Australian Politics
Monday, January 29, 2024
Misuse of police in hospitals
A former police officer and opposition frontbencher has slammed the Queensland Premier for dismissing concerns about cops being stuck at overstretched hospitals as just doing “their job”.
An ex-Queensland superintendent also weighed in, saying police were being forced into a “terrible situation” amid a “raging crime crisis”.
It comes after The Courier-Mail revealed police were being held up for nearly a week in Queensland hospitals guarding prisoners, left for hours in waiting rooms and made to ramp alongside ambulances with injured or mentally ill people in patrol cars.
A spreadsheet collated by Brisbane officers, obtained by The Courier-Mail, lists three years of occasions when police were kept from their normal duties because other frontline services were too busy.
But in response, Premier Steven Miles said police being tied up at hospitals was “part of their job”.
“Well, it is their job, it’s part of their job,” he said.
“Hospital workers and police work together.
“Sometimes that does mean that police have to spend time at the hospital to keep our hospital workers safe while ensuring that those in custody get the healthcare that they need.”
But LNP Police spokesman Dan Purdie said police initially created the register because of this “growing problem”.
“I’ve been a police officer all my adult life and it was never our job to care for a patient in the back of a police car ramped outside a hospital for up to eight hours, but it is now thanks to a chaotic Labor government that has lost control of services across the board,” he said.
“If Labor believes this is just business as usual, then why did they fight so hard to keep it hidden?”
Former Gold Coast superintendent Jim Keogh said the scenarios were “not the job of the police at all”.
“They are being faced with a raging crime crisis in Queensland, and they are being forced to compensate for the failings in other departments,” he said.
“Those police are trained law enforcement officers and that’s what they should be allowed to focus on – and they are being turned into health managers.”
Mr Keogh said it was crucial each department was “funded and resourced properly to be able to do their own jobs”.
But Health Minister Shannon Fentiman backed Mr Miles, and said it was “the job” of police to offer support to patients at hospital when needed, particularly those with psychosis or in serious mental health distress.
“It is really important that police, as a frontline service, are involved with our ambulance service and our hospitals – particularly for those patients who may have come from prison and need health care, or those patients who are experiencing extreme distress and mental ill health.”
Ms Fentiman said she had spoken with Queensland Police Commissioner Katarina Carroll about how beat police were facing a spike in call-outs related to mental health.
“It is definitely part of their job these days,” she said.
Ms Carroll said demand for policing services had “increased exponentially”.
The Health Minister pointed to a rollout of co-responder models over the past few years, which was due to be expanded.
“The big hospitals that have been mentioned in this spreadsheet, in the last performance data, have seen more and more people presenting, but actually they’re treating people with the recommended time frame,” she said.
But pressed on the inside information showing sometimes ambulances didn’t even show up, Ms Fentiman conceded it wasn’t good enough.
“We have invested in an additional 200 paramedics, just this financial year, they’ve all been employed and they’re all on the front line,” she said.
Mr Miles reiterated that officers had the responsibility to keep the community safe, including health care workers at hospitals. “Obviously, they do their very best to minimise the amount of time spent in those kinds of circumstances,” he said. “But ultimately this is our emergency services, our police and our health services working together.”
The Queensland Police Union declined to comment.
Opposition Leader David Crisafulli slammed the government’s response to revelations that police were being stretched thin, ramping patients and guarding prisoners at hospitals for up to a week.
“For a Premier yesterday to address that police sitting at an ambulance ramp for eight hours is business as usual is not normal,” Mr Crisafulli said.
“If we are given the privilege of governing in October, working harder for Queenslanders will be a priority for us and we will see an end to this chaotic behaviour,” he said.
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International student visa numbers fall amid migration squeeze
The number of international student visa holders approved to come to Australia is on track to plummet by more than 90,000 this financial year, as the federal government rejects an increasing number of applicants to curb the high levels of temporary migration.
The number of visas granted to offshore students dropped to 139,132 in the first half of the financial year, figures from the Department of Home Affairs reveal, with nearly 20 per cent of all applicants rejected. If the approval rate continues 91,715 fewer overseas students will arrive in 2023-24 compared with the past year.
International Education Association of Australia CEO Phil Honeywood said the figures were part of the government crackdown on giving visas to applicants who were more interested in work rights than study, which the government refers to as “non-genuine students”.
“The focus has been on winding back a large number of diploma-level vocational students doing courses such as diploma of leadership, and instead the primary focus is on students who can add skills to the Australian economy,” he said.
The total number of student visas approved – including for non-residents already in Australia – was 195,934, which is also on track to fall below the record 577,295 visas granted in 2022-23.
The change in the numbers is being driven by the number of rejected applicants, with 81 per cent of student visa requests being granted in the past six months.
This is down from 86 per cent of applicants being approved in 2022-23, 91.5 per cent in 2021-22 and 89.9 per cent in the pre-Covid year of 2018-19.
A Department of Home Affairs spokeswoman said visa approvals needed to be “balanced against upholding the integrity of the student visa program”.
“The department has seen increasing levels of integrity concerns across the student visa program,” she said.
“The department received higher levels of fraudulent documents, fraud related to English language testing, non-genuine claims and non-genuine subsequent marriages being presented in student visa applications.
“The department will refuse a visa application to non-genuine applicants who do not meet regulatory requirements and where fraud is present.”
Education Minister Jason Clare said Labor was committed to improving the standing of the nation’s higher education sector and combating exploitation.
“The Albanese government’s migration strategy and the other integrity measures we’ve put in place send a clear message that we will act to prevent the exploitation of students and protect Australia’s reputation as a high-quality international education provider,” he said.
A global push is under way to limit student migration, with Canada seeking to curb its numbers by announcing a two-year cap on foreign students that will cut numbers by 35 per cent, and Britain barring foreign students from bringing dependants.
Migration expert and former immigration department official Abul Rizvi said the decline in student visa approvals reflected a bid from the government to lower net migration and ease the pressure on infrastructure and the housing market.
“The reason I think the government is targeting students right now is to get net migration down to a more sustainable level,” he said. “And in our history, whenever net migration has hit or approached around 300,000, problems have occurred in terms of congestion, inadequate infrastructure and housing, but also many government services start to strain at that level of net migration.
“And of course last year, we hit over 500,000, which is the highest in our history and not surprisingly, all of those things are under strain as a result.”
Mr Rizvi said the Australian, Canadian and British governments’ different approaches to bringing down student numbers were all poorly designed, arguing that the Albanese government’s strategy of upping refusals wasted resources. “Australia’s approach has been to crank refusal rates,” he said. “I personally think all three countries have got it wrong; they’re just doing it badly.
“Not letting dependants come is poor practice, student visa capping in an arbitrary way and it’s also chaotic … and Australia’s approach is subjective refusal rates.
“That’s not very good either, it’s just a waste of resources.”
Opposition immigration spokesman Dan Tehan has accused Labor of pursuing a “Big Australia policy” and allowing a record intake of international students to help “drive overseas migration to a record 518,000 people as Australians endured housing shortages, rent hikes, and a cost-of-living crisis exacerbated by population growth”.
“Labor says they’re not running a Big Australia policy but they also said they would deliver the stage 3 tax cuts,” he said.
The rate of visas being granted to international students in the university education sector alone dropped to 82.5 per cent since July, from 87.5 per cent in 2022-23 and 96 per cent in 2021-22.
In the past six months 98,198 student visas have been granted for study in the higher education sector showing a trend downwards from 2022-23 when 261,317 visas were granted through the course of the year, the highest in more than a decade.
While the rate of overseas Chinese university students being granted visas offshore remained steady at about 97 per cent, grant rates for offshore higher education students from India, Australia’s second-biggest market, dropped from 74.2 per cent in 2022-23 to 60.8 per cent this financial year. Grant rates for the third-biggest market, Nepal, went from 65.2 per cent to 48.8 per cent in the same period.
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Bookshop owner sorry for ‘just white kids, no wheelchair, rainbow or Indigenous’ comments
A Melbourne bookstore owner who complained that there were not enough books with “just white kids on the cover” has apologised.
Susanne Horman, owner of the Robinsons Bookshop, railed against the “woke agenda” in publishing last month in a series of posts on X, which have attracted widespread criticism after being shared by the Instagram account coffeebooksandmagic on Sunday.
Ms Horman, who purchased the business in 2007, has since deleted her X account amid the widespread backlash.
“What’s missing from our bookshelves in store? Positive male lead characters of any age, any traditional nuclear white family stories, kids picture books with just white kids on the cover, and no wheelchair, rainbow or Indigenous art, non-Indigenous Australian history #weneedbetterstories,” she wrote in one X post on December 9.
The next day she added, “Books we don’t need — hate against white Australians, socialist agenda, equity over equality, diversity and inclusion (READ AS anti-white exclusion), left-wing govt propaganda. Basically the woke agenda that divides people. Not stocking any of these in 2024.”
She concluded in a follow-up on December 20, “So I am advocating for a substantial shift in the focus of Australian publishers to be in line with public opinion and requests for books and for what is GOOD! We aren’t going to stock books that intend to cause harm and make Australians hate each other.”
Sharing the comments, Emily Rainsford of coffeebooksandmagic wrote that she was “not one for willy nilly ‘cancelling’ but the comments … are so wildly out of pocket that I have no problem suggesting a widespread boycott would be appropriate”.
“She has not only said she wants more white people on covers and in books, but goes further to say that she won’t be stocking anything that … well, what, exactly? Isn’t about white people? And then somehow manages to claim that she’s fighting division,” she wrote.
“This kind of mentality has no place in the modern landscape and I truly hope it will eventually die out with the generation that’s as archaic as her website.”
Ms Horman has since issued a public apology to staff and “anyone who was offended by the comments” which she claimed were taken out of context, The Age reports.
“We clearly state, so there is no misunderstanding, that we fully support and encourage stories from diverse voices, minorities and we are most definitely stocking these important topics and the authors that write them,” Ms Horman told the newspaper.
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Climate of naivety our greatest danger
Hubris is a well-known occupational hazard for self-made billionaires. They risk mistaking obsequiousness for admiration and are vulnerable to the knowledge delusion: the conviction that their business acumen qualifies them as experts about everything.
Andrew Forrest took the opportunity to share his wisdom on international security at a sod-turning ceremony at one of his wind turbine plants this month.
He claimed investing in wind and solar would make us safer in a world where bad actors want to control fossil fuel supplies. “I don’t want machine gun-toting, fruitcake extremists in Yemen, firing missiles in the Red Sea, to dictate if I can drive my kids to school here in Dubbo,” Forrest said. “Why would I back oil and gas when it’s controlled by people like Putin?”
You don’t have to be Henry Kissinger to spot the flaws in Forrest’s analysis. Whatever the assumed benefits of stripping native vegetation to erect wind turbines, they are not an obvious deterrent to Iranian-backed Houthi rebels. Warships tend to be more effective.
The Russian President may be a man of some influence, but he does not have the power to impose limits on Australian gas or coal production. Punitive royalties and activist judges are much better at doing that.
Australia is the world’s second-largest exporter of coal, pushing Russia into a distant third. We are the third-largest exporter of liquid natural gas, shipping three times more than Russia. We do less well when it comes to pipelines, but that’s a small price to pay for the security of living on an island continent.
We could be more than self-sufficient in oil if we put our minds to it. Geoscience Australia estimates our identified recoverable reserves of conventional oil at 1.8 billion barrels. There is significant potential for unconventional oil, which could be recovered with fracking.
It would be nitpicking to point out to Forrest that Yemenis sweeten their cakes with honey, not fruit. It is true that Iranian-backed terrorists from this dirt-poor but troublesome country are a not inconsiderable threat to our trade with Europe, the Middle East and parts of Africa. They pose little, if any, threat to our oil imports, however.
Less than 40 per cent of international oil exports come from the Middle East, almost all of which comes from the Persian Gulf. The tankers the Houthis delight in setting on fire in the Red Sea are bound in the first instance for Europe and the Mediterranean.
One doesn’t have to travel to Dubbo to guess that electric vehicles are seen less frequently outside its school gates than in Cottesloe. For those concerned about domestic energy security, that’s a good thing. While Australia is rich in lithium, cobalt, rare-earth minerals and almost everything that makes a lithium-ion battery, nearly all of it is sent offshore for processing, predominantly to China. The Chinese manufacture two-thirds of electric vehicles, including the BYD Atto 3 and MG ZS EV, the third- and fourth-best-selling electric cars in Australia.
That’s no problem if you live in Twiggy Land, where the People’s Republic of China is a benign player in world affairs and is the country that will turn the battle against global warming. Back in the real world, however, outsourcing our energy future to the Communists in Beijing is about as stupid as government policy gets.
Turning to wind and solar makes us highly dependent on China. Most of the world’s solar panels come from there, and they are aggressively attacking the wind turbine market. Chinese belligerence is the most significant external threat by far to the security of energy supply as we continue to run down our coal-fired power stations and put obstacles in the path of gas.
The most significant risk to energy security, however, is homemade. Labor’s ambitious 2030 energy target and opposition to nuclear power is driving coal out of the energy mix with no alternative source of base-load energy.
Rising interest prices and lengthy approval processes are stifling the growth in insecure, intermittent wind and solar. Reaching the target of 40 new 7MW wind turbines a month has been a little trickier than Chris Bowen seemed to imagine in his first weeks in the job.
Bowen has precious few opportunities to turn sods, so it is hardly surprising he was prepared to travel to the picturesque NSW Central Tablelands this month for a photo opportunity with Forrest at Squadron Energy’s Uungula wind turbine development.
Uungula was the only commercial wind turbine project to reach financial closure last year. Hundreds of renewable projects are “in the pipeline”, as renewable enthusiasts like to say.
Mercifully for the local communities they are helping to destroy, however, precious few of them are likely to get off the ground. Uungula has been in the planning stage since 2011. In 2016, CWP Renewables, the previous incarnation of Squadron, sought approval for 249 turbines on the site that it claimed would be connected to the grid by 2020.
That proposal has since been scaled back to 69 6MW turbines and is unlikely to be connected until the end of 2025 at the very earliest after submitting neighbouring residents to two years of construction hell.
We must be thankful for small mercies. The original proposal threatened 1880 hectares of native vegetation. The revised proposal’s footprint covers just 639 hectares, an area some 1½ times larger than the Perth suburb of Mosman Park.
Sooner or later, the impossibility of reaching the government’s back-of-the-envelope targets will sink in. Governments in a liberal democracy are bound to obey the laws, including the laws of physics. They will take stock of the energy graphs and realise the last thing we need in the middle of the day is more renewable energy, and the last thing we need the rest of the time is energy we cannot rely on.
In a world that grows increasingly unstable and in which we, or more accurately our friends, are already fighting two wars, we will realise we are indeed the lucky country, blessed with abundant resources which we must learn to mine and process ourselves.
We will learn that the greatest threat to our future is not global climate change but homegrown naivety.
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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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