Australian Politics
Wednesday, June 19, 2024
False rape accuser prosecuted
A rarity in Australia. Wise of Garside to start filming the incident when it started going wrong. It took that to overcome the evil "Believe the woman" assumption. Police arrested him purely on the word of the woman, with no further investigation. The police concerned should be prosecuted too. Garside could well sue the State of NSW for lost earnings etc
Harry Garside has reflected on his domestic violence court case ordeal, revealing that boxing helped provide clarity during that turbulent spell.
Garside, 26, was arrested by NSW Police in dramatic scenes at Sydney Airport as he returned home with his father after shooting the reality TV show I'm A Celebrity...Get Me Out Of Here! in South Africa earlier this year.
Police dropped the charges against the 26-year-old in a Sydney court after his legal team produced video evidence they said showed his ex-girlfriend, Ashley Ruscoe, was the alleged aggressor during an incident on March 1.
Garside had steadfastly maintained his innocence throughout the ordeal, but admitted it was a testing time.
Ms Ruscoe, 35, was arrested at her Bellevue Hill home in July and charged with assaulting and intimidating her former partner, Mr Garside.
Months later, Ruscoe - who works as a boxing coach and wellness guru - was subsequently charged with two counts of intentionally distributing intimate images without consent.
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Origin Energy warns costs and public support are inhibitors to nuclear
Needless controversy from Dutton
The Coalition’s nuclear strategy will have to overcome high costs and community acceptance if it is to play a part of the country’s future National Electricity Market, Origin Energy chief executive Frank Calabria has warned.
The comments underscore the significant challenges that the Coalition will need to overcome if it to implement its signature energy policy, which is says will reduce the toll of the transition net zero by 2050 on households and businesses.
Mr Calabria said the industry is agnostic to technologies underpinning the country’s electricity market, but said nuclear has some sizeable hurdles, and it does not offer an immediate solution.
“There’s obviously also the public debate that’s going to go on about the acceptance of nuclear, and we would have to watch that as well. We’re not in control of that,” said Mr Calabria.
“The experience today around the world if you’re building a new one, it’s very expensive, but there are now new modular technology around the technologies that are being certainly development and research and that’s going to be something that continues, and we all look at that with interest.”
Opposition leader Peter Dutton has flagged seven potential sites, including AGL Energy’s Liddell Power Station in NSW and Loy Yang in Victoria and EnergyAustralia’s Mount Piper Power Station in NSW. The Coalition has also earmarked Western Australia’s Collie Power Station and South Australia’s Northern facility and Callide and Tarong in Queensland.
Australia’s energy industry has been careful to comment on the proposal amid concern of alienating a potential future government, but AGL Energy has rebuked the suggestion.
The most directly impacted companies did not immediately respond to the proposal, but AGL’s chief executive Damien Nicks In March said nuclear was not viable.
“There is no viable schedule for the regulation or development of nuclear energy in Australia, and the cost, build time and public opinion are all prohibitive,” Mr Nicks said.
“AGL’s ambition to add 12GW of new renewable and firming generation by 2035 does not include nuclear energy. Policy certainty is important for companies like AGL and ongoing debate on the matter runs the risk of unnecessarily complicating the long-term investment decisions necessary for the energy transition.”
While AGL has vowed to push ahead with its renewable energy strategy, Australia faces a looming shortfall.
The Australian Energy Market Operator estimates that the country’s coal power station fleet is likely to have been retired within 15 years, a fact acknowledged by Mr Calabria.
“We’ve got coal plants that are coming to very long into their lives, so we can talk about years, but they’re not going to be there,” Mr Calabria said.
“For decades, we are going to have a coal transition, but that’s all around timing. And so therefore, what we’re doing is, therefore having to make the investments and navigate that as a country to achieve what’s the best blend of technologies that does that?”
While Australia’s energy industry has been considered, Treasurer Jim Chalmers slammed the Opposition’s energy policy as the “dumbest policy ever put forward by a major political party” and accused the Coalition of “ideological stupidity”.
He said the Albanese government’s policy “couldn’t be more different to the economic madness, which is being peddled by our opponents today”.
“We are expecting to hear a bit more about the Coalition’s nuclear road to nowhere.
“With Australia’s advantages and opportunities, nothing could be more economically irrational, or fiscally irresponsible. Nuclear takes longer. It costs more, and it would waste Australia’s unique combination of geological, geographical, geopolitical and media illogical advantages.
“It might be the dumbest policy ever put forward by a major political party. It is the worst combination of economic and ideological stupidity.”
Energy now shapes as a defining theme of the election due by May 2025, with a diametrically opposed strategies threatening to create more policy uncertainty.
Mr Calabria said there was “certainly more” certainty today than five years ago as to the government’s position on renewable energy but said clarity was needed on the federal Labor’s centrepiece Capacity Investment Scheme.
“There’s certainly more in terms of where they want those renewable zones to be constructed and where they will be built,” he said. “And there’s more certainty in our role now … as you approach timing, and we’ve just committed for a gigawatt of batteries to be installed on our existing sites, and we see those have matured as being part of a solution.
“I think there are still some things that need to happen in terms of timing on transmission, timing on when those builds will occur. And probably the capacity investment scheme is the key one where they’ve announced that scheme, but we’re just waiting. More details need to be developed.”
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Bring back watchdog to halt union’s thuggery
The events involving the CFMEU campaign against the AFL because of a personal vendetta against its head of umpiring, Stephen McBurney, the former head of the Australian Building and Construction Commission, are exactly why our sector needs an industry-specific workplace relations regulator.
The wider community, along with the Prime Minister and other senior ministers, are now witness to exactly the type of tactics and thuggery that have flourished in many parts of the building and construction industry for decades, and that continues to worsen.
It is sickening to see how so many are powerless as a very public display of bullying and threats plays out against an individual who is just doing their job.
This conduct is designed to send a clear message: “It’s our way, or the highway. You play by our rules, not the rule of law, and if you want to betray us, you’re going to pay a price.”
For our members who run building sites, expletive-laden abuse, intimidation and threats of retribution are nothing new.
And the irony of the latest campaign by Victorian CFMEU construction secretary John Setka isn’t lost on them, with one company I spoke with recently saying: “Welcome to our world, Prime Minister.”
This echoes much of the recent feedback and messages I’ve received, and underpins the frustration growing in building and construction businesses.
The industry never understood why the government abolished the ABCC when there was so much clear evidence that it needed to stay.
There have been four royal commissions, hundreds of court judgments, and dozens of other reports and independent inquires that forensically examined the unlawful and illegal conduct of building unions. They all reached the same conclusion – there are problems unique to building and construction, and therefore there is a need for an industry-specific workplace regulator or specific rules for the industry.
The evidence is compelling, with our research showing building unions are responsible for about 90 per cent of all breaches of workplace laws governing freedom of association, right of entry and anti-coercion provisions.
This is almost 20 times more than all other unions combined, and building unions are 48 times more likely to break right-of-entry rules than any other union.
Courts and judges are just as frustrated as our members, with a litany of publicly available judgments criticising the CFMEU as “bringing the union movement into disrepute” and for being “the most recidivist corporate offender in Australian history”.
But despite this, the government abolished the ABCC to appease one of its largest political donors. In doing so, it turned a blind eye to the thuggery, abuse and the need for an effective body with strong powers to uphold the rule of law on building sites. And now it’s coming back, stronger than ever, with building unions so emboldened they are willing to have a fight with our Prime Minister and the AFL.
Perhaps now the government will understand the frustrations felt by employers and small businesses about changes to workplace laws since it came to power.
Small subbies and tradies don’t understand why the government passed changes that increase financial penalties for them while giving unions even more rights at the same time they abolished the only regulator that protected them.
We have heard some argue that the Fair Work Ombudsman will be responsible for protecting construction workplaces from this behaviour, but we are yet to see a single case taken up. As builders now tell me: “There is nowhere for us to go.”
It’s not just tradies who pay the price, it’s the public servants, including female inspectors, who are intimidated from carrying out their job, and it’s taxpayers who have to pay more for projects and time delays in the middle of a housing crisis.
If the government is serious about ensuring workplace laws are strong and effective, it must immediately take steps to deal with the bullying and intimidation the CFMEU deploys.
Welcome to our world, Prime Minister. As our members say: If you don’t stop it now, it will only get worse.
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Pope Francis bans traditional Mass at Melbourne’s St Patrick’s
This is a disgraceful fiat by a "progressive" Pope. The Tridentine mass is one of the few growth areas for the church, as well as being comforting to older Catholics
In a move that has shocked and upset hundreds of Catholics in Melbourne, the Vatican has banned the traditional Latin Mass from the city’s St Patrick’s Cathedral.
The final traditional Mass will be offered on Wednesday, June 19, at 5.30pm. By essentially ordering traditional Catholics to get out of their own cathedral, the ban is stirring up tensions and divisions.
On Wednesday evening Mass, which has been a regular feature of cathedral worship for 13 years, drew a crowd of more than 150, mainly young people, including city workers not aligned with traditional parishes.
Veronica Sidhu, who attended the Mass, said it was solemn, uplifting and sad because worshippers knew it was coming it an end, as well as devotional, with “heavenly’’ choir singing.
“There was a mix of people – city workers and tradies _ including a dad who went to Communion with one toddler on his shoulders and was holding another by the hand,’’ she said. “Has Pope Francis or Archbishop Comensoli ever attended a Mass like it?’’
Ms Sidhu said that after years of contributing energy and resources to the church in Melbourne she felt “appalled’’ to be excluded from her own Cathedral.
The priest who said that Mass, Father Shawn Murphy, 34, who was ordained a year ago, told The Australian: “The Cathedral is the mother church of the Archdiocese and like a mother should be welcoming to all her children.’’
Father Murphy, the Assistant priest of the St John Henry Newman old rite parish in Caulfield North in Melbourne where he leads the young adults’ group, said members of the group were distressed, shocked and disbelieving about the decision.
“What is so tragic is that unlike previous oppressions of the Mass and the faithful, in England under the Tudors, during the French Revolution and in prison camps of the Soviet Union and China, this oppression is coming from within the church,’’ Fr Murphy said.
It was a blow against Christian and Western cultural heritage and causing confusion, especially among the young, he said. St Patrick’s Cathedral had been built for the traditional Mass in the late 19th century, he said.
The ban was imposed by Archbishop Peter Comensoli, who had no choice, following a direction from the Vatican’s Dicastery for Divine Worship.
It is the next step in a campaign by Pope Francis to crush the traditional rite, which evolved through the early centuries of the church and was largely unchanged for about 1500 years until the mid-1960s. It was phased out following the second Vatican Council, replaced by the more prosaic novus ordo (New Mass), usually said in the vernacular.
The traditional Mass was given fresh impetus by Saint John Paul II in the 1980s and by Pope Benedict in 2007, who affirmed the right of all priests to say Mass using the traditional rite (now known as the “extraordinary form”), without the permission of bishops. Benedict’s letter also clarified the fact that the Traditional rite was never abrogated.
While those changes were initially expected to accommodate older Catholics who remember the pre-1969 Latin Mass, the growth in attendance stunned church leaders as young families and 20-something and 30-somethings discovered the Old Mass and stayed. Along with Pentecostalism, it is one of the main growth areas of Christianity around the world, with new societies of priests established in the US and Europe to train priests in the Old Rite.
Francis overturned his predecessors’ initiatives three years ago, in a document ironically entitled Traditionis Custodes (Custodians of Tradition), which crushed centuries of tradition.
Cardinal George Pell, an adherent of the New Mass, who respected the principle of choice and inclusivity for Catholics who preferred the Old Mass, predicted that Traditionis Custodes “would not outlive the current pontificate’’.
In June 1992, an auxiliary bishop in Melbourne, the then Bishop Pell celebrated the first Solemn Pontifical Mass (an extraordinary form High Mass said by a bishop) in St Patrick’s Cathedral in Melbourne, or in any Australian cathedral, since 1969.
Ms Sidhu said the latest decision from the Vatican was divisive, denied Catholics choice, and had an element of coercion – trying to force worshippers to attend the New Mass against their will.
Traditionis Custodes stipulates that the traditional Mass is “not to take place any longer’’ in normal parishes. But bishops around Australia, including Archbishop Comensoli, have used their authority and discretion in implementing it, with a view to the pastoral needs of growing numbers of worshippers, especially the young and converts, who were drawn to the transcendence and gravitas of the Old Rite.
The Wednesday evening Cathedral Mass survived, until Archbishop Comensoli sought further guidance from the Vatican.
In a letter to Archbishop Comensoli, Archbishop Vittorio Viola, Secretary of the Dicastery for Worship, said it was not “appropriate for the antecedent liturgy to be celebrated in the place that should serve as an example for the liturgical life of the entire diocese’’.
Father Glen Tattersall, Parish Priest of Newman parish in Caulfield in Melbourne, said the weekly traditional Latin Mass began at St Patrick’s in 2011, granted in response to a petition by Catholic laity. “I had the privilege of celebrating the majority of those Masses over the following years,’’ Fr Tattersall said. “There was a pause during Covid, but we returned after the lockdowns.
“This Mass was loved by many. It was fitting that the rite of Mass for which the Cathedral was built was returned to it, and had an honoured place in the life of the Archdiocese of Melbourne.
“It was also a particular demonstration of the communion of Catholics attached to this form of the Mass, with the Archbishop of Melbourne. The Mass was celebrated peacefully up to now with the blessing of the former and current Archbishops.
“I can personally attest to the many graces, including those of conversion, that have been granted through this Mass. It has borne only good fruit. But now, we learn that the Holy See has directed that the Mass be discontinued – causing widespread sadness and distress.
“In fact, the historical form of Mass is a constituent part of tradition and cannot be lawfully suppressed or forbidden. But in this Pontificate neither orthodox doctrine nor the law of the Church counts for anything.
“Everything is about power, and those in power in Rome insist that this Mass must stop. Archbishop Comensoli has been treated by the Holy See not as a Successor of the Apostles – which he is as Archbishop – but as the flunky of a remote and heartless bureaucracy. It seems that Pope Francis has suppressed Vatican II as well as the old Mass!’’
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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)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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