Australian Politics
Thursday, May 11, 2023
Qld youth crime: Stats show school disciplinary action may add to youth crime crisis
There seems to be confusion here about the causal chain -- a claim that expulsions CAUSE bad behaviour. That remains to be established. What we DO know is that bad behaviour causes expulsions. Correlation is not causation
There is however no doubt that expulsions are a bad disciplinary option. Classroom behaviour was much better when corporal punishment was allowed
The state’s foremost expert on families and children has warned there is a direct correlation between suspended and expelled students and those swept up in Queensland’s youth crime epidemic.
Queensland Family and Child Commission (QFCC) principal commissioner Luke Twyford said evidence showed more than half of all kids in the youth justice system were disengaged from education, and a high-rate suspensions and exclusions could be adding to the problem.
It comes after The Courier-Mail revealed vulnerable kids – including First Nations children, kids with a disability and those in care – were eight times more likely to be suspended or excluded from school than their peers.
“A young person’s disengagement from education is a known risk factor and indicator of their future contact with the youth justice system,” Mr Twyford said.
“Using suspension and expulsions does not work for children whose home environment is causing their behaviour.
“Instead we need greater investment in specialised education outside of the mainstream system, such as Flexischools, and greater focus on trauma-informed responses in schools.”
Mr Twyford said he was aware the education department was taking action on the “highly-concerning statistics”, and he had received briefings on the progress.
“Whilst there are positive improvements in the use of SDAs for young children including those in Prep, I remain concerned that more needs to be done for high-school teenagers, particularly those in vulnerable cohorts,” he said.
“Keeping children engaged in education or employment is the best way to give them hope for the future and keep them out of crime.”
The QFCC says it has raised its concerns through meetings with state government ministers, and is continuing to monitor improvements in the use of school disciplinary absences.
Speaking about an over-representation of some student disciplinary absences, Education Minister Grace Grace said the rates were “very concerning”.
She said she had asked the department to review the issue last year, and preliminary data had indicated a decline in overall absences.
“However there is still clearly more to do, which is why addressing this issue is a key focus of our new equity and excellence strategy,” Ms Grace said last week.
“Some of the measures include closely monitoring student absences and acting when patterns indicate additional support is needed, establishing a dedicated position in each region, and providing professional development programs to support staff to better respond to complex behavioural issues.”
Bond University criminologist Prof Terry Goldsworthy said there was sufficient evidence that showed disciplines at school could lead to anti-social behaviour out of the classroom.
“What are they doing? What are they getting up to? Most parents are at work, all that can be problematic,” Prof Goldsworthy said.
Prof Goldsworthy said community welfare should always come first. “It’s a difficult position for schools,” he said. “But on the other hand community welfare must come first over individual autonomy.”
Griffith University criminologist Professor Ross Homel said while suspension and exclusions relieved pressure on schools, they tended to backfire.
Prof Homel said he sympathised with schools who were forced to suspend violent children to protect their classmates but said it wasn’t always the best answer.
“We know that it leads to the potential for youth crime, for mental health problems and homelessness,” Prof Homel said of suspensions. “I don’t blame schools and it’s not just in Queensland where it’s an epidemic.”
A Department of Education spokeswoman said principals considered the care arrangements of students prior to deciding whether to suspend them.
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Glaring electric car problem exposed after man’s tyre goes flat
An Australian driver has revealed a glaring problem with electric vehicles after finding himself stranded on the side of the road when one of his tyres went flat.
Eddy May was driving home in his electric Mercedes-Benz EQC-400 on Sunday just before midday when his rear left wheel deflated, leaving him and his wife stranded on the side of the road in Adelaide.
Making use of an in-car customer service offered in the luxury model, he pressed a button and spent five minutes on the phone with Mercedes about the tyre.
“I’ve spoken to them, they’re sending a tow truck,” Mr May told his followers in a clip shared to TikTok.
“Quick five minutes on the phone, a $200 cab charge voucher to get home, [and the] car’s going to get towed to Mercedes and the car’s going to be fixed tomorrow apparently,” he said.
About 35 minutes later, the $128,000 vehicle was loaded onto a tow truck and the couple’s taxi arrived.
By just after 12pm, they were on their way home. “Pretty good. Well done Mercedes,” Mr May said.
But his video praising Mercedes for their service raised questions over why a spare tyre wasn’t kept inside the car as it would be for petrol cars.
“There’s no spare in this f**king car because all the room is taken up with batteries and so forth,” Mr May said.
Most electric vehicles don’t come with spare tyres given the extra space and weight they require.
“I would be severely unimpressed with needing a tow truck, taxi ride, loan car and what 1-2 days without my car over a flat tyre,” one comment on the video read. “I would much prefer the 10 minutes to change the tyre,” another wrote.
“Great service, interesting way of saving the planet and reducing carbon emissions. Taxi ride and tow truck compared with carrying a spare tyre,” a third said.
Mr May argued the vehicle still worked out to be friendlier on the environment overall, even though it used a lot of resources when a tyre blew out.
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Slack Qld police again
I am not surprised. When my car was stolen, they THREW AWAY evidence leading to the offender. Officer Turgeon is greatly to blame As in Britain at the time, police policy was apparently not to investigate car theft
A juvenile offender allegedly involved in a terrifying armed hold up of a young woman in her own bedroom has been acquitted after a court heard police “didn’t bother” to collect crucial witness statements or seize a weapon found at the scene.
Police had alleged the boy was among a group of young armed males who forced their way into the female’s bedroom and demanded money, threatening to smash a television if she didn’t comply.
But he has walked free this month after a botched police investigation and failed prosecution resulted in him being found not guilty after a trial in the Children’s Court of Queensland, with the presiding judge saying she had a reasonable doubt about the boy’s guilt given the lack of evidence put forward by the prosecution.
In her trial judgment, Judge Vicki Loury described the failure to call witnesses to the alleged incident as “entirely unsatisfactory”.
The boy’s defence argued he was not present during the burglary at Redbank Plains and the complainant, who had met him about five or six times prior to the incident, mistakenly identified him.
According to the judgment, witnesses who may have been able to identify the alleged offenders were not asked to give statements or called to give evidence, CCTV collected by police from neighbouring properties was not tendered in evidence, and the weapon the boy allegedly left at the scene was not seized or examined by police.
After the teens fled, the complainant found a steering wheel lock under the sheets in her bed which she assumed the defendant hid when police arrived.
“Photos were taken of the item some days later,” Judge Loury wrote. “It was not seized, nor subject to a forensic examination. “There is no explanation in the evidence for that not having occurred.”
Judge Loury said Senior Constable Eliza Wheeler gave evidence at trial that while she was at the crime scene speaking with a person, the defendant approached and asked her what was going on.
He claimed he had come from a nearby house behind the complainant’s address.
“No effort was made to confirm his account,” Judge Loury wrote, noting no attempt was made to get statements from others at that address who could support or deny his story.
Police also failed to take witness statements from people who may have been able to identify the defendant – including the complainant’s brother who had opened the front door to the alleged offenders and her friend who was in the bedroom at the time of the incident.
Judge Loury said Senior Constable Brook Mair gave evidence she took over the investigation nine months after the incident and collected CCTV footage that was not tendered in evidence.
“In cross examination she confirmed that she spoke to the complainant’s brother to try to get a statement from him,” Judge Loury wrote.
“In the end, she did not bother as it was too hard with her rosters to obtain a statement from him.
“She did not attempt to obtain a statement from the complainant’s friend, … who the complainant said was inside her room during the incident.”
Judge Loury said the officer also “did not bother” to follow up the defendant’s claim that he was visiting a nearby house and was unaware of whether the steering wheel lock found in the complainant’s bed was seized or forensically examined.
Judge Loury said it was likely the complainant’s friend and brother would both have been able to shed some light on the identity of the defendant had police bothered to speak to them.
“I consider the explanations given for the failure to call the complainant’s brother to give evidence or the complainant’s friend, … and the failure to call any of the residents from (the property the defendant claimed to have come from) to be entirely unsatisfactory,” Judge Loury wrote.
“It would be reasonable for a prudent police officer to have obtained statements from each of these material witnesses and for them to be called at the trial of the defendant.
“The prosecutor has conceded that it would be open to draw an inference adverse to the Crown given the state of the evidence before me.”
Judge Loury said the complainant was a careful and honest witness and that there was strength to her evidence that the defendant was one of the intruders in the room.
“In this case where the central issue is one of identification/recognition, and taking into account the special need for caution before convicting in reliance on the correctness of the complainant’s identification, the failure to call material witnesses who could have shed light on this very issue means that I ought to entertain a reasonable doubt about the guilt of the defendant,” she wrote.
The boy was found not guilty of a charge of entering a dwelling with intent to commit an indictable offence armed and in company.
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Frustrated truckies blast new tax and warn of the ‘domino effect’ on prices
More fuel for inflation from your destructive Leftist government
Frustrated truck drivers have ripped into the government for increasing the Heavy Vehicle Road User Charge, saying the extra fees will put even more pressure on their stretched finances.
The charge, which is a tax truckies pay for using roads, will increase from 27.2 cents to 32.4 cents per litre of diesel used by 2025 which, truckies say, will cause a “domino effect” on the costs of goods around the country.
Sydney truckie, Les, blasted the “ridiculous” move in an interview on 2GB and told host Ben Fordham that the move was “just another hit on a cash cow”.
“That’s all we are to the transport industry, we’re a cash cow,” Les said.
“Every time we do something, the more you do, the more they hit us with taxes, fuel – we’re paying twice the fuel we were from last year.”
He said he was also paying anywhere up to $1000 on tolls for his small trucking operation.
Another caller, AJ – who is a third-generation trucking business owner with a larger fleet of around 40 vehicles – said the increase, tacked on top of the sky-high fuel prices, means he will likely not be able to distribute raises to staff.
”So, we probably use anywhere from 60 to 70,000 litres of diesel a week. Our fuel bill’s probably, you know, up over $100,000 easily each week,” he told 2GB.
The increase to the Heavy Vehicle Road User Charge, Fordham said, means AJ is set to spend $182,000 more on fuel every year to operate his business.
AJ told the program the higher costs for heavy vehicle operators would also mean “costs to our customers go up, and that will start the domino effect” known as inflation.
“When their cost of living goes up, (staff) come to us and go: ‘Hey boss, we need some more money’, but we’ve got to pay extra for all these things,” AJ said.
“So I just ended up going around and around in circles with these higher costs to us.”
Les was glib when asked what he has gained from the budget, saying the only one was realising that it was probably better to “go on the dole”.
“Go on the dole and you’ll get more money, because the harder we work the more we have to give the money away,” he said.
“I have no problem with people that need to be on the dole being there, but (for Labor) to turn around and do what they’ve done … it’s just ridiculous.”
Australia’s transport ministers announced on Monday that they had agreed to increase charges by 6 per cent each year for the next three years, to “help provide some certainty to industry”.
“This level of increase is considered by ministers to strike the right balance between the need to move back towards cost-recovery of the heavy vehicle share of road expenditure and the need to minimise impacts on this vital industry,” the ministers said in a joint statement.
As part of that increase, the Road User Charge will increase from 27.2 cents a litre to 28.8 cents a litre after July 1 this year, when the changes come into effect.
It will then jump to 30.5 cents and 32.4 cents in the years after. Registration costs will also increase for heavy vehicles.
National Road Transport Association boss Warren Clark described the increase as a death knell for some operators.
“This is a cruel blow to operators already under extreme stress who are desperately trying to stay viable,” he said, slamming the ministers’ claims about striking a balance for the industry.
“In effect, they’ve given a final push to those businesses that are already teetering on the edge.”
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RBA research finds Australia has up to an 80 per cent recession risk to get inflation under control
Only a cutback in government spending will reduce price rises
Previously unpublished internal research from the Reserve Bank estimates that Australia's risk of recession over this year and next could be as high as 80 per cent.
The research, released as a result of a freedom of information request, includes modelling from a senior analyst in the RBA's Economic Analysis Department.
The economic modelling, conducted in September 2022 and based on the bank's economic forecasts from August 2022, considered the risk of recession as the RBA raised interest rates at the fastest pace in recent history.
Using the Sahm Rule, which defines a recession as when the quarterly average of the unemployment rate rises by at least 0.75 per cent above its minimum over the previous 12 months, the senior analyst said some models put the risk of recession at 65 per cent or more over the next two years.
"Estimates suggest the probability of a recession over the next two years could be as high as 80 per cent," the note stated.
"If a recession does occur, it is most likely sometime over the next four quarters. This is in line with intensifying market commentary predicting a recession in the first half of 2023."
Using a different type of model reduced the recession risk, but still found the odds of Australia remaining on the "narrow path" talked about by RBA governor Philip Lowe of getting inflation back below 3 per cent without a major economic contraction at little better than 50-50.
"The likelihood of ending up on the 'narrow path' is around one in two," the senior analyst noted.
"Allowing policy to respond increases this probability modestly, both because policymakers can tighten more aggressively to combat inflation and because they can cut rates to avoid a recession, when required."
This research also offers some insight as to why the Reserve Bank may have eased off on its monetary policy tightening, from 0.5 percentage point increases from June to September to a 0.25 of a percentage point rise in October.
At the same time, the RBA has been willing to tolerate inflation sitting just above its 2-3 per cent target even by the end of its two-year forecast horizon.
"Around 70 per cent of all simulations where inflation returns to just above the target band by the end of the horizon do not involve a recession," the modelling predicted.
"The proportion with inflation getting inside the band without a recession is notably lower, at around 55 per cent."
This might go towards explaining why Mr Lowe and the RBA board have generally been resisting calls to get inflation back within the band faster.
Mr Lowe has repeatedly said that to get inflation down more quickly would cost tens, and possibly hundreds, of thousands of jobs, and that he believes this trade-off is not worth it.
"Some of the simulations with inflation returning to target involve significant increases in the unemployment rate," the September research noted.
"The upper bound of the 75 per cent interval peaks at between 4.5 and 5 per cent across both simulations.
"Under the Taylor Rule, the worst outcome has the unemployment rate 2 percentage points higher than in the central forecast.
"This suggests that returning inflation to target could involve significant job losses even when monetary policy responds to developments."
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