Australian Politics
A real gentleman and a foolish woman
The MAFS report below reveals what a great gentleman "Josh" was: A man of exceptionally good character. And the woman had him. She was "married" to him but dumped him. She dissed him because he was not enough of a sexpot.
But how shallow can you get? Sex can be great in the early stages of a relationship but it usually becomes rather mundane after a while. A good sex life in the beginning is not enough to enable a good relationship in the long haul. Finding a partner who is kind and forgiving is the real treasure in a lasting relationship.
I have had a really good sex life with a number of women over the years but the relationships concerned did not last. And I do have good and pleasing relationships with women with whom I am not sexually active.
"Josh" is to me the "pearl without price" for almost any woman. That Melissa dumped him over a few uninspiring sexual encounters is doubly dumb. She lost a good man and probably also lost the good sex life she was seeking. Good sex does not always come immediately. It can be greatly improved by both parties working on it. Her impatience made her a loser in every respect
Men tend to have an impression of hairdressers as air-headed. Melissa cetainly reinforced that image
It all tends to call to mind a raucous old song popular in the 1950s :
"You can throw a silver dollar down upon the ground,
And it will roll, because it's round.
A woman never knows what a good man she's got,
Until she turns him down"
Married At First Sight's Josh White has broken his silence after his ex-'wife' Melissa Sheppard was slammed for her appalling behaviour towards him.
Taking to Instagram on Monday, the advertising client director, 40, pleaded with viewers to be 'kind' to Melissa - even after she made shocking and insensitive remarks about the couple's sex life at Sunday's commitment ceremony.
'Hi, everyone. The events of Married at First Sight happened a few months ago and Mel and I have had a chance to heal from our experiences,' he said in a video.
'What you saw in the experiment is no different to real life where two strangers come together from different backgrounds to try to learn more about each other, and themselves in the process.
'I think that we had some really beautiful moments, but we also had some moments of reflection, and I think that both of those will be pretty long-lasting.
'I've always maintained the pressure of the experiment affects people in different ways. But let me be very clear about one thing: what happened in the experiment happened between Mel and I.'
Josh explained that targeting Melissa doesn't make him feel any better about what happened on the show. 'Please do not attack Mel. It doesn't make me happy. It doesn't give me any satisfaction. It doesn't raise me up at all,' he said.
'We are real people. We have real feelings. And we all came into the experiment looking for something.'
Josh added in the video's caption: 'I ask you as an audience to please be respectful and kind to Melissa.
'There isn't a need to attack her at all. I understand people will want to but that doesn't make me feel any better and it just perpetuates a cycle that we should all reflect on.'
He also told fans he'd been 'doing well' since leaving the experiment.
Earlier on Monday, Melissa doubled down on her criticism of Josh during an interview on The Kyle and Jackie O Show, accusing him of being a 'different person' in one-on-one interviews with producers and revealing unflattering details about their sex life.
Listeners were left stunned as Melissa - who is in damage control after being portrayed on the show as callous and sex-obsessed - alleged Josh was 'not the same person in front of the cameras' as he was behind closed doors.
She also told radio hosts Kyle Sandilands and Jackie 'O' Henderson the pair never actually kissed - despite having 'sloppy' sex several times in the experiment - and also claimed they didn't engage in oral sex.
'It was really sloppy and messy… I wouldn't say that was hot and heavy and intimate. It wasn't how I imagined to have an amazing sex life with someone,' she said.
'There was no kissing. It was very transactional. It was just physical - that was quite awful.'
The single mum also said her portrayal as an overly demanding lover was unfair and all she wanted was sex 'two to three times' per week.
Melissa explained that while things started off great with Josh on their honeymoon, their relationship went downhill once they moved in together.
'Josh is a very different person in front of me and he would go to [film] these vox-pops. I felt like I was sleeping with a secret assassin,' added the hairdresser.
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7% of youths on bail committed offence leading to death or serious injury
Just last week, a community crime forum was called in Toowoomba following the death of a 75-year-old man who was allegedly attacked by a number of youths.
At the forum, a remarkably candid Queensland Police Commissioner Katarina Carroll described the current crisis as: “We have seen in the last 12 months an escalation of offending that we haven’t see before.”
Examination of police crime data shows the overall crime rate in Queensland has risen seven per cent in 2021-22, the rate of break and enters has risen 18 per cent, stolen vehicles 13 per cent, assaults went up 60 per cent.
The number of robberies is up 29 per cent.
In Queensland, police are hamstrung by a restrictive pursuit policy.
The perception is that stealing a car in Queensland is a low-risk criminal enterprise. Only a week ago, we saw youth offenders flee an alleged home invasion and brazenly drive a stolen vehicle from Brisbane until they crossed the border into NSW, where the police promptly intercepted and arrested them.
We now know that serious repeat youth offenders account for 17 per cent of youth offenders, up from 10 per cent in 2020, and commit 48 per cent of youth crime.
Despite only accounting for 16 per cent of all offenders, youth make up 54 per cent of robbery offenders, 53 per cent of stolen vehicle and 50 per cent of break-and-enter offenders.
So how did we get here? In 2016, the Labor government removed the offence of breach of bail for youth offenders.
It also outlined that for youth offenders, a detention order should be imposed only as a last resort and for the shortest appropriate period.
Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk revealed on Monday she would backflip and reintroduce breach of bail as an offence in the “spirit of bipartisanship”.
In 2019, the current government further weakened youth justice laws by passing legislation that was designed to facilitate more grants of bail to youth offenders.
The new laws formed part of the government’s $550m investment in youth justice reforms, including new programs and services to keep young people out of custody and from reoffending.
It sounded admirable at the time.
It only took a year for the government to realise its mistake and enact more amendments to try to fix the problem in 2020.
Yet still the bar was set too low in terms of allowing the hard-core offender back out on to the streets to continually reoffend.
There have now been two sets of additional youth justice reforms since to try to combat the crisis; both are best described as inept and ineffective.
Despite the shrill calls of panic from the progressive elements in our society, few youth offenders get sent to jail.
The Children’s Court annual report released last month showed that in 2021-22 a detention penalty was only imposed in 6.6 per cent of convicted youth appearances.
Raising maximum sentences for stealing a vehicle, as the government has in its latest youth justice reforms, is simply smoke and mirrors if no-one gets the maximum.
Data from the Queensland Sentencing Advisory Council showed that the average period of detention for youth offenders convicted of stealing a vehicle was 3.6 months, and only 6 per cent of youth offenders who stole a vehicle went to detention.
The Atkinson review of the government’s youth justice reforms released in 2022 showed that offending by young people on bail had increased.
A total of 53 per cent of young people on bail reoffended while on bail, 19 per cent committed serious offending and seven per cent committed an offence leading to death or serious injury while on bail.
These figures are simply unacceptable.
It is right that the offence of breach of bail for youth offenders needs to be introduced immediately to give an effective and efficient option for police to take action for youth committing offences on bail.
Backgrounding this are moves to decriminalise youth offenders aged 10-12.
The Queensland government has supported this proposal as part of a broader push to raise the age of criminal responsibility to 14 years.
As the Police Union noted, it will create a generation of invisible offenders.
An example of the failures of the youth justice reforms put in place by the government is the electronic tracking devices. At the forum in Toowoomba, the Police Minister claimed that the trial of the trackers “was very successful”.
The Atkinson review showed that instead of the 100 expected to be issued, only three had been, at a cost of about $11.5m. If that is a success, I would hate to see a failure.
The short-term offending cycle of serious repeat offenders needs to be stopped.
If you commit a serious offence on bail, there should be no show cause situation, it should be the case that you remain in custody until your matter is finalised.
The government can easily pass legislation to this effect.
Therapeutic interventions to address the multifactorial causes of serious youth offending can come later to stop the long-term offending cycle.
The community is right to be angry. The government must listen to the people and take appropriate action to address this crisis.
Community safety must come first.
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The internet has changed everything
Mark Latham
One doesn’t normally associate David Bowie, the androgenous rock star of the Seventies and Eighties, with piercingly accurate political analysis. But recently I saw an old interview with the Thin White Duke (recorded at a time when the internet was becoming prominent) that seemed incredibly insightful.
Bowie argued that up until the invention of the internet, the human knowledge-set was reasonably well settled. While historians sometimes differed, this was only at the margins, giving us a definitive interpretation of past events. So too, most aspects of science had been resolved.
Social values and norms were framed around mainstream notions of decency and commonsense. The parameters of political debate, while keenly contested at election time, pivoted on the orthodoxy of a handful of major parties.
It was as if the 18th-century Enlightenment had struck an ideal balance: creating new freedoms of speech to debate concepts and ideas, thereby further advancing the knowledge-set, but within accepted boundaries as to what was factual and what was nonsense.
Very few people subscribed to conspiracy theories or wacky notions of information being ‘socially constructed’ and ‘fluid’. Observable truths were respected as the foundation-stone of intellectual enlightenment.
Bowie’s thesis was that the internet would blow this settlement apart. As a mostly unregulated, open-access regime it would give a wide range of political activists the forum and space they needed to create their own self-serving narratives, unchallenged by the disciplines of evidence and facts.
This in turn would fragment society, as people would find their own group with which to associate and support online. Public life would be transformed, becoming more divisive and censorious as political tribes tried to close down their rivals and embed their beliefs in popular culture.
The orthodoxies of history, science, education and major party politics would come under permanent siege. And as this process played out, the internet tribes would dig in deeper, fortifying their positions with fewer facts and even less evidence, talking mainly to themselves (in what we now call the political ‘bubble’).
Bowie said we had to turn and face this change. As ever in his lyrics, strange fascinations fascinated him.
One would have to say, 30 years later, his dismal prophecy has been realised. He has given us a handy framework within which to understand the new politics of ‘fake news’ and ‘cancel culture’.
In the madness of today’s politics, why shouldn’t we take the unexpected wisdom of Ziggy Stardust as a reference point?
It helps to explain why the political centre has hollowed out and the major party vote has declined. They have been cannibalised by movements to the left and right of them.
Five new tribes have emerged in politics, as confirmation of Bowie’s thesis:
The Lunar Right
Some voters are dazed and confused by the extent of change in our public institutions. Old certainties have been lost, replaced by the alien authoritarianism of political correctness, identity politics, gender fluidity, decarbonisation and cancel culture. In seeking out a single, simple explanation, the Lunar Right has latched onto the theory of international conspiracy, through the UN, WEF, Agenda 21, WHO, COP and any other globalist forum that carries an acronym.
I hear from these people often and I can assure them: most of the political madness we have in Australia is homegrown. Adam Bandt, Lidia Thorpe, Penny Wong and Anthony Albanese have been refining their leftist agenda for decades. They don’t receive, or in fact need, memos from the UN every other day to do their worst.
Policy Traditionalists
This is where I have tried to position NSW One Nation, around a belief that Australian public policy reached a high-water mark of effectiveness during the Hawke-Keating-Howard-Costello era. There was never any need for change.
For Traditionalists, our watchword is evidence: to reject the Left’s agenda based on its observable adverse impacts. Why, for instance, would Australia destroy its resource and manufacturing industries and millions of jobs when the elimination of our carbon emissions cannot have any measurable impact on global surface temperatures?
Surreal Teal
This is the new politics of wealthy indulgence: well-heeled women so comfortable in life they have deluded themselves into thinking they can repair any part of society and ultimately, save the planet. They only visit places like the Hunter Valley and Western Sydney by accident, so the loss of blue-collar jobs in these regions is inconsequential to their virtue-signalling.
Woke Identitarians
Labor used to believe in helping people on the basis of their socio-economic status. Now, bizarrely, it sees politics through the prism of things people were born with, the identity politics of race, gender and sexuality. Martin Luther King’s ethos of judging people by their character has been replaced by the primitive habit of judging them by how they look. Thus a privileged, powerful person like Penny Wong can plead disadvantage from being an Asian lesbian, even though no aspect of her life is actually disadvantaged.
The Green Extreme
Authoritarianism is back in fashion, with the Greens seeking to control the language, values, behaviour, family life and employment of other people. If you’ve ever met a Green MP you will know they can barely run their own lives, but this is not a barrier to trying to engineer everyone else’s life in their own image.
Bowie was right: Time can’t change me and I can’t change time. But the internet has changed everything.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/02/political-oddity/
*****************************************************The major mistake Australia made during the Covid-19 lockdowns: Top professor describes hated rule as 'absolutely atrocious'
Peter Collignon - one of Australia's most trusted voices through the Covid crisis - has said restrictions on outdoor activities during the Covid-lockdown was 'absolutely atrocious' and a major mistake.
The infectious diseases doctor tweeted on Monday that 'restrictions on outdoor activities (during Covid lockdowns) was a major mistake'.
He said his warnings from the start of the pandemic that preventing people from going out to exercise had been proven right - 'We should never in the future stop people from being outdoors.'
Professor Collignon told Daily Mail Australia that 'No matter how hard you look, you can not find (much Covid) transmission outdoors.
'There was some - there was a report in the US of someone talking to somebody for 15 minutes outside and getting Covid, and there were some building workers in Singapore who probably got it outdoors.
'But basically, outdoors, there's very little transmission of Covid. The effective R (the rate of passing Covid on to another person) was much less than one.
'In other words, you didn't transmit it much,' he said.
The doctor, who lectures at the Australian National University's medical school in Canberra, said restrictions on outdoor exercise 'was a real mistake'.
'There was a lot of hysteria about people going to beaches and to parks, and you could only be out for an hour a day and closing parks for children.'
He said while it could not have been guaranteed that no transmission would have occurred outdoors, 'it would have been minimal and should have easily been handled by contract tracing and testing'.
Prof Collignon said this is not a conclusion he has come to with the benefit of looking back, that he had been 'saying that three years ago too'.
Photos on social media showing crowded beaches during lockdowns - implying that people were breaking the law - were misleading, he said.
'They did it with telephoto lenses which made it look like people were really close together.
'But when you looked at aerial views from drones, people were more than two metres apart.'
Prof Collignon said at the time that lockdowns such as closing national parks so people couldn't go walking were 'not sensible'.
'And in retrospect, it looks an absolutely atrocious mistake to have made those rules,' he said.
The issue of travelling in a crowded space to get to a beach or park during lockdowns complicated matters, though.
'If you had to travel by train or bus or a crowded car to get there, that's a risk. But it's being indoors that's the big risk.
'If you can go in your own transport to an outdoor venue, you had no more risk of acquiring Covid from anybody not in your household.'
Prof Collignon also addressed the issue of the increased number of drownings this summer being blamed in part on children not having been able to learn to swim in pools due to lockdowns.
'I am under the impression, and it's based on hearsay, but there have been less children learning to swim over the last few years than in the years beforehand,' he said.
'It all depends on the data ... on how many children aged two to six have drowned and how different that is (from pre-pandemic numbers).
'Because that is the age group that would have been affected by not being able to learn to swim (due to lockdowns).'
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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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