Australian Politics
Tuesday, February 20, 2024
Young menaces, helpless police and no solution
What is not said below is the the offenders are Aboriginal. Taking any measures against them would lead to cries of "racism"
It’s 8pm and the dust is settling across the ranges of Alice Springs when inside the town’s industrial area a group of kids arrive at the Pickles Auctions car yard.
They’re about to steal a car and lead police on a dangerous chase – an all-too-familiar scene here, where children as young as 10 are caught behind the wheel and immediately returned to a “responsible adult” – only to continue to reoffend.
Dozens of cars in the yard are protected by a 2m-high fence topped with razor wire, but the kids have their eyes on one in particular. It’s a Toyota Rav 4 they’ve stolen once before.
The first time ended badly – the car smashed up and ultimately hauled into the car yard, where it was written off by the insurance company.
But the car is drivable – and the kids still have the keys.
Jumping the razor wire fence, they climb into the SUV and drive it headlong into the heavy metal gate. It takes seven attempts to get through.
Soon the car is heading towards the centre of town.
It’s a pattern the residents of Alice Springs are well and truly used to. On one night last December, eight vehicles were being driven around town by out of control children and teenagers.
It’s just over 12 months since this city became the focus of national attention over out-of-control crime, but on the ground, locals say it’s never been worse.
In the early hours of Wednesday last week, there are four boys in the car: one aged 13, two aged 11, and the youngest just 10.
The boys are yelling and screaming from the vehicle, as they speed through town.
The driver can barely see over the steering wheel, the car mounting roundabouts, careening through red lights and on the wrong side of the road as the passengers hang out the windows.
Helpless police sit in their cars and watch as the kids perform donuts on the council lawns.
“You’re going to kill someone, stop,” one officer yells from his car as he flashes his torch at them.
Eventually police try to contain the vehicle with spike strips, but report that nearby youths on foot are tipping off the occupants about the spiking locations.
The vehicle is so badly damaged it struggles to reach its maximum speed, but on other occasions, cars have been clocked at more than 100km/h in some parts of town.
Just before 11pm, the boys abandon the vehicle outside K-Mart.
“With precision and skill, police located and apprehended four youths, aged between 10 and 13,” police say in a statement the following day.
The two 11-year-olds and the 10-year-old are conveyed to their homes and “handed over to a responsible adult”.
The 13-year-old, who was charged with theft, driving a motor vehicle without consent and damage to property, appears before a court the following afternoon. It’s his first time before the court. He sits there, apparently bored, running his hands through his hair. He does his best to avoid eye contact with anyone in the room as a police officer stands beside him.
In applying for bail, the court hears there have been three domestic disturbances at his proposed bail address within the last month.
His family and another family are also having a dispute.
The following day, he withdraws his bail application. He’d rather stay in jail than live at an alternative bail address in a remote community far removed from Alice Springs.
On average, there were 39 vehicles stolen every month in Alice Springs last year. Many of these vehicles ended up abandoned in the desert after they had been taken for a joyride or used in a ram-raid – often at a liquor store.
Northern Territory Country Liberal Party senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price says entire communities are being left to suffer and Aboriginal children are “fast-tracked into a life of crime and incarceration”.
“This is what happens when children are left neglected, in dysfunction, without the care and supervision they deserve,” Senator Price says.
“This is the result of division, of a new apartheid driven by Labor and their progressive Green allies so they force their agenda onto guilt-ridden Australians.
“If you really want to close the gap, we need less grandstanding in Canberra, and more action on the ground.
“To get real solutions, we need to hold people responsible and enforce consequences.”
A month ago a child care centre was placed into lockdown due to “unsettled protests and riots” in the CBD, with some people armed with weapons.
One late-night CBD proprietor – who asked for his name to be withheld for fear of reprisal – says the situation on the street is “getting worse day by day”.
“They want to kill people, there are public beatings and fights almost every night,” the business owner says.
“They need to do something, the government, otherwise everyone will be leaving here.
“It’s worse than last year, it’s getting worse day by day, they have to do something for the kids.
“This year I lost a lot of friends (who moved away), even my family is worried, they say ‘what am I doing here?’,” the person says.
In April last year, this journalist befriended a group of youths in the early hours of the morning on the streets of Alice Springs.
Soon after, the topic of conversation turned to stolen cars.
They surrounded my car, and joked about stealing it and taking it for a joyride. They took a great interest in my cameras, too, while keeping a watchful eye out for police.
“I don’t give a f..k, I can do anything before I become a man,” one very young boy said.
“Mister, mister, look here, can you see it?” another asked, as he showed me footage from inside a stolen car. “That’s me at the front, brother.”
“F..k the police, FTP, motherf..ker,” another said as they started playing American rap music.
They continued to gloat about breaking into homes and businesses, using tools such as screwdrivers and angle grinders, and claiming they’ve been to “juvie” for months at a time,
They started begging for a lift, pleading that it was cold. “We’ll go try steal a car,” one said.
When we parted company it was 4am – and their search for trouble seemed as if it still had a long way to go.
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Eating green ideology: official diet advice to warn of climate impact
The federal government’s official advice on diets will now incorporate the impact of certain foods on climate change, sparking outrage from farmers who fear it is driven by an “ideological agenda” against red meat.
It could lead to consumers being told to reduce steak and lamb chop intakes in favour of alternatives like chicken, which some scientists say has a lower carbon footprint.
Red meat producers are concerned that the move by the National Health and Medical Research Council to incorporate environmental sustainability into Australian Dietary Guidelines will be based on “misinformation” and present an incomplete picture about the industry’s effect on the environment. They have called for it to be scrapped.
The statutory authority’s dietary guidelines expert committee says the change is based on “stakeholder feedback” and has already started setting up a sustainability working group to help its review of the 2013 guidelines, due by the end of 2026.
Red Meat Advisory Council chair John McKillop accused the NHMRC, which is responsible for funding medical research and providing health and nutrition recommendations to the government, of straying beyond its remit. “These developments are an overreach by the dietary guidelines expert committee that go well beyond the policy intent of the Australian Dietary Guidelines to provide recommendations on healthy foods and dietary patterns,” he said.
“The red meat industry has a strong story about sustainability, so our concerns are not because we believe it’s a weakness but because it’s not the role of the dietary guidelines nor is it the expertise of the dietary guidelines expert committee. The nation’s dietary guidelines should be focused on promoting public health, preventing chronic diseases and ensuring that all Australian have access to accurate and reliable information about their basic nutritional requirements.”
Sustainability was included in an appendix of the previous guidelines, but the expert committee says “sustainability messaging should be incorporated within the revised dietary guidelines, and not included as a separate section within the appendices”.
Mr McKillop said expanding the scope of the dietary guidelines into other non-nutritional topics would undermine their purpose and the public’s confidence in them. “This is going to make clear and simple nutritional messaging even more difficult,” he said.
RMAC will ask the NHMRC committee to reconsider the change to the guidelines. “If they refuse, we’ll be asking the federal government to intervene as it’s starting to look like the process is running off the rails,” he said.
“The dietary guidelines review process must not be allowed to be used as a vehicle to drive ideological agendas at the expense of the latest nutritional science.”
The dietary guidelines expert committee has defined sustainable diets as being “accessible, affordable and equitable diets with low environmental impacts”.
In a statement, the NHMRC said including sustainability followed a “stakeholder survey” in which one in three people surveyed listed it as a priority.
“While the 2013 guidelines included messages about the environmental impact of food choices, the placement of the messages in an appendix has made them easy to overlook,” a spokesman said.
“Stakeholder feedback suggests there is low awareness of their existence. The revision of the guidelines provides an opportunity to improve integration of messages about food sustainability into the guidelines.”
The organisation rejected the suggestion that incorporating sustainability messaging would undermine public confidence.
“Developing or updating NHMRC guidelines involves a thorough review of the evidence, methodological advice on the quality of these reviews, drafting of the guidelines, public consultation and independent expert review of the final guidelines,” the spokesman said.
“The dietary guidelines expert committee advised that recommendations for dietary patterns and food groups should firstly consider health impacts in the Australian context, followed by consideration of sustainability and other contextual factors,” the spokesman said. “This is consistent with how sustainability has been incorporated into dietary guidelines in other countries.”
Central Queensland cattle farmer Mark Davie said industry concerns were heightened by perceived misinformation about the health impacts and sustainability of red meat production permeating media, public policy and nutritional advice.
Mr Davie, who chairs the Australian Beef Sustainability Framework, questioned how the NHMRC could measure one food source against another while still accounting for benefits to things like soil or biodiversity.
Meat producers are concerned that an updated version could follow rhetoric from organisations like the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, which advocates for reduced livestock grazing.
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Unaffordable green dream blacked out by reality
When Craig Emerson has finished working out how much Woolies is gouging us for a litre of milk, perhaps he might turn his attention to the exorbitant price of electricity.
The Prime Minister’s price-gouging tsar might ask why energy companies were cashing in on the misery of Victorians last Tuesday by charging up to $2225.50 for a MWh of electricity.
Origin Energy chief executive Frank Calabria joined a conference of investors last week to announce underlying profits of $747m for the first half of the year, up from $44m a year earlier. Origin had grabbed a share of Tuesday afternoon’s bonanza by cranking up its gas-peaking plant at Mortlake.
Profiteering, raising prices at times of scarcity or emergency, would be frowned upon in other circumstances. Not in the National Electricity Market, however, where the fluctuating five-minute spot price balances supply and demand 24 hours a day.
Without it, we could expect many more unserved energy events, as the Australian Energy Market Operator initially described the collapse of half of Victoria’s electricity grid, leaving 540,000 customers powerless, many of them for days.
Like soldiers, doctors and others who run a daily risk of messing up people’s lives, the energy business has its dehumanising euphemisms to describe the things that cause collateral damage or adverse events.
On Tuesday, 90,000 customers were caught in friendly fire when the energy operator deliberately cut their power. The load shedding was vital to cover the drop in supply caused when six giant transmission towers on the state’s main 500kV transmission line buckled in high winds, knocking Victoria’s largest generating plant offline.
Why a break in the line near Geelong would cause the safety switches to trip at Loy Yang, 230km away, is one of life’s mysteries. It’s like asking how a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil can start a tornado in Texas.
Weather and energy grids are chaotic systems where fixed laws govern complex interactions and feedback loops but lead to seemingly random outcomes. As the late Australian scientist Robert May once said: “Simple models can help us understand complex systems, but they are not a substitute for understanding.”
That’s why a prediction that the average household energy bill will fall by $275 over three years by installing more renewable energy should have been treated with a bucket of salt, even if, as Anthony Albanese claims, it was based on the most ambitious modelling on anything by any opposition party in the 120-year history of the commonwealth.
It is why you can’t draw up a grand plan for a carbon-free electricity grid on a whiteboard in Sydney and expect it to work.
The task of grid engineers is not to design the perfect system but to manage risk. Their task does not stop when they’ve linked enough generators to supply the expected demand. They should follow the example of John Bradfield, who over-engineered the bejesus out of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, which today supports a load he might not have imagined.
The collapse of the steel towers on Victoria’s main transmission line is irrefutable evidence our current transmission network needs upgrading. We should be patient before rushing to build another 10,000km of transmission lines before we’ve found the money to give the 45,000km of lines in operation the Bradfield treatment.
We should review the costings and technical specifications of the ones we plan to build. If we want them to last at least 50 years, underground cables may be cheaper in the long run.
The over-engineering imperative also applies to generation. The relatively stable East Coast Grid that operated reliably before renewables came along had abundant excess capacity from coal generation.
There was no need to synchronise DC power from wind and solar plants so fewer things could go wrong. Transmission line runs were shorter and easier to manage. Inter-connectors played an ancillary role, keeping prices low by increasing competition and balancing supply between states. They were never designed to run at full bore, as the interconnectors do now for growing periods. The 2016 blackout in South Australia occurred after storms damaged transmission lines, and the Heywood interconnector with Victoria became overloaded.
Energy Minister Chris Bowen thinks the answer is to add more intermittent generation and hope we’ll have enough batteries installed in time to save our bacon when the sun fades, and the wind drops. Yet battery boosters should take a reality check. The NEM supplied 3.2TWh of electricity to customers in the last seven days. A mere 7.7GWh, or 0.24 per cent, was supplied from batteries. A little over two-thirds (64.4 per cent) came from coal.
This raises the question: How will the grid be managed if Australia’s largest generator, Origin’s coal-fired plant at Eraring, NSW, closes next August as the company says it will?
“Running baseload these days is just getting more and more difficult,” Calabria said last week, noting low prices particularly in the middle of the day, when wind and solar are eating coal’s lunch.
No problem, say the boosters. “Analysts have said that there is no need for Eraring to stay open, given the number of new renewable and battery storage projects currently under construction,” wrote the editor of Renew Economy last week.
Really? What analysts? When? Would they like to show us their modelling? Any government that bases its decisions on that kind of advice should be prepared for a very wild ride. Which is why NSW Labor Premier Chris Minns will do almost anything to keep Eraring open.
The NSW government has gone to drastic lengths to ensure the state’s remaining coal-fired power stations remain supplied with coal. Coalminers are obliged by law to reserve 10 per cent of their output for domestic generators and are forbidden from charging more than $125 per tonne.
On the one hand, the government gears policy to shut the coal generators out by privileging renewables in the NEM, pushing spot prices negative in the middle of the day. It subsidises unreliable, intermittent generators by allowing them to sell renewable energy certificates, so they can operate profitably even if spot prices fall below zero.
On the other hand, governments are using a mixture of pleading and coercion to keep coal-power stations open because even the starry-eyed people at AEMO know the chance of blackouts will increase in NSW if Eraring closes.
One hates to be the bearer of bad news to the Tesla drivers of Mosman, but around 80 per cent of your electricity on Saturday night was produced from black coal, more than a third of it from Eraring.
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SEQ youth crime: Chilling warning as ex-Army security guard patrols blue-chip Brisbane suburbs
Desperate residents in the blue-chip Brisbane suburb of Chelmer and nearby Graceville and Sherwood are paying thousands of dollars a week for a private security guard and highly trained dogs to deter youth criminals, accusing the government of doing “jack shit”.
Since taking neighbourhood safety into their own hands from mid-November 2023, they say the incidence of crime has dropped by up to 80 per cent.
A young father – who said he set-up the community effort after a Sherwood mother of three had her house broken into allegedly by juveniles wielding machetes – said the government and the courts’ response to youth crime was an “absolute joke”.
“The government is doing jack shit and people are fed up and scared,” he said.
“Once we started this and saw how much was going on, it was like, ‘holy shit, this is out of control’.
It comes as Premier Steven Miles said he wasn’t surprised by alarming findings in a poll commissioned by The Courier-Mail showing 45 per cent of Queenslanders don’t feel safe in their home or community.
“I know what that poll was telling us because I talk to Queenslanders and they have been saying the same thing to me,” Mr Miles said.
But the Sherwood father said it was clear the Premier wasn’t listening.
“The problem is getting worse but it is falling on deaf ears,” he said.
“It’s not the police’s fault, but we are refusing to stick our heads in the sand – only fools believe they won’t eventually become a target of youth crime.
“Every single night and early morning there is something happening, whether it’s groups of kids in dark clothing on foot or cars with lights dimmed and driving slowly scoping places out.”
The man, who has joined some patrols, receives daily reports from Walker Security, run by ex-army reservist Dan Walker, then passes updates to among 30 families each paying up to $100 per week for the service.
Mr Walker travels in a vehicle painted camo-style and with high-vis reflective white signage and spotlights – accompanied by one of three trained protection dogs, Dutch shepherd Xee or Belgian Malinois Mercy and Captain.
His texts include times and sightings such as this, on February 19: 0200: 5 x males in their teens, headed into park after seeing me; and this, on February 18: 2310: sedan turned around and left after seeing me on Laurel Ave.
Mr Walker said the crime statistics didn’t lie. “Houses were getting broken into left, right and centre but this is now becoming almost non-existent when I’m on duty,” he said.
“My high-vis vehicle lights up the whole countryside and as soon as the teens see it they bugger off – we don’t want to go hands on, we aim to be preventive, but I am more than willing to deal with a situation if it presents itself.
“Hence why I have the dogs, they will bite and hold if they have to.”
In Chelmer, where the median price for a four-bedroom home is $1.95m, figures from the Queensland Police Service online crime map show the number of offences reported in January and February are the lowest since November 2023.
In Graceville and Sherwood, February figures are the lowest compared with any month last year.
The Premier met with his Cabinet in Ipswich on Monday as community calls grow for increased police presence at the Redbank Plains Town Square shopping centre where grandmother Vyleen White was allegedly murdered.
“They have been concerned about community safety, especially concerned in the wake of that awful murder we saw at Redbank Plains just a couple of weeks ago,” Mr Miles said.
“I don’t think those survey results (of The Courier-Mail poll) are surprising.
“You’ll know that we’ve heard that message just by how much we’ve been focused on community safety, how much we’ve been talking about community safety.
“It’s my job to work with the police to rebuild that sense of community safety and that’s absolutely what we’re focused on.”
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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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