Australian Politics
We trust the police. But the court system? Not so much
I have previously shown via survey researh that the public thinks most sentences handed down are too light
http://jonjayray.com/prisent.html
Just 30 per cent of Australians have faith in the country’s courts and justice system according to a new poll, but more than double that figure trust the police and feel safe in their homes and suburbs.
A whopping 47 per cent of people in the recent Resolve Political Monitor survey said they did not have faith in the judiciary, with another 23 per cent declaring they were either undecided or neutral.
The lack of faith in Australia’s court system follows a series of high profile trials in recent years. Bruce Lehrmann and decorated former soldier Ben Roberts-Smith had findings made against them in defamation cases but not in criminal proceedings – Lehrmann for rape and Roberts-Smith for war crimes.
In contrast to people’s lack of faith in the courts, the survey of 1603 people, taken earlier this month, found 69 per cent trusted the police; 13 per cent said they did not and 18 per cent were undecided.
A total of 82 per cent agreed they felt safe in their own home, with 9 per cent disagreeing and 9 per cent undecided, while 67 per cent agreed they felt safe in their local area or suburb, with 19 per cent disagreeing and 15 per cent neutral or undecided (some figures add up to more than 100 per cent due to rounding).
Social media was also marked down, with 59 per cent agreeing with the statement they felt safe on the internet and social media, while 21 per cent were undecided and 21 per cent disagreed.
The exclusive findings are contained in the most recent Resolve Political Monitor survey of 1603 people, conducted from July 10 to 13 by pollsters Resolve Strategic. The results have a margin of error of 2.4 percentage points.
Resolve pollster Jim Reed said while most people trusted the police, “less than a third trust the justice system to deliver, which is hardly surprising given the conga line of mis-trials, appeals, resignations, scandals and inconsistent results we’re seeing in high profile cases like the Lehrmann prosecution”.
The finding was important to the legal profession but also for social cohesion, he said.
“We can only operate as a society if we all agree to certain shared values, behaviours, rights and responsibilities, and if those administering the rules lose our collective trust the whole show is at risk.”
Voters were asked during the survey to nominate three types of crime they thought authorities should tackle as a priority in Australia right now. An almost equal number of men (64 per cent) and women (67 per cent) nominated ending violent attacks, including rape and murder, as their top priority. Tackling domestic violence and stalking came in second, with 59 per cent, but far fewer men (52 per cent) than women (66 per cent) nominated this as a priority.
Child abuse (38 per cent) was the third most-nominated priority, with men (30 per cent) and women (46 per cent) split over how much of a priority it should be.
Voters want Labor to allow MPs more freedom to break ranks
Men were more likely to prioritise tackling scams and fraud (36 per cent) and stopping the physical theft of vehicles, mugging and burglary (34 per cent) than child abuse, whereas 32 per cent of women nominated scams as a priority and 25 per cent nominated physical theft.
People failing to pick up dog poo was nominated by just 2 per cent of people, while cracking down on vapes and e-cigarettes (5 per cent) and on vandalism (5 per cent) were low on people’s priorities.
A total of 12 per cent of those surveyed said they’d witnessed a crime in the last 12 months, while 8 per cent said they’d been the victim of a crime. Surprisingly, just 51 per cent of people who’d experienced a crime said they had reported it, while 38 per cent said they had not done so.
Reed said crime statistics suggest Australia is becoming a safer place.
“But when one-in-12 are telling us they’ve been a victim of crime in the last year, and only around half of them reported it, we are not perfect - and neither are the statistics we rely on to judge that,” he said.
“It’s encouraging that most people believe crimes endangering people should be prioritised. At the end of the day, you will recover from a stolen car, a scam or graffiti on your fence, but the loss and trauma stemming from violence stays with us.”
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Universities need to look closely at how they are perceived
Australia is not the only place in the world where universities are on the nose among a significant proportion of the population. For a sample of feeling in the US, see the speech by Republican vice-presidential candidate JD Vance that is getting new attention since Donald Trump chose him as his running mate.
The Universities are the Enemy is its unequivocal title, and it comes from a man whose arts degree from Ohio State and law degree from Yale were stepping stones in his journey from a dysfunctional, drug-ridden community in the post-industrial midwest to where he is now.
The anti-university feeling in Australia is not close to the level of sheer venom felt by Trump supporters in the US. But here it’s real enough, both at the level of the general population and in the political arena. Universities’ ability to directly influence political decision-making is minimal. The evidence is there in the casual ease with which the Albanese government has ransacked the international education industry this year without pushback from any political party. The fact that international education earned nearly $50bn in export revenue last year seemingly counted for nothing.
Yet Universities Australia has estimated that the government’s first action last December to restrict the issuance of student visas will cost universities $500m in revenue this year. If the government’s legislation for student caps passes parliament then universities and other international education providers will be hit with a second round of pain when Education Minister Jason Clare puts caps on student numbers with powers that enable him to control numbers down to course level and by geographic location.
How did universities arrive in this invidious position? There are two parts to the story. One is universities’ own blinkered journey to the precipice. The other is the lack of general awareness – both among the public and in political and business circles – as to what universities actually do and why it has importance.
Starting with the former: universities’ mishandling of their relationship with the public reached a peak in their handling of two issues.
One was vice-chancellors’ million-dollar salaries. University governing bodies, and vice-chancellors themselves, acted as if this issue – perceived by the public as an example of the gross indifference of the elites – didn’t matter.
But it did and does matter, and badly damages universities’ ability to be taken seriously by the public when they argue for more resources. Australian university leaders’ salaries are well above those in comparable countries. This was abundantly clear when Brian Schmidt, one of the few university leaders who have acted sensibly in this matter, became vice-chancellor of the Australian National University in 2016. He asked that his salary be pegged to international benchmarks and he accepted a package worth two-thirds the amount received by his predecessor. No other vice-chancellor is known to have followed his example.
There was another telling moment. When Michael Spence chose to leave the vice-chancellorship of the University of Sydney in 2020 to become head of University College London, a university of greater prestige, he halved his $1.5m salary package. What more needs to be said?
The other key issue on which universities have lost public trust is international students. For more than three decades they have been a growing source of revenue for most universities, filling the ever widening gap in research funding.
There has always been an underlying level of public disquiet about international students. There are fears that they take Australian students’ places – they don’t – and more well-founded evidence that too many international students have poor English skills and that some courses are overwhelmed by international students to the detriment of locals. Universities responded to this in the wrong way.
Yes they had a valid reasons to enrol international students. In reasonable numbers they enrich campus life and offer wider benefits to the nation by boosting exports and building strong ties in the region. But most universities reacted to the public disquiet by being secretive about how many international students were enrolled, how they were distributed across various degree courses, and how many came from each student source country.
In the absence of information, speculation and partial truths filled the gap. Parents heard only what their children told them about classes overcrowded with international students with poor English.
What if universities, 10 years ago, had collectively decided to put limits on the total number of international students (say at one-third of enrolments), and limited the proportion of international students enrolled in each course and the proportion from each source country? And then reported each year on these figures and also shared with the public more details of what they were doing to secure housing, part-time jobs and other necessities for international students?
If they had, they would be in a far better position to withstand the heavy pressure today to cut international student numbers. Such self-regulation would have required a revenue sacrifice from the big five universities – Melbourne, Monash, Queensland, NSW and particularly Sydney – which have benefited enormously from the wave of Chinese students coming to Australia. But it probably would have avoided the financial pain universities now are facing, let alone the damage being done to Australia’s reputation among international students.
But let’s be fair to universities. There really is a lack of appreciation of the importance of their role. Even those who buy the extreme Vance line that universities are so dangerously woke they pose a threat to Western civilisation (which I don’t) still have to acknowledge what universities do on a day-to-day basis. They make critical research breakthroughs, they invent new technology and they train the next generation of engineers, teachers, tech workers, nurses and specialists in countless disciplines that modern society is utterly dependent on. All of this has very little to do with woke students, freedom of speech controversies or disputes over Gaza and anti-Semitism.
I’ve come to the end of my nearly seven years as higher education editor at The Australian. It’s 21 years since I first covered the university sector and much has changed in that time. But universities are facing a more difficult outlook now than any I have seen.
What’s the solution? It’s up to universities to take a clear eyed look at what they do and how they do it. It’s not enough for them to cite their achievements. They need to look at their weaknesses and where the public isn’t buying their story.
And it’s up to the rest of us to acknowledge the critical benefits universities produce and ensure that they can continue.
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Specialist disability schools won’t be phased out, government says
The federal and state governments won’t move to phase out specialist disability schools and have kicked the future of disabled group homes and segregated employment programs down the road in their response to the $600m disability royal commission.
The Albanese government also put a new disability rights act on the backburner, along with a federal watchdog to protect disabled people’s rights, and knocked back a proposal for a new federal minister for disability inclusion.
The commonwealth and state governments outlined their initial response to the 222 recommendations in the final report of the royal commission into violence, abuse, neglect and exploitation of people with disability on Wednesday, an inquiry that ran for more than four years.
Of the 172 recommendations for which it has primary or shared responsibility with the states, the federal government accepted 13 recommendations and another 117 in principle, while a further 36 were under consideration. Six were “noted”, an indication the government is unlikely to act on them, including the recommendations on segregated education.
The government’s response noted the split among the six commissioners on education, with three calling for special schools to be phased out by 2051 and the others saying they remained a viable option.
Developing Australians Communities Co-founder River Night has weighed in on whether or not the National Disability Insurance Scheme [NDIS] is costing Australians too much.
“The Australian government recognises the ongoing role of specialist settings in service provision for students with disability and providing choice for students with disability and their families,” the federal response notes.
“State and territory governments will continue to be responsible for making decisions about registration of schools in their jurisdictions, with the intent to strengthen inclusive education over time.”
To facilitate some of the recommendations, the federal government said it was committing an additional $117m on programs including improving community attitudes to disability and supporting advocacy.
This was on top of more than $225m previously announced for a new disability employment program and $3bn over the last three budgets to drive greater safety and inclusion for people with disability, social services minister Amanda Rishworth said.
Ms Rishworth said the government was committed to the disability royal commission’s vision “where people with disability are free from violence, abuse, neglect and exploitation.”
She said many of the recommendations were accepted in principle, meaning more work was required to flesh out the detail, and there would be a six monthly report delivered to monitor progress.
Around 5.5 million Australians have some form of disability, and 600,000 are on the National Disability Insurance Scheme.
The royal commission reported in September after more than four years of hearings. While it laid out a broad road map for disability reform, the commissioners were split on key policy areas such as group homes, education and segregated employment.
The commission called for a response from government by March 31, but this was delayed to allow for more consultation with the sector.
The government’s response noted more work would be done on disability housing within the NDIS review framework before a final view was taken on the future of group homes
“The Australian Government and state and territory governments support the development of a diverse range of inclusive housing options for people with disability that support them to exercise choice and control over their living arrangements,” the government’s response said.
It said any consideration of a new disability rights act should be done in conjunction with ongoing work around whether Australia should establish a new federal Human Rights Act.
And it said there was already sufficient representation in cabinet on disability issues through the social services and NDIS ministers in “noting” the recommendation for a new Minister for Disability Inclusion.
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The Queenslander hand-picked by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to clean up the CFMEU has put his home state’s militant branch on notice for its “really worrying conduct”
New Workplace Relations Minister Murray Watt, a Queensland senator, said he didn’t believe the bad behaviour of the CFMEU was limited to Victoria and New South Wales.
It comes after the federal government, in light of allegations of criminal conduct in CFMEU construction branches in Victoria and New South Wales, made an unprecedented request for the Fair Work Commission to put the union’s east coast arms into administration.
This is yet to occur, with Fair Work Commission head Murray Furlong seeking advice on making an application to the Federal Court.
Senator Watt said ultimately the scope of the application would be a matter for the regulator.
“Reform of the CFMEU is a very high priority for me … we’re serious about cleaning up this union,” Senator Watt said.
“My role would be as the lead within the government to deliver the intervention that’s required into the CFMEU.
“And if that takes legislation, then that’s my job to deliver that.”
Allegations of links to the bikie underworld or corrupt behaviour have not been levelled against the Queensland branch of the CFMEU, though the union has continued to be a thorn in the side of government and developers across major project sites in the state.
Senator Watt said it was a matter of record that there had been “really worrying conduct” led by the CFMEU in Queensland for some time.
“Our government thinks it’s in the interests of construction workers and members of the CFMEU to clean this up. I think all union members want to be part of a clean union who is putting the interests of its members first,” he said.
“And I think sadly the CFMEU doesn’t fall into that category.”
Senator Watt confirmed his first briefing in his new portfolio was the progress on the administration process and signalled the government was working what legislative levers it needed to pull to ensure it happened.
He indicated the government was conscious the CFMEU was “cashed up” and had a history of very long-running litigation.
“If any application made by the general manager of the Fair Work Commission is opposed, or if there are barriers to that, then we will remove those barriers through legislation,” he said.
CFMEU Queensland secretary Michael Ravbar recently told members the union would not support any administrator appointment over “unproven media allegations”.
“The last week-and-a-half has been tough, because at the end of the day your union has done nothing wrong,” Mr Ravbar said.
“Why is the CFMEU being talked to be put in administration? If you’re going to have a look about criminality and corruption in the industry, you start from the top of the food chain, you don’t start down the bottom.”
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All my main blogs below:
http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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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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