Australian Politics
Sydney teacher found to have racially vilified Indian student
This report rather grieves me. I have been to India 3 times and have always admired Indian people for their patience and good nature amid adversity. And a very important person in my life at the moment is of wholly Indian descent. I admire her greatly. See her below:
The Department of Education has been ordered to make an official apology to a former Cronulla High School student after a teacher allegedly described Indian people as “Uber drivers and Deliveroo people” during a Year 12 business studies class.
The teacher – James Anderson – played an educational YouTube video for the class entitled Elements Of Marketing which featured a presenter of Indian descent.
During the video, Anderson is alleged to have mocked the presenter before saying “all Indians are Uber drivers and Deliveroo people, and their service is bad”.
The incident, which happened on March 3, 2021, was complained about by a student who was of Indian descent.
The student and her parents met with the principal following the incident, but filed a complaint with NSW Civil and Administrative Tribunal after being unsatisfied with the school’s response.
“As the video was playing, I saw Mr Anderson, while smiling, glance at me a few times and continue to mockingly giggle at the lady and her accent,” the student said during her evidence at the tribunal.
“During the playing of the video which ran for over twenty minutes, I recall a girl in the class asking for the video to be turned off a few times ... but Mr Anderson did not do so.
“I was distressed and uncomfortable that Mr Anderson was looking at me during the video and mocked the Indian presenter, knowing that I am of Indian race. It was embarrassing and hurtful.”
During his evidence, Anderson denied mocking the presenter, but admitted he said something to the effect of: “Don’t assume because she is Indian that she is an Uber driver or works at 7-Eleven”, before complaining about the quality of service provided by Uber and food delivery providers.
He admitted his statements were “inappropriate” and “racial in nature”.
“At the time there was nothing in the nature of any reactions by the students in the class that day to cause me to think that one or more of the students was upset,” he told the tribunal.
On Tuesday, the Tribunal handed down its decision finding the student’s complaint of racial vilification substantiated.
The Tribunal ordered the Department of Education – the first respondent in the case – to issue the student with a written apology which acknowledged the Tribunal’s findings of racial vilification and the harm caused to her.
The teacher remains at the school but received a disciplinary warning and training.
In a statement provided to the Herald, a spokesman for the Department of Education commended other students in the class who spoke up during the incident.
“We reject all forms of racism and are committed to the elimination of racial discrimination in NSW public schools,” he said.
“The matter was reported to the Professional and Ethical Standards Directorate in 2021 and appropriate action was taken.”
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Growing doubts over whether troubled Taipan helicopters will return to duty
These European-made contraptions were always problematical. They should have been returned to their manufacturer years ago. Calling them Taipans was a joke. In 2022 Norway terminated their purchase of them and demanded a full refund.
As someone who has worn my country's uniform, I am always particularly perturbed when the lives of servicemen are put at risk by government incompetence
Future flying operations for Australia's troubled Taipan helicopter fleet are increasingly uncertain, as the painstaking and difficult recovery operation from last week's tragic MRH-90 crash continues in Queensland.
For several days navy divers and a Royal Australian Navy Minehunter vessel have taken part in a multi-agency search for wreckage of the army helicopter, which is scattered across hundreds of square metres of the ocean floor.
"It's clear the helicopter hit the water with a hard impact and it's a difficult job to gather all the debris for the investigation," one figure familiar with the recovery operation told the ABC.
Inside the army community there is also growing anger over Friday's tragedy and speculation the troubled MRH-90 fleet may never return to full operations ahead of the helicopter's scheduled retirement next year.
"The Army Aviation community isn't just merely saddened and grieving so much as f***ing furious," one 5th Aviation Regiment army veteran told the ABC.
Speaking on the condition of anonymity the aviator, who previously worked on the MRH-90 Capability Assurance Program (CAP), claimed successive governments and military leaders ignored increasing risks with the multi-role helicopter.
"The myriad of contributing factors associated are so voluminous that a catastrophic incident such as Friday night not occurring before is actually the true testament to the professionalism and capabilities of the people that fly, maintain, operate and directly support them."
Senior Defence and government figures have declined to comment this week on whether the planned 2024 introduction of new American-made Black Hawks could be expedited.
Earlier this week the ABC reported on concerns that the grounding of the Airbus manufactured multi-role Taipans could limit the ability of Australian special forces to respond to critical incidents.
The ABC understands private civilian contractors are continuing to provide some air services for the military while the MRH-90 fleet remains grounded.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-08-03/will-taipan-helicopters-return-to-duty/102678508
************************************************ACT’s system of justice hangs in the balance over crooked prosecutor
There is a dark cloud hanging over the proper administration of justice in the ACT. The Sofronoff report, handed to the ACT Chief Minister on Monday, will go some way to lifting that cloud. But only a series of resolute responses to that report can reset justice in the nation’s capital territory.
One of the most serious issues aired during the May public hearings concerned evidence that ACT Director of Public Prosecutions Shane Drumgold instructed a very junior solicitor to draft an affidavit asserting that legal professional privilege attached to police documents known as the Investigative Review Documents.
These documents, sought by Bruce Lehrmann’s lawyers but withheld by Drumgold, revealed inconsistencies in evidence provided by Brittany Higgins about her allegation of rape and questions about her credibility.
When Lehrmann’s legal team made an application to the court for disclosure, Drumgold instructed solicitors in his office to draft an affidavit to support nondisclosure on the basis that the documents were protected by legal professional privilege. Drumgold gave evidence that it was for the Australian Federal Police, not him, to assert legal privilege over the documents.
Therefore, an affidavit would need to cite the AFP was the source of information about privilege. Drumgold emailed two solicitors in his office about drafting the affidavit. The more senior of the two solicitors asked Drumgold, by return email, what the source of the information about legal privilege would be.
Drumgold did not respond to that question. Instead, he told the more senior solicitor that he would instruct the junior solicitor to deal with this part of the affidavit. Drumgold sent the young solicitor suggested wording for the critical part of the affidavit that claimed the police documents sought by the defence were privileged.
That wording was included in the affidavit sworn by the junior solicitor at the DPP’s direction. It created a falsehood, when presented to the court and to the ACT Chief Justice, that police had claimed privilege over the investigation documents. In fact, the AFP had not claimed privilege over these internal investigation documents. Evidence presented to the inquiry revealed that police believed these documents should have been disclosed to defence.
If Walter Sofronoff KC finds the DPP was knowingly involved in presenting a false affidavit to the ACT Supreme Court for the purposes of withholding information from the defence, Drumgold’s demand for this inquiry last year will rate as the biggest legal own goal since Oscar Wilde brought a defamation suit against the Marquess of Queensberry.
The ACT government’s response will be critical to the administration of justice in the ACT. Consider what was at stake. A young man was on trial for rape. If he was found guilty, he would, in all likelihood, go to jail. If the DPP tried to withhold evidence on false grounds, and if he presented that falsehood to the court, the DPP’s removal from high office is the easy decision. So is his removal from the roll of legal practitioners.
The most important decision will be to investigate whether the DPP knowingly attempted to pervert the course of justice.
The information that the DPP potentially tried to withhold from Lehrmann’s lawyers may have assisted them in formulating their client’s defence. The information may have revealed material that could have given rise to trains of inquiry for Lehrmann’s lawyers to pursue. Any attempt to withhold that information would interfere with those avenues of defence, and potentially it would keep information hidden that should probably have gone to the jury.
As was revealed during the Sofronoff inquiry, even if the material was not admissible in court, it was still material that should have been disclosed to the defence. It is a serious crime if Joe Citizen makes a false statement with the intent to pervert the course of justice. It is another level of seriousness if done by a person charged with upholding the administration of justice.
A prosecutor, entrusted with the enormous powers of the state over citizens, must behave as a minister of justice at all times: searching for the truth in an objective, impartial and fair manner.
Chief Minister Andrew Barr had better start consulting numerous sections of the ACT Criminal Code. First, under section 703(1), a person commits perjury if they make a sworn statement in a legal proceeding that is false and the person making it is reckless about the statement being false.
It becomes aggravated perjury, under section 702, if a person makes a false statement in a legal proceeding with the intention of procuring a person’s conviction for an offence. If the DPP knowingly presented a false affidavit to the ACT Supreme Court for the purposes of withholding information from the defence, section 708(b) is also relevant. It makes it an offence if a person deceives someone else so that this other person gives false or misleading evidence in a legal proceeding.
Consider, too, section 713, which makes it a criminal offence if a person, by his or her conduct, intentionally perverts the course of justice. It won’t matter that the affidavit was sworn by the junior solicitor and not by Drumgold. Under section 46 of the ACT Criminal Code, a person is taken to have committed an offence if they procured someone else to engage in the conduct. That means if the DPP was knowingly involved in presenting a false affidavit to the ACT Supreme Court for the purposes of withholding information from the defence, he could face multiple charges, each charge giving rise to maximum jail terms of seven years.
Let us be emphatic about this: in any criminal prosecution, should it come to that, Drumgold is entitled to the presumption of innocence and a fair trial, just as Lehrmann was, and may have been denied that by Drumgold. The rule of law applies equally to all.
Barr and his Attorney-General, Shane Rattenbury, will need to refresh their memories about Marcus Einfeld, the federal court judge who was sentenced to two years in jail in 2009 for lying about a speeding fine. The judge completed a false statutory declaration that stated he was not driving his car at the time his silver Lexus was clocked for doing 60km/h in 50km/h zone. The potential fine was $75 and the loss of three demerit points. Einfeld claimed his friend, an American academic, Teresa Brennan, was driving his car. This was a gross lie. Brennan had died three years earlier and Einfeld knew it.
When sentencing Einfeld to jail, NSW Supreme Court judge Bruce James said the judge’s lies struck “at the heart of the administration of justice”.
Outside court that day, the head of the police fraud squad, Detective Superintendent Colin Dyson said there were “no winners today but justice has been served”.
If Drumgold is found to have knowingly lied to try to keep police investigation material from a defendant who faced jail if found guilty of rape, it enters a different realm of gravity.
A decision to launch an investigation into a possible attempt to pervert the course of justice will fall squarely on the shoulders of three institutions: first, the ACT Chief Minister, as the first recipient of the Sofronoff report; second, ACT Policing, the unit within the AFP responsible for investigating criminal offences in the ACT; and, third, the ACT Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions, the body charged with carriage of prosecutions.
This raises obvious challenges. The ACT government appointed Drumgold. The AFP had a fractious relationship with Drumgold, as laid out over many weeks in public during the Sofronoff inquiry. And a new minister of justice who heads up the ODPP in the ACT won’t relish the prospect of having, as one of their first jobs, the prosecution of the previous director.
That said, if any of these powerful institutions of state turn a blind eye to a possible attempt to pervert the course of justice, then they will be responsible for the darkest chapter in this saga, one that will do the most harm to the administration of justice in the nation’s capital territory.
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Global boiling. Ouch!
It’s been quite the week for overblown climate hyperbole and preposterous exaggerations, so we thought we may as well join in the fun: ‘New Ice Age to arrive by summer 2023. Australia prepares for a White Christmas.’ In reality, our own far-fetched prediction is probably more credible than the nonsensical ‘the era of global boiling has begun’ trotted out by the clownish and increasingly toad-like Secretary General of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres. Every politician rightly dreads the moment the public stops fearing them or taking them seriously and instead starts laughing at them, and Senhor Guterres certainly toppled over that particular tipping point this week. Sadly, however, his is not a democratically elected position, so it is unlikely he will disappear from our TV screens any time soon. Thus, we must take his prediction seriously, not so much for what damage our ‘boiling’ planet may do to us all, but rather, the incredible damage such asinine rhetoric is doing and will carry on doing to our economic outlook and future prosperity.
You didn’t have to be a climate-denier or even a climate-sceptic to find the Guterres rant risible. But the problem is that such inflammatory climate language is then regurgitated through all channels of the media and fed directly into our schoolchildren’s daily diet of woke disinformation. Most well-meaning but less-politically engaged people and hard-pressed parents tend to presume that the truth about subjects like climate change ‘lies somewhere in the middle’ and are quite happy for others invested in the culture wars to battle it out. However, by constantly ramping up the extremist language, the left wilfully and deceptively shifted the ‘sensible centre’ further and further away from reality. Even one of the head honchos at the IPCC was forced to admit that Guterres’ ‘global boiling’ was wide of the mark. But of course such cautionary notes gain nowhere near the publicity of hysterical fear-mongering.
Full marks as always to Speccie contributor and South Australian Senator Alex Antic for his suggested future alarmist expressions for the UN to excitedly promote when ‘global boiling’ loses its scare factor, which it shall, including ‘Global Climate Inferno’, ‘Mega Universe Heat Death’ and ‘Super Global Spine Chillingly Hot’.
Equally absurd, and linked, was the claim by both Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese that their government had ‘saved’ the Great Barrier Reef. Hilaire Belloc would have adored the twisted logic that has the United Nations not declaring the Great Barrier Reef to be in mortal danger as they had been feverishly plotting to thanks entirely to the one-and-a-bit-year-old Labor government having increased the cost of your electricity bills. Or something like that. Here’s a wildly radical and heretical thought: perhaps it was never in danger to begin with. Because maybe the oceans aren’t actually boiling.
In this week’s magazine, Michael Baume exposes just one tiny but incredibly disturbing aspect of where all this madness is leading us to. It was Alan Jones who used to speak of the ‘national suicide note’ that is net zero. But our foolish Energy Minister seems hell-bent on living up to that promise, as he jeopardises our critical relationship with Japan courtesy of his climate dogma and renewables fantasies. As Michael writes, ‘[Our new emissions laws] are of such major concern that not only have Japanese senior ministers already requested flexible measures under the safeguard mechanism for LNG projects supplying Japan, but PM Kishida has made a similar approach to PM Albanese.’
At the same time, Rebecca Weisser reveals that even the net-zero luvvies have added up the carbon numbers and come to the conclusion that offshore wind farms in NSW are a flat no-no.
No hyperbole there.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/08/global-boiling-ouch/
*****************************************************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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