Australian Politics
Tuesday, January 31, 2023
Violent reality of Alice Springs revealed in shocking new videos
When dreamy Leftist laws make prosecution impossible, this is what you get
Warning: Graphic. Confronting video posted by an Alice Springs resident shows a town under siege by out of control youths.
Shocking footage of everyday street violence in Alice Springs has emerged revealing a town under siege by out-of-control youths and a police force that is all but powerless to stop them.
The confronting videos, posted by an Alice Springs resident who wished only to be known by the name Rachel, were revealed after a harrowing interview with Ben Fordham on 2GB Tuesday morning.
A former nurse and single mother, Rachel said she had to film “because no one was capturing what was happening,” adding that the Prime Minister Anthony Albanese had only provided an “easy answer” with last week’s announcement of temporary grog bans.
“It was back to back, all night long,” she said of the videos which she took from the upper story of a hotel in Alice Springs and posted Saturday night.
Rachel also said that many nights the violence is worse, adding that Alice Springs residents were regularly suffering home invasions at the hands of youths armed with machetes and businesses were unable to trade because customers were being bashed.
“There were hundreds of kids outside,” said Rachel, who said she feared for her life when the hotel was under siege.
“The hatred for anyone other than in their pack was so disturbing … all you hear is you’re a white this, you white bitch, that’s all you hear day in and day out.”
In the series of videos, Aboriginal youths can be seen brawling with makeshift weapons, taunting pub-goers, attacking hotel security and fighting with anyone who crossed their path.
In one video, the youths can be seen attacking a man who confronted them after they allegedly tried to steal items from his ute while he was in it.
In others, police appear to drive by but do not intervene in the situation.
Speaking to 2GB, Rachel was also highly critical of government responses to the deteriorating situation in Alice Springs.
“They just banned alcohol for a few days and moved on to the next thing … it was an easy answer for (the PM),” she said.
“These kids are being raped at home and the domestic violence is horrific.”
While Rachel said she was sympathetic to the victims of domestic violence and sexual abuse, it did not excuse their behaviour. “When someone is waving a machete in your face I don’t care about your past trauma,” she said.
“You cannot unsee the things we have seen.”
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Need for projects to plug looming gas supply shortage to test Australia’s climate goals
Urgent investment is needed in new gas fields to avoid looming shortages in NSW and Victoria, setting up a clash with the Albanese government’s new climate targets.
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s (ACCC) latest report on the east coast gas market, released on Friday, said current sources of domestic supply were running out and shortages would hit by at least 2027 and potentially sooner unless new gas fields were opened up.
The Bass Strait gas field has traditionally supplied up to half the demand on the east coast, but its reserves are rapidly depleting and uncertainty over production will continue to put pressure on gas prices, despite the federal government’s intervention to cap wholesale prices this year.
The federal government could redirect exports into the local market under the Australian Domestic Gas Security Mechanism, known as the gas trigger, but that would mean disrupting crucial energy supplies to major trade and defence partners in Japan, China, Singapore and Korea.
The commission urged federal and state governments to cut the red tape gas companies face in getting big projects up and running.
“Forecast production is insufficient to meet forecast demand in the east coast from 2027,” the ACCC report said.
“Although the need for investment in new sources of supply and associated infrastructure is clear, only a limited number of relatively small domestic supply projects that could come online between 2023 and 2027 have been approved for development.”
However, approvals for more gas fields could stumble at hurdles raised when Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen introduces binding pollution caps for the nation’s 215 biggest industrial polluters from July 1 under the safeguard mechanism.
The mandatory pollution caps will be a major driver to hitting Labor’s legally binding target to cut emissions by 2030.
When asked if there would be room under the 2030 climate target for new gas fields, acting federal Resources Minister Catherine King said the safeguard mechanism would guide companies through the voluntary emissions reduction commitments they had already made.
“Reforms to the safeguard mechanism provide well-overdue certainty, and is in line with the over 70 per cent of safeguard facilities that already have corporate commitments to net zero by 2050,” she said.
Opposition resources spokeswoman Susan McDonald said the federal government’s reform agenda was being rushed and had reduced industry confidence in new projects.
“Labor is implementing policies that sound good but don’t work. Legislation has been rushed and
rammed through with virtually no consultation.”
ACCC chair Gina Cass-Gottlieb warned that gas would be needed for some time to back up supply in the grid. “There will continue to be calls upon gas power generation for the purposes of firmed supply at times when renewables are not able to generate and stored power is not available and in addition, there are some commercial industrial users for whom their manufacturing and production processes are dependent upon gas.”
New gas projects are typically large enough to trigger the government’s incoming pollution caps, which have a threshold of 100,000 tonnes of annual carbon emissions.
Any new project would likely be forced to fit within the existing emissions budget that applies to the nation’s gas industry and comply with new regulations including meeting world’s “best practice” emissions efficiency standards.
Santos says it wants its Narrabri gas field in northern NSW to start production in 2025, supplying up to half the state’s demand. But the company is facing yet another legal challenge, with traditional owners last week appealing to the Federal Court.
Cooper Energy said this week it had to review plans for an offshore gas project in Victoria’s Otway Basin, which was set to supply utilities giant AGL with up to 10 petajoules of gas a year from 2025.
Cass-Gottlieb said it was possible that shortfalls of around 12 per cent of annual demand could hit the east coast this year unless the Queensland exporters of liquefied natural gas (LNG) honoured their promise, under the heads of agreement struck last year with the federal government, to ensure the east coast market was fully supplied.
The ACCC last week threatened the exporters with $50 million fines if they failed to deliver. One company, Shell, has offered 8 petajoules to the market but so far no deals have been announced.
LNG exporters processing facilities are among the biggest emitters captured by the safeguard mechanism and they will be needed to develop new supply, with the ACCC reporting that they control more than 90 per cent of the east coast’s peak gas reserves.
LNG producers halted new offers for wholesale gas supply in December, when the federal government imposed $12 a gigajoule price cap on wholesale contracts, in a bid to halt runaway prices amid an international energy crisis.
The Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association (APPEA) claims the price caps create uncertainty for producers and deter investment in new gas projects and on Friday said
“The ACCC has underscored the importance of gas for Australia’s energy transition and the need to reduce the barriers faced by gas producers in bringing new gas supply to market,” APPEA chief executive Samantha McCulloch said.
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Court win for Christian foster care applicants is a victory for common sense and a fair go
In 2017, West Australian couple Byron and Keira Hordyk were rejected as ‘unsafe’ by fostering agency, Wanslea Family Services, to provide foster care to vulnerable infants and toddlers in the child protection system. Their application was rejected because of their traditional Christian views on marriage and sex.
Five years later, the Hordyks have won their legal case against Wanslea and been awarded damages. The WA State Administrative Tribunal found that Wanslea had treated the Hordyks unfairly on the basis of their religious beliefs.
This decision is good for all Australians. The Hordyk decision is a victory for common sense and provides an antidote to the polarised public discourse in Australian culture.
While the Hordyks are deservedly vindicated by this decision, the real losers in this case are vulnerable children who were robbed of the opportunity to be placed in a loving, caring, and stable home.
This landmark case demonstrates how societal hostility to religion – and especially Christianity – is increasing and is a threat to common sense pluralism. Christians who established, grew, and then gave to Western cultures their key social institutions such as hospitals, universities, aged care facilities, and foster care agencies are now facing increasing exclusion from those very institutions.
In its decision, the Tribunal firmly rebuffed Wanslea’s assertions that their rejection of the Hordyks had nothing to do with their religious beliefs.
The evidence showed that Wanslea takes a flexible approach to approving carers who are smokers and can’t foster babies, carers with disabilities, or unique home circumstances that made them unsuitable for certain types of children. However, when Wanslea was faced with conservative Christians, it changed the rules.
The Hordyks hold to the views of their Church on sex and morality.
Wanslea considered the Hordyks’ views unacceptable and rejected their fostering application – not because they were unsuitable to provide a temporary home for vulnerable toddlers, but because they held unacceptable religious views now out of step with the prevailing Australian cultural norms. This is increasingly common with many Australian institutions.
The Tribunal found that key Wanslea evidence on this point was ‘avoidant, defensive and crafted to cast events in the most favourable light for Wansela’. There was religious discrimination which they attempted to cover up as ‘business as usual’.
The Hordyks are not alone in falling afoul of such ideological purity tests. In 2022, Andrew Thorburn at the Essendon AFL club was forced to resign because he held the wrong views. In 2021, the Australian Christian Lobby had venue bookings cancelled by the WA government because their Christian beliefs were inconsistent with ‘diversity, equality, and inclusion’. In 2020, the WA government refused to give Pastor Margaret Court’s Perth charity the funding needed for a freezer truck to distribute food to the needy because of her publicly stated views on marriage.
This increasing animosity to religion can be attributed to a variety of potential factors: the increasing secularisation of Australian society generally, the simplistic and sensational reporting of religious issues in the media, the ascendancy and triumph of LGBTQ+ advocacy in Australian culture, the hard fusion in popular discourse of Christianity with the evils of colonialism or the fragmentation and polarisation of cultural dialogue in a social media age.
Whatever the causes, these cultural trends should be of concern to all Australians. While Christians are the target today, there is no reason why this cultural trajectory will not progress to declare other social and political convictions as anathema and beyond the pale, both religious and irreligious.
The recent Essendon public apology to Andrew Thorburn and the Hordyk decision are a welcome dose of balance and common sense in an otherwise febrile cultural environment.
The tenacity of the Hordyks in seeking vindication through a gruelling 5-year process demonstrates that there is value in pushing matters to Courts past the loud cultural voices that have captured many of Australia’s institutions and which have declared Christianity anathema and unsafe.
These voices seek to impose a narrow secular vision of Australia rather than a pluralistic multicultural vision of Australia.
For Australia to flourish, it requires the participation of a variety of people with diverse and conflicting religious beliefs, political convictions, and personal opinions. The friction lines between competing views will often be difficult to adjudicate, but the Courts have shown that, regardless of the prevailing ideological fashions of the day, religious and even heteronormative Christian Australians must be given a fair go.
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The truth about Australia’s education system: bullying, indoctrination, and intimidation
Recently, I interviewed an 18-year-old New South Wales University student named Tallesha. My goal was to get a first-hand glimpse of what is really going on in the education system.
It was incredibly insightful to speak with Tallesha. While high school is still vivid in her mind, she is now undertaking the transition into the university lifestyle. She recently completed a bridging course consisting of sociology, business, media, and writing; and will now study political science. She has the ambition of becoming a political journalist.
Drawing on her experiences, Tallesha summed up her thoughts by saying, ‘I believe a lot of the political issues we’re facing at the moment stem from the information and behaviours being taught in schools and universities.’
She went on to say, ‘What is currently being assumed about the education system is definitely not an overreaction, a large extent of genuine indoctrination is happening and it’s definitely getting worse.’
Expanding on those comments, Tallesha drew on her own specific experiences. ‘It’s very hard to openly disagree with the lecturers because your marks could suffer,’ she explained. ‘In my bridging course I did sociology and that was obviously very far left. So, in assignments, that would be based on Marxist theory. You had to accept their way as truth. If you debated that, you wouldn’t get the marks, because you would be seen as incorrect.’
She backed up her comments by providing an example.
‘A question on one of my tests was, “Is gender fixed?” And the correct answer was “false”, because it is supposed to be fluid. If you disagreed with that, you would lose that mark.’
Identifying as a Christian conservative, Tallesha obviously had an issue with this answer, but she can see no way of bypassing having to go along with the Marxist ideology that oppose her own beliefs. She appears to be in the tiny minority, however, as according to Tallesha, 95 per cent of her fellow students lean openly left.
This prompted me to ask Tallesha if she feels comfortable expressing her views in her classes. ‘No,’ she replied. ‘You pretty much can’t.’
From the moment her lecturers enter, there is clear ideology expressed. She told me that without fail, every lecturer introduces themselves with their pronouns. Is it little surprise that the students also follow suit, as Tallesha told me, ‘I had my graduation recently, and any speaker that got up, all announced their pronouns.’
With such a dominant lean towards leftist ideology, I asked Tallesha if any of her fellow students ever acknowledge that things should be more balanced. ‘No,’ she replied. ‘A lot of them don’t think they lean that far left. They think, “This is mainstream. Every young person should share our views. If you don’t then there’s something wrong with you.”’
Tallesha was then able to provide more context of how the peer pressure is applied.
‘In sociology, the way the other side was depicted is uneducated and misinformed. So, they make it seem like if you are part of the other side, it would be embarrassing,’ Tallesha recounted. ‘It was almost like bullying. My lecturer would always make jokes about conservative views, constantly.’
With the peer pressure in place, then comes the indoctrination.
Of the subjects she studied in her bridging course, Tallesha found business to be the most centrist, but her writing course contained clear left bias. ‘It was a uni prep course, so it teaches you all the skills you need to succeed in uni,’ she explained. ‘But each skill was taught in a context, and all the context they were taught in were some sort of left subject. Climate change was used. The freedom movement, the anti-vaccine moment was used.’
I find it hard to understand how anyone can paint ‘freedom’ in a negative light, but Tallesha was quick to inform me that ‘white supremacy’ is linked to the freedom movement. ‘They make lots of links that just don’t make sense,’ she said.
This prompted me to ask if any figures of the right are ridiculed. ‘Trump was definitely brought up a few times,’ she replied. ‘Even the Liberal Party, even though they’re not very conservative, the Liberal Party is attacked as well.’
I then asked if there is any politician that her lecturers adore. Her response was interesting. ‘No, I don’t think there are any specific ones.’
It seems if you attack your enemies constantly, then there is no need to defend your side.
My final question to Tallesha was, ‘What needs to happen to reform the education system?’
‘Honestly, I don’t really know. It’s pretty much that far gone. Because everyone in it and within it, is all left. Maybe ten years ago it could be saved, but now it’s all left. It’s too far infiltrated. You can’t get conservatives in there. If you aren’t left and you’re a lecturer, you’re not going to get a job. And if you are a conservative student, you’re very likely to be kicked out if you say the wrong thing.’
‘It’s almost bullying.’ Tallesha added, speaking of the peer pressure that is placed upon students. ‘All of them are so eager to fit in. The conservative side is being portrayed as embarrassing to be a part of and you’ll be made fun of if you’re part of that side. So, everyone is swaying away from that. It sways anyone that is not sure on their political views to the left pretty quickly, because they want to fit in.’
Interviewing Tallesha did not fill me with much hope. After all, this is our youth. This is our future. If Tallesha is correct and 95 per cent of students are left-leaning, then the other side of politics is faced with a big problem.
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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)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Evelyn Rae, a 
Sahara Ray is undoubtedly a good-looking woman. Since she is Australian-born there is even a possibility that we may be distantly related
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