Australian Politics
Another Australian black shielded from justice
A senior academic staffer has accused James Cook University of “basically doing nothing” after she complained that the head of the Indigenous Education and Research Centre had allegedly threatened to “spear” her if she didn’t increase enrolment.
The woman alleges Martin Nakata, the Townsville-based deputy vice-chancellor of Indigenous Education and Strategy, made the threat in front of staff and a student three times in two days, first on November 16 at a whole-department training day.
In a complaint to James Cook University’s human resources department and WorkCover Queensland, the woman said Professor Nakata had told her she needed to increase Indigenous enrolment from 670 to 1000, a target she felt was unrealistic.
“He’s a Torres Strait Islander man and because of that and because we’re the Indigenous centre, we have things on our walls, and one of the things is the spear,” she told The Australian.
“He points to the spear and says if you don’t reach that target, I’m going to take that spear off the wall and I’m going to spear (woman’s name).
“On the Friday he repeated the same comment, and later that day he repeated the same thing in front of a student.
“It flabbergasted me. Everybody felt very uncomfortable … they sat there in silence, I think in shock. “I felt totally humiliated, and I was also quite dumbfounded.”
The Australian asked Professor Nakata for a response.
He did not comment but a JCU spokesman said: “(The) university is aware of the alleged incident. All such allegations are taken seriously and handled in accordance with the university’s policies and procedures.”
The woman said she had worked with Professor Nakata for more than five years and they had previously had a good working relationship.
She said she tried to resolve the matter unofficially, by emailing Professor Nakata and telling him she “respectfully requested him” to stop making the comments.
“He said he was sorry and it was just a joke,” she said.
The woman said she had accepted his apology and was keen to work together as normal, but her relationship with him had deteriorated to the point where he did not speak to her. “On a normal day I’d have to speak to him half a dozen times, so that means I can’t do my job,” she said.
The woman said she felt bullied, and made a complaint to JCU’s human relations department on December 3, after she had been contacted about the alleged incident by The Cairns Post.
She then made a claim to WorkCover. “I went to HR and they’ve basically done nothing,” she said.
“He’s a very respected Indigenous academic and he’s very high-profile and I think they don’t know what to do.
“If it was somebody at a lower level, they would have been suspended or sacked. They are trying to work out how to make me want to go away.”
The JCU spokesman said: “JCU has endeavoured to meet with the complainant but scheduled meetings have had to be postponed due to respective leave commitments.”
The woman has been on stress leave and annual leave.
Professor Nakata is the first Torres Strait Islander to graduate with a PhD in Australia and his decades-long research career has focused on Australian Indigenous education.
He was awarded the Member of the Order of Australia in 2020.
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Daniel was forced to have a Covid jab to keep his job. Then he fell gravely ill. Now he has secured a HUGE legal victory
A public servant who was forced to get a Covid vaccination to keep his job, but then fell gravely ill, has won a major legal battle and will be paid compensation.
Daniel Shepherd, 44, received two Covid-19 vaccinations when he was a youth worker at Baptist Care South Australia in 2021 and suffered adverse reactions to the jab.
The father of one started a new job with the Department for Child Protection (DCP) on October 19 that year, but was told on January 28, 2022, that he had to get a booster shot to keep his job as a child and youth worker.
Mr Sheperd was given a Pfizer mRNA jab on February 24, 2022, but a day later he had serious chest pains.
The pain kept getting worse until March 11, when he thought he was having a heart attack and was rushed to Adelaide's Ashford Hospital. There he was diagnosed with post-vaccine pericarditis - an inflammation of the membrane around the heart.
The illness meant Mr Shepherd was only able to work for a few months in a part-time administrative capacity.
DCP acknowledged the pericarditis was caused by the Pfizer mRNA booster shot, but it denied workers compensation liability, saying it was a legal government directive and so was excluded under the SA Emergency Management Act.
But Judge Mark Calligeros, the SA Employment Tribunal's deputy president, rejected the DCP's arguments.
'It is not surprising that some people who receive a dose of Covid-19 vaccine will sustain injury as a result,' he wrote in his judgment.
'It would be astonishing if parliament intended that an employee of the state, injured adhering to an EM (Emergency Management) Act direction, was to be precluded from receiving workers compensation.
'I am not satisfied that parliament intended to deny compensation to employees of the state injured by heeding a vaccination mandate designed to protect the health and welfare of citizens.'
Judge Calligeros added that Mr Shepherd was required to be vaccinated to continue working in healthcare.
This was 'because (the state) sought to protect and reduce the risk of infection to the public and general and those members of the public receiving healthcare services in particular.
'It would be ironic and unjust if Mr Shepherd was denied financial and medical support by complying with the state's desire to preserve public health.'
In a landmark ruling, the judge ordered that Mr Shepherd should get weekly income support payments and the payment of medical expenses.
The ruling came despite SA Health still enforcing a mandatory Covid vaccination policy for some employees, even though similar policies have been dropped in other states.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13023211/Covid-jab-legal-victory-Daniel-Shepherd.html
**********************************************‘We want our school back’: Newington parents, old boys gather to protest co-ed move
Students returning to Newington College on Wednesday were greeted with a parent protest outside the school’s gates, as backlash intensified against a decision to admit girls to the 160-year-old institution.
A group of parents and alumni gathered at a Stanmore park before walking to the private school’s main campus gates carrying placards that called for the college to reverse plans to transform into a fully co-educational school by 2033.
Newington announced late last year that it would admit girls in the junior school from 2026, and become a fully co-educational campus by 2033. The decision, made almost two years after the idea was first floated to the school community, has drawn intense criticism from some parents and old boys.
An online petition objecting to the co-ed move has garnered 2300 signatures, while a separate group of parents is threatening legal action against the college over the plan to enrol girls.
In November, a letter from law firm Brown Wright Stein was sent to the council chairman Tony McDonald on behalf of parents and old boys, challenging the validity of the co-ed plan and arguing it was contrary to the inner west school’s trust, which was established in 1873.
The decision also prompted Newington’s Founders’ Society chairman Greg Mitchell to quit his position and withdraw his bequest to the school.
“I believe this decision is ideologically driven by the minority and is now being imposed on the whole of the Newington community with potentially disastrous consequences,” he told the Herald last year.
The Founders’ Society was established in 2010 to raise money for the college and for student scholarships by asking alumni to donate by making a bequest in their wills.
A separate coalition of parents and old boys have also set up a group called Save Newington College to campaign against the co-ed move and lobby the school to overturn the decision.
“Such a seismic shift in this extraordinary school will destroy the great traditions and heritage that make Newington College the greatest school for boys in Australia,” a message on the group’s website says.
Morgan, who graduated from the school in 1990 and is one of the founders of the Save Newington group, said 640 alumni and current and former parents had registered to be a part of the group.
“The Save Newington group is not directly involved in any legal action, however many of our groups’ supporters are, and we are all interested in its success,” said Morgan. “The group has helped to pass on information from the legal action group to our supporters, including fundraising efforts.”
A former parent at the school, Kerry Maxwell, who is part of the MOONS (Mothers of Old Newingtonians), said she attended the protest to help “speak up on behalf of a lot of families I know that are furious about this decision, but they’re too scared to talk”.
“Parents signed up for a boys’ school. They heard nothing about possible co-ed plans for months and then there is a sudden announcement. Now if parents try and get their boys into other schools they can’t.”
Another old boy, Tony Retsos, who graduated in 1977, said he had “nothing against co-ed” but the school “had been a private elite boys’ school for 160 years and the process to consult about a decision of this kind wasn’t sufficient.”
“All we want is for the decision to be reversed and a proper consultation with all stakeholders. Without more information the decision is unfathomable,” he said.
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‘Divide and conquer’ key to Anthony Albanese’s class warfare
You don’t have to be a dewy-eyed romanticist about the past to believe that in the past year Australia has become angrier and more divided than we can ever recall.
The evidence is everywhere. White versus black, rich versus poor, women versus men, women versus trans, and every other schism one can imagine yawns wider than it ever did. For some, this is not only deliberate but necessary. And, indeed, a damn good thing. You can’t have a revolution without conflict.
However, because Marxist conflict theory and old notions about class warfare are discredited everywhere in Australia (except in our law schools and other radical corners of our universities), it is not politically astute to advertise that you are deliberately stoking conflict. As an instrument of statecraft, inciting and capitalising on division is a decidedly old-fashioned and brutish concept. That is why the Albanese government is polishing its messages to hide its intent. Pull the curtain aside, and its modern political platform is deeply rooted in class, race and gender wars.
While superficially playing a neutral and reassuring game, this government believes Australia is broken and needs radical change, which can only be achieved after, and as a result of, significant conflict. Like its tax policies, none of this was advertised at the 2022 election.
Because most Australians think Australia is basically a pretty good place, which only needs incremental rather than revolutionary change, a political party that wants to make major change must hide that from the voting public.
The voice was a classic example. The government tried to tell mainstream Australia this was a minor change, a simple matter of good manners. It did so even though those drafting the words were saying the opposite. Though the government did fail miserably in its constitutional quest, the ugly and bitter campaign did achieve one of its goals; by stirring up anger and division, it energised activists to intensify their fight.
The most rancorous Australia Day in history is testament to that. The aim of activists is to make Australia Day so contentious it will have to be abandoned. Predictably, those who want to mark Australia Day are not taking this lying down. Peter Dutton’s call for a boycott of Woolworths for its apparent abandonment of Australia Day is in fact reactive – he is simply channelling the anger many feel about the activists.
Moreover, it’s likely that dialling up the rhetoric against Australia Day – with local councils refusing to hold citizenship ceremonies and Tennis Australia refusing to mark Australia Day – will simply generate much more heat and light without effecting any substantive change.
Success by the activists will simply perpetuate the division. If a new Australia Day is chosen, the anger of those unhappy with the change will be directed to changing the new date. Division will become permanent.
A particularly repulsive new form of division has emerged from the grisly merger between the Indigenous sovereignty movement and the pro-Palestine movement. Anthony Albanese cannot wash his hands of what he has wrought. By stoking the “always was, always will be” claims about ownership of Australian land he made it inevitable this particular narrative of colonial dispossession would merge with claims that Israel too is a colonial power. The “always was, always will be” crowd have joined in conflict with the “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” brigade.
As if we weren’t divided enough about Gaza with every conceivable group from the LGBTQ Mardi Gras to the ABC violently split, now we are told to view Gaza through the prism of colonialism and dispossession. When virtually every event in human history is explained by some variant of oppressor/oppressed analysis, and everyone is allocated to one or other of those buckets, it is any wonder we find more and more reasons to divide ourselves up into warring groups?
Mind you, this division into oppressor and oppressed can bring benefits to some members of the allegedly oppressed. Indeed, some members of these groups become the new privileged, immune from criticism or punishment no matter how badly they behave.
For example, until this newspaper exposed the death threats made by Indigenous cultural adviser Ian Brown against white project manager Rochelle Hicks, it appeared Brown’s Indigeneity gave him immunity from the normal legal consequences of his actions.
At the ABC, impartiality rules don’t seem to cover the work of Indigenous affairs editor Bridget Brennan.
In her Australia Day news report, she announced that the country “always was and always will be Aboriginal land”. After the Prime Minister released proposed words for the voice in July 2022, Brennan appeared on ABC’s Insiders panel telling Australians the voice must include reparations. These are the demands of an activist stoking division, not an impartial journalist.
Under this government, class warfare – the forerunner of the kinds of conflict theories that drive colonialism, race and gender wars – remains a critical part of its political playbook.
Anthony – “my word is my bond” – Albanese has reneged on the stage three tax cuts in favour of “divide and conquer” class war politics. The PM is effectively saying, without a hint of shame, that it is fine for him to break the promise that was crucial to winning the 2022 election because it enables him to take from the rich to give to the poor.
You can ignore the PM’s cries of “we had no alternative”. Reneging on stage three was a deliberate choice of one preferred policy among a large number of options. If the PM wanted to provide more cost-of-living relief while still keeping the tax cuts, there would have been many ways to fund it. Spending cuts or deferrals of environmental or industrial policy would be but a few of the obvious ways for him to have kept his promise on stage three while still funding cost-of-living relief.
No, the real reason the PM broke his promise is that he is still “fighting Tories”. Class warfare, it would seem, justifies any dishonesty in the PM’s world.
Wedded to identity politics, the Albanese government is going to war on many fronts, knowingly fermenting division while apparently promising to fix society. Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus, for example, has released discussion papers aimed at dramatically skewing the law on sexual assault.
Everything is on the table, it would seem, from specialist courts with suitable attitudes, to re-education camps for lawyers involved in this work, to the abandonment of trial by jury in favour of some method of adjudication that will ensure more convictions.
Everything is being considered, it would seem, except for any consideration of the rights of accused persons. They are apparently expendable. Mere roadkill in the path of the new conviction-focused juggernaut.
A successful, peaceful country needs values that unite us. Australians have shown time and again they have no time for class warfare, or warfare based on race, gender or any other form of identity politics. This is why the ALP has spent so little time in office federally since World War II. However, it explains why this Labor government wants to do as much as it can as quickly as it can while it still has a House of Representatives majority and a favourable Senate. It wants revolution not evolution, and is prepared to stoke division to get there. What it needs to remember though is that revolutions have a nasty habit of eating their own.
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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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