Australian Institute of Marine Science annual report proving coral coverage on the northern and central parts of the Great Barrier Reef is at its highest level since monitoring began 36 years ago especially unwelcome. It validates Dr Peter Ridd’s views whose scholarship countering the prevailing apocalyptic orthodoxy, had him fired from JCU.

That said, while the results are reliable, AIMS’s methods are outdated, which raises questions as to why, with $1.44 billion in government grants and pledges, the Great Barrier Reef Foundation has not funded AIMS into the latest Japanese technology? Perhaps in ignorance lies financial bliss? True or not, blaming global warming for the projected decimation of the platypus, certain marsupial populations and, the Great Barrier Reef, has proven to be a lucrative source of funding for activists and rent-seekers.

It’s also an excuse for the federal government to institutionalise massive wealth transfers through a 43 per cent 2030 emissions reduction target. It knows this ambition is utterly unattainable but that a lie told often enough becomes the truth. So the enforced economic and social distortions which follow will enrich the few at the expense of the many and be justified on the familiar, yet dishonest, ground that the cost of emissions reduction is far less than the damages of inaction.

As US House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi neatly summarised when supporting the Democrats’ historic climate bill, ‘How can they (Republicans) vote against the planet? Mother Earth gets angry from time to time and this legislation will help us address all of that’. In a world led by superstitious authoritarians, who will argue?

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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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