Australian Politics
Youth crime crisis has led to soaring crime rates in Alice Springs
Alice springs has a large Aboriginal settlement nearby and young Aborigines often show little respect for the law. Crime for them is often a form of entertainment. Under Leftist pressure, police are required to go easy on them
A local in Alice Springs has penned a heartbreaking letter begging authorities to 'fix all this criminality' as a youth-led crime crisis sees local jails hit breaking point.
In a letter to the outback town's paper, Alex Morelli wrote that he believes the time has come for locals to fight for their safety after crime rates exploded.
'When will someone do something to fix all this criminality?' he pleaded.
'Last night, I called the police, because a woman was screaming, shouting and throwing rocks in the Eastside.
'Tonight, while I was driving along the main road (McDonald Street) a bunch of kids threw rocks at my car.'
He told Daily Mail Australia the intention of people throwing rocks was 'not like fun'.
'The way they do it, it intends to injure someone.'
Mr Morelli said Australians from other cities have no idea how dangerous Alice Springs feels.
'I lived in Brisbane, then on the Sunshine Coast, and then moved to Alice Springs. I always found Australia such a safe country, but here I am not feeling safe at all.
'When I tell people in other parts of Australia what's happening here they don't believe me.'
Alice Springs is the only Australian town in the 20 most crime-affected locations on earth, coming 17th according to surveys collected by Numbeo.
The other towns to make the top 100 were Rockhampton at 36th, Cairns at 69th, Darwin at 79th and Townsville at 96th.
In 2022 government statistics showed Alice Springs has triple the national average for recorded assaults, 2556 per 100,000 people, compared to 790 for the whole of Australia.
Alice Spring's rates of assault represented a 36 per cent jump on the previous year.
Domestic violence assaults went up 45 per cent, alcohol-related assaults up 46 per cent, property damage was up 54 per cent, car thefts 37 per cent and house break-ins up 24 per cent.
Leader of the Northern Territory opposition, Lia Finocchiaro said in a speech last month that Alice Springs businesses are closing with staff too afraid to go to work.
'Behind the eye-watering crime statistics are families living in fear and business owners are being pushed to the brink.'
'They are 'at breaking point because the financial, physical and emotional costs are just too much to bear.'
As of January 2023 the outback town's only prison is stretched beyond capacity and police are forced to house convicted criminals in police stations.
The Alice Springs Correctional Centre, which has reached its capacity of 650 inmates, is being expanded to add another 80 beds by the end of 2023.
'It is now evident that with the annual trend, more and more prisoners are being held within the watch house,' the jail's general manager Bill Carroll wrote in an email to staff.
Last month the ABC reported a youth crime crisis was engulfing Alice Springs.
Some of the shocking behaviour included youths driving 'head first' at police patrols in order to coax them into high-speed pursuits, the ABC reported.
Some of the young offenders were treating police interaction as a good social media content by livestreaming pursuits for their social media accounts.
In late 2020, NT Police Assistant Commissioner Martin Dole, compared the cat-and-mouse antics of Alice Spring teens to a the classic violent game Grand Theft Auto.
'It’s one-upmanship type behaviour, it’s very much a dangerous game,' he said.
'It needs to be stopped, and it needs to be stamped out.'
Mr Morelli believes it's time for Alice Springs locals to hit the streets to make a point publicly about the safety issues they face.
'It's time to protest and demonstrate against this current situation!' Mr Morelli said.
'Lots of people are leaving for that reason, and the town is become even more unliveable.'
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Mainstream media now totally woke
We are living through arguably one of the greatest divides the Western world has ever experienced and on the night of December 2, 2022, this divide went nuclear, courtesy of Elon Musk. It’s the great Mainstream Media (MSM) divide and it consists of a disconnect between those who consume news from MSM exclusively and those who consume news from both mainstream and so-called ‘alternative’ news sources.
Those who consume MSM exclusively remain oblivious to a plethora of important news stories; at the tip of the iceberg are the Hunter Biden Laptop scandal in America and the Rotherham grooming scandal in the UK. This lack of knowledge of these two stories alone is appalling and indeed unprecedented in living memory.
Speak to an average Australian who consumes only MSM news and they will not have heard of Rotherham. Nor would they be remotely aware that Hunter Biden has a long history of business dealings in Ukraine. Rotherham and Hunter Biden are vital news stories Australians have a right to be made aware of as they navigate child safety and the cost-of-living crises – the latter being widely attributed to the war in Ukraine.
Knowledge is power; if your only source of information is from MSM in 2022, you are disempowering yourself and your family, essentially voting in an information void. A revolution is currently taking place in the Fourth Estate and to their detriment, the majority of people are unaware of it.
In his address at the Claremont Institute on October 13, 2020, Tom Klingenstein argued that the Democratic Party had been taken over by its radical wing and that ‘Republicans are not doing a good job explaining the stakes’.
Given MSM openly flaunts its left-wing bias and Woke ideology, it is impossible for Republicans (or any similar Conservative party) to explain anything at all to the public through that source. Klingenstein’s speech itself was not widely heard by Republicans, let alone swing voters or the many Democrat party members who had become frustrated with the current radical left trend of their party. One had to be on the ever-moving Twitter, following the right accounts at specific moments in time, to catch a glimpse of a speech that deserved a worldwide audience. This is virtually impossible for the average person to do.
Klingenstein and others of that year created political and cultural waves – but these waves could only be felt online. The real world and MSM remained untouched. What should have been a tsunami petered out in the MSM world of ‘do not amplify’.
Investigative journalism, meaning the facts, has been erased Soviet-style by MSM, resulting in Westerners living in a society of haves-and-have-nots regarding what is happening in the world. This divide can be seen between party members, family members, and friends alike, throwing people into parallel world views, dictated by whether or not they consume news via MSM exclusively. At least when they built the Berlin wall we had the physical evidence in front of our eyes that we were divided. Nowadays, it would be Photoshopped out.
Traditionally in the West, we have placed an almost sacred trust in the Fourth Estate – that it will unbiasedly report to the public news they need to know in order to hold their governments accountable. Due to this long-held trust in the Fourth Estate and reliance on MSM, large portions of the public don’t even have the advantage Donald Rumsfeld described in 2002 of being aware that there are ‘… unknown unknowns-the ones we don’t know we don’t know’.
And so it goes, seemingly forever, an almost pointless void between people on the MSM/alternative news parallels, and like all parallel lines in Euclidean geometry, never the two shall meet. It feels like a big bang, in the same metaphor, with the MSM and alternate news sources growing further apart. Fortunately, it’s the latter that seems to be expanding at a faster rate.
On December 2, 2022, Musk decided to give the voting public a hint of what they don’t know they don’t know, if you follow my drift. Laura Ingraham summarised: ‘Musk had bought Twitter not realising he was in fact buying the largest Democratic Party Super Pac.’ Once he did realise this, he decided to share this revelation with the world, tweeting American journalist Matt Taibbi’s expose of the Democratic Party’s communications with Twitter staff in 2020 regarding censoring the New York Post’s story on Hunter Biden’s laptop. In doing so, Musk exposed the chasm between MSM and alternate news reporting, the former’s sins of omission particularly.
Westerners are accustomed to journalists using MSM as their credentials. However in 2022, the credentials are found in the content of the news itself. Primary sources are king, and indeed king makers amongst the new breed of citizen journalists, Andy Ngo being the perfect example of this.
Edmund Burke first coined the phrase ‘Fourth Estate’ in 1787 to highlight the power journalists and news media held.
Thomas Carlyle quotes Burke in stating there were ‘three estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporter’s Gallery yonder, there sits a Fourth Estate more important far than they all’. Power corrupts and as Musk has shown the world, the MSM that has for decades dominated the Fourth Estate has no interest in serving anything but its masters. Journalism, as formerly understood, ceased to be. There is not even the pretence of impartiality anymore in the MSM. As it stands, the Second and Fourth Estates are in collusion to such a degree that authoritarian regimes and their tactics come to mind, actually, throw in the First and Third Estates as well.
Ignorance is currently bliss, but the longer this media exclusion zone with its selective censorship continues, the worse the clean-up will be. If not addressed, this chasm will drive a potentially insurmountable wedge through society and dictate geopolitics for the next decade. It has the potential to be as, if not, more dangerous than Woke ideology
Forget occupying Mars, Musk needs to occupy the Fourth Estate with citizen journalists who will challenge the stranglehold the elites have over the media, by bringing them to a mainstream audience. The digital world can provide a printing press for anyone. Citizen journalists can challenge the status quo, we just need to tune our antennas in their direction and accept that the MSM is gone with the wind.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/01/msm-gone-with-the-wind/
****************************************************PM is told 'you're losing people' on the Voice to Parliament
He's trying to pull a swifty: Get people to vote on something that can be twisted into extreme policies after the event
Anthony Albanese has compared the Indigenous Voice to Parliament to the Sydney Harbour Bridge in a combative radio interview.
The prime minister was questioned about the details of the proposed advisory body at least six months ahead of a referendum on its creation.
For 21 minutes he tried explain that the gritty detail of how the Voice would function was yet to be determined, and the referendum would ask a simple question.
Opponents of the Voice fear the referendum could become a 'bait-and-switch' in which the public gives approval only to find out later what that means in practice.
Mr Albanese tried to allay those concerns by using the bridge analogy first made by indigenous leader Noel Pearson about the difference between the vote and subsequent detail-laden legislation.
He said the referendum was like deciding whether or not to build the Sydney Harbour Bridge without getting lost in arguments over how many lanes it would have or what the tolls should be.
Radio 2GB host Ben Fordham insisted Australians were entitled to see details of the planned 'bridge' before they made a decision on whether or not to proceed.
Mr Albanese said a detailed report by Professors Marcia Langton and Tom Calma released in July 2021 put forward potential models for the Indigenous Voice.
The report goes into great detail about how it would work, both at a local and national level, and the PM previously said the Voice would be based on it.
'Go have a look at the report, it is 260 pages long. it goes through [detail about] the national and regional Voice,' he told Fordham.
Fordham said Australians should not be required to read 260-page report of proposals in order to know what they were being asked to vote on.
Mr Albanese said he would answer if he could get a word in between the questions. 'It (the report) envisages two people from each state and territory and a group of people specifically representing remote communities,' he said.
When Mr Fordham interrupted to ask how they would be chosen, Mr Albanese accused him of 'not being interested in the answer'.
Eventually Mr Albanese explained that, in NSW as an example, there was already work being done to establish a local Voice with members elected by indigenous people in that state.
Members of the national Voice would be chosen from those representatives, along with those of other states and territories.
The prime minister did not rule out legislating the Voice into existence even if the referendum failed, as the vote was specifically on whether the body should be enshrined in the constitution, not on whether it exists at all. 'If Australians say no, there will be no constitutional change,' he said
The radio host asked several specific questions, including whether Voice members would be paid and if it would have an office in Canberra.
Mr Albanese insisted 'the question before the Australian people is a really simple one'. 'Our constitution doesn't go to whether there is an office somewhere or not, it doesn't even have the office of prime minister in it,' he said.
'He said all of the 'serious detail' will be included in legislation that would be voted on in the House of Representatives and Senate.
The PM accused Mr Fordham of already knowing this but seeking to mislead listeners. 'You could come up with 50 theoretical questions about a whole range of issues to undermine what is a very simple principle,' he said.
'And the second is Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people asked us to have a process, and what they wanted that process to come up with is the Uluru Statement of the Heart in 2017... which is asking for a Voice.'
Mr Fordham insisted he was posing the questions that many Australians had about the referendum. 'Please don't tell me what I know and don't know... I'm genuinely asking these questions,' he said.
Mr Albanese also refuted claims members of the Voice or others could take the government to court for not acting on its advice, or if they were not consulted on particular legislation.
The PM in November said the referendum would be held in the second half of this year, with analysts tipping October as the most likely month.
That gives the government nine months to make its case and draw up plans for the Voice that voters could use to make their decision.
Mr Albanese said there would be a parliamentary inquiry into what words would be added to the constitution, which voters could make submissions to.
Parliament would then make a final decision through legislation in the lead-up to the referendum being called.
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The green mining boom is as gritty and dirty as every other boom
Chris Bowen’s ambition to turn Australia into a renewable energy export powerhouse stalled last week when the giant Sun Cable Australia-Asia PowerLink entered voluntary liquidation.
It seems that exporting rays of sunlight to Singapore is as difficult as it sounds. Writing a convincing business plan to install millions of solar panels in the Northern Territory, capturing their intermittent output in giant batteries and sending this through thousands of kilometres of underwater cables is a formidable challenge, even if it’s backed by two renewable energy devotees with very deep pockets.
Australia’s best hope of cashing in on the global clean-energy boom stems not from the thought bubble of a hirsute software entrepreneur, but from the sweat and genius of its mining engineers. Kalgoorlie is at the centre of the so-called green mining boom. It is fast becoming the Dallas of clean energy by doing what it does best: digging up dirt, extracting minerals and sending them to market. The WA outback is to lithium-ion batteries what Texas is to oil. It is rich in deposits of lithium, cobalt, nickel and rare earth elements for which global demand is insatiable.
Finding the half tonne of minerals contained in a Tesla battery requires digging up 250 tonnes of dirt, which is good news for a town that makes its money that way. Global car manufacturers have been competing to secure deals with Australian lithium miners. Last July, for example, Ford Motor Co bought up a third of Liontown Resources’ production and threw in a $300m loan facility to expand Kathleen Valley mine, 350km north of Kalgoorlie.
The love for electric vehicles, however, like the love of sausages, is severely tested by seeing how the object of one’s affection is made. The green mining boom is as gritty and dirty as every other boom that has graced the WA goldfields region since the discovery of gold in 1893. Surrounding roads are lined with road trains hauling ore, giant earth movers, chemicals and explosives. Massive new creators are transforming the natural landscape, but this time the wilderness campaigners don’t seem particularly bothered.
The new green job opportunities we have been frequently promised are as dirty and sweaty as the old ones. Ardea Resources plans to employ 500 people over the 25-year life of its Kalgoorlie Nickel Project’s integrated nickel manganese cobalt battery material refinery hub, assisted by $119m in investment by the former federal Coalition government. They will be driving a fleet of 120-tonne excavators and 90-tonne trucks at 13 open-cut sites at Goongarrie Hill, 80km from Kalgoorlie. They will process ore in high-pressure acid-leached autoclaves. The resulting discharge will be filtered and the solids dry-stacked.
This energy-intensive, chemical-thirsty and land-hungry process adds to the substantial carbon debt that is attached to every electric vehicle. If the unrefined ingredients of a single EV battery were to be transported by train to Esperance, they would fill at least four wagons. Figures produced by car manufacturers show an electric vehicle must be driven for approximately 100,000km before its overall emissions are lower than an equivalent diesel or petrol vehicle.
These material realities of the imagined transition to a green economy are discounted by the renewable energy lobby. As US policy analyst Mark P. Mills bluntly points out, no energy system is actually “renewable” since all machines require the continual mining and processing of millions of tonnes of primary materials and the disposal of hardware that inevitably wears out.
Mills estimates that compared with hydrocarbons, the machines to produce renewable energy require a 10-fold increase in the quantities of materials extracted and processed to produce the same amount of energy.
Mills calculates that by 2050 the quantity of worn-out solar panels will constitute double the tonnage of all today’s global plastic waste together with more than three million tonnes a year of un-recyclable plastics from worn-out wind turbine blades. By 2030, more than 10 million tonnes per year of batteries will become garbage.
The failure to offset the costs against the supposed environmental benefits of renewable energy is part of the dodgy accounting clean-energy advocates would like us to ignore. They turn a blind eye to the 8000 tonnes of steel required to generate a terawatt of electricity with solar panels. They look the other way while 8000 tonnes of concrete are delivered by a conga-line of trucks and poured into the ground to support wind turbines with the same capacity. Coal, gas and nuclear require something less than a tenth of those basic raw materials to generate the same amount of power.
The truth seldom acknowledged by advocates of renewable energy is that reducing dependence on hydrocarbons by shifting to wind, solar and batteries alone will dramatically increase our dependence on minerals. The assumed benefits of decarbonising the electricity grid must be offset against corresponding increases in mining and processing.
In 2005, the mining sector produced 9 per cent of Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions. In 2020 it was 20 per cent. While the sector has been making considerable strides in reducing emissions, there is no scalable technology available to achieve the massive gains a target of net zero by 2050 requires.
The task will be even harder if we want to bring more of the processing onshore, as we must if we are to avoid increasing our energy dependence on China, currently by far the world’s biggest processor of lithium and other critical minerals.
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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 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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