Australian Politics
Wednesday, June 15, 2022
Culture of violence in remote communities drives attacks on Aboriginal women
The article below is very instructive. It shows how gross the problem with Aborigines is and how insoluble it is. Governments have tried all sort of approaches to improve the Aborigine lifestyle but nothing works. The article below shows why. You would have to transform an entire culture. And how do you do that?
And I haven't even mentioned the different range of cognitive skills among Aborigines
A high-profile crown prosecutor says a major factor in the domestic violence epidemic afflicting Northern Territory Indigenous women is an “enculturation of violence” on remote communities.
In a rare and candid interview, Victorian Senior Crown Prosecutor Nanette Rogers, one of the nation’s most experienced criminal barristers, said resolving the Territory’s family violence crisis required “profound change’’ to address such violence, which was “predominantly male-on-female”.
“It’s really trying to change that enculturation of violence; that culture of entitlement to assault or using violence on any person.’’
Ms Rogers also said some “remote communities tend to be very punitive towards a victim or someone who has helped a victim or sought help from the police’’.
On such communities, victims of domestic abuse had sometimes “been punished by their family members as well as the perpetrator’s family members” for reporting such crimes.
Ms Rogers is the former Central Australian prosecutor who stunned the nation in 2006 when she spoke out about horrific cases of physical and sexual abuse of Aboriginal children and women. She also spoke about how a male-dominated Indigenous culture and kinship connections had helped to create a conspiracy of silence.
READ MORE:‘Epidemic of violence’ plagues women: judge
Her revelations led to the 2007 report Little Children Are Sacred, which was followed by the Howard government’s contentious NT Intervention.
Ms Rogers, who left the NT almost nine years ago, said she was shocked by how little things had changed for Indigenous women from remote Territory communities in recent decades.
“What is disappointing for me is that nothing’s changed,’’ she said. “That is the takeaway point for me. I find it shocking that nothing has changed.
“… My understanding is that the violence towards Aboriginal women and children by Aboriginal men continues unabated.’’
Remote communities, Ms Rogers said, could be “extremely unsafe” for Indigenous women.
She was responding to comments by NT Supreme Court judge Judith Kelly, who said last week that Aboriginal women in remote communities remain trapped in an epidemic of violence caused by disadvantage and intergenerational abuse, and a culture that privileges the rights of perpetrators over those of victims.
Justice Kelly wept as she described cases in which women who had tried to flee violence were effectively kidnapped and endured beatings and rape on outstations.
“I just want people to know what’s happening to Aboriginal women,’’ she said, as she argued they were bearing the “absolutely dreadful” brunt of society’s failure to address high levels of welfare dependency, substance abuse and other problems on far-flung Indigenous communities.
Ms Rogers agreed that better education and more jobs for men and women on remote communities were needed to help build individuals’ self-esteem. She added: “On top of that you’ve got this enculturation of violence that is predominantly male-on-female.’’
Ms Rogers has conducted successful prosecutions against Victorian murderer Adrian Basham, who killed his estranged wife in 2018, and sexual sadist Jaymes Todd, who raped and murdered aspiring comedian Eurydice Dix-on in Melbourne in the same year.
Ms Rogers said that since she left the Territory, she had noticed a change in “the judicial language” used there, with some judges and magistrates more likely to call out “toxic” relationships between perpetrators and victims, especially if a perpetrator had abused his partner for years before severely injuring her. “Judicial officers are much more prepared to say it doesn’t matter whether you are an Aboriginal person or not; this is unacceptable,’’ she said.
“It must be really soul-destroying as a judge from the bench to see time and time again these horrific acts of violence that never stop.’’ She said that for such judicial officers “there must be a point at which you go ‘This is outrageous, no matter how liberal my attitude is towards Indigenous people and the Indigenous cause’.’’
According to a 2017 NT government report, Indigenous women in the Territory are 40 times more likely than non-Indigenous women to be hospitalised following family violence assaults. The same report quotes an NPY Women’s Council estimate that Aboriginal women from the NT, South Australia and Western Australia border region are about 60 times more likely to be murdered than non-Aboriginal women.
In a three-part series, The Australian recently revealed how a young Aboriginal woman, Ruby, was raped and bashed by her father in Yuendumu in Central Australia, and then forced to leave the desert town after he was jailed.
Last year, another NT Supreme Court judge, Justice Jenny Blokland, called on the NT government to address a potential, emerging pattern of sexual assault victims “being incidentally punished in their home communities through a form of banishment’’.
She made this remark while sentencing 32-year-old Simeon Riley, who pleaded guilty to raping an adolescent girl he had kidnapped and kept as a sex slave for several weeks in 2005. During that time, the girl, then aged 13 or 14, was kept in one room, sexually assaulted and forced to urinate and defecate through a hole in the floorboards.
The judge added that the victim of this “chilling” crime, who came forward to police in 2018, had been further punished as she felt she could not return home. The judge urged leaders from the girl’s otherwise “well-functioning” community to “seriously” reflect on that.
Justice Kelly also described a culture within some remote Indigenous communities that protected perpetrators of violence rather than their victims, and Ms Rogers said this was a longstanding problem. She said courts had traditionally assumed that when a victim of violence left the NT “that it’s a choice’’. But she said often, “their lives have been made so unlivable’’ and so “horrible and difficult” they have no choice “but to leave”.
In the wake of Justice Kelly’s remarks, Indigenous academic Marcia Langton called for a permanent group of experts to advise the federal government on how to improve safety for Indigenous women and children. Professor Langton argued that “lives are being lost while people in the women’s safety sector dither about irrelevant issues’’.
Ms Rogers said that like abuse victims in the wider community, some Indigenous women were torn between love and hate for an abuser. They could also have mixed feelings about their own relatives, whom they loved but who might have banished them for reporting abuse.
“It’s a double burden for those who have to leave,’’ she said, as they dealt with their violence-related trauma and being exiled from close relatives – sometimes including a mother or grandmother. “It’s an enduring situation – the woman has to leave, never the man … in that way, it’s not unlike any other culture.’’
Ms Rogers said domestic violence on remote NT communities was often intergenerational, with a father being sentenced for acts of violence and his son coming before the same judge for similar crimes 15 years later.
She said the unacceptably high levels of abuse endured by Indigenous women on such communities was not adequately acknowledged by the wider community.
Most people who live in Sydney or Melbourne “have never been to the Northern Territory. Most people have never been to a remote community. Most people have never met an Aboriginal person.’’
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My all-girls education failed to give me the skills I now value most
This article by Anita Punton is a good antidote to the deeply biased article by Loren Bridge that I rubbished recently
I went to a private, all-girls school from the age of five. Whenever I had my violin lesson, the portraits of the two Miss Singletons, tightly stitched into their Victorian gowns, looked down on me with admirable patience.
The Singleton sisters were the joint principals of my alma mater in the late 19th century, and they were determined to provide girls with a proper education.
I found them hugely inspiring. Still do. But my all-girls education failed to give me the skills that I now value most. I had to learn those skills in the real world.
I support anyone who believes an all-girls school is the best choice for their daughter, but I don’t subscribe to the theory that this educational model is how our future female leaders have the greatest chance of succeeding.
When my two sons reached high school age, I was determined that they would go to a co-ed school, because I believed it was the best way for them to grow up treating women as equals.
Paradoxically, I wanted my daughter to go an all-girls school like me, to give her “opportunities” to “fulfil her potential” and be a “leader”. These are the same words and phrases that all-girls schools use so liberally in their marketing.
However, I started to notice that most of my highly educated, successful female friends were choosing to send their girls to co-ed schools. One of them told me bluntly: “The world is not single sex. They will have to work with men all their lives.”
I began to question the logic that girls must be sequestered away from males in order to learn the very skills that are needed to work with them in the future.
One of the underlying assumptions about all-girls schooling is that boys are an impediment to a girl achieving her potential. They are “other”. It’s as if their presence will take something away from a girl, that she will not feel confident enough to thrive in their presence.
This was certainly the messaging I took on board throughout my time at an all-girls school, and I still hear the same messaging from parents today.
Now I feel those assumptions not only further entrench outdated gender roles, but demonstrate an offensive distrust in both the strength and capacity of our girls and the humanity of our boys.
On a daily basis, boys in a co-ed school get to see that girls are confident, capable, courageous and profoundly human. They get to experience a female perspective when discussing issues. They work together on projects. They see girls succeeding and leading and it is completely normal.
The idea that girls must be isolated from the rest of society and overtly taught strategies of how they are going to cope when they finally are catapulted back into it seems a back-to-front way of going about preparing girls for leadership. The cultivation of women’s leadership potential should not be the sole responsibility of women; all of society must contribute.
My daughter has grown up with a second language that wasn’t available to me as a teenager – a language to express female solidarity, strength, possibility and self-worth. The culture she has experienced is totally different to the one I knew as a teenager.
And while some might dismiss the empowering effect of a Taylor Swift lyric, or watching The Simpsons episode “Lisa vs Malibu Stacey”, those cultural experiences have done as much to provide fluency in that language for her as any overt teaching by her parents or school.
I ended up sending my three children to the local high school. My daughter is now 15. What has she missed out on going to a co-ed school? Her government school, like many, had some poor facilities, inconsistency in teaching due to a staff room under immense pressure, funding shortages.
What has she gained? All those skills it took me so long to learn. Enviable confidence that she can talk to anyone and handle herself in any situation. An ability to try new things, make a fool of herself and find it funny, rather than humiliating. A complete indifference to the “otherness” of boys. She lives her life with them every day. They are her friends and collaborators.
This morning, I asked her if she had ever felt any sense of discrimination at school because she was a girl. Did the boys dominate? Has she ever been tempted to “play small” because she’s worried what the boys will think of her? Did she feel that the boys were stopping her from achieving her potential?
She gave me the same withering look as the time I asked her to explain TikTok. “Never,” she said. She’s too polite to say “OK, Boomer”, but I’m pretty sure she thought it.
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Energy crisis Qld: ‘Sun tax’ hit looms for solar customers
Solar panel users will now be PENALIZED. Quite a turnup
Solar customers are being urged to install battery systems ahead of an impending “sun tax” that will see users charged for exporting power when there is low demand, as the state grapples with the ongoing energy crisis.
LNP energy spokesman Pat Weir said Queenslanders would “continue to operate in the dark while the Palaszczuk government fails to detail its plan for future energy supply”.
“Solar users are rightly concerned that feed-in tariffs are dropping at a time when there should be incentives for the uptake of renewable energy,” he said. “The events of the last 24 hours have again proved the importance of a reliable energy network that prioritises network security and affordability.”
Clean Energy Council director of distributed energy Darren Gladman said “most solar customers still purchase some electricity from the grid so if electricity prices rise, they will be affected by that”.
He said the increase in wholesale electricity prices will (eventually) lead to an increase in the feed-in tariff (FiT).
“This will make solar an even more financially attractive option in future, once the electricity prices increases have flowed through to consumers,” Mr Gladman said.
The AEMC Retail Price Trends report for 2021 estimates annual consumption in Queensland to be 5650kWh per annum, which is equivalent to about 15.5kWh per day.
A 5kW system in Brisbane is expected to generate about 21.0kWh per day on average.
But Mr Gladman said to avoid buying from the grid, “the electricity would either need to be consumed when it is generated or stored in a battery”.
“Sales of solar PV in Queensland in May were about 10 per cent above April figures – anecdotal reports from industry suggest sales are rebounding even more strongly in June,” he said.
It comes as the Australian Energy Regulator has confirmed a controversial shake-up to the solar industry that will see households charged for exporting solar electricity at certain times from 2025.
But experts say the impost can be navigated by avoiding peak times and making better use of energy storage systems.
Compare the Market’s general manager energy and utilities Brett Mifsud said when two-way pricing was introduced, families would likely be charged a fee to export during low-demand times, such as the middle of the day when solar electricity was generated.
Changes are set to come into effect from July 1, 2025, in Queensland to ensure the electricity grid isn’t overwhelmed by an upswing in solar use.
Storing excess solar electricity in batteries will allow it to be used when needed most or be exported back to the grid when the payback is higher.
Batteries can cost anywhere from a few thousand dollars for a smaller system to almost $20,000 for systems with more storage and inverter chargers.
Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen says there is enough energy supply in the system to avoid load shedding. “There is enough supply in the system to avoid load shedding, asking the big industrial users to reduce their energy use or…
Lauren Daley, who runs Al’s Plumbing and Gas from her home in Clayfield, said her family had been reaping the rewards of solar energy since 2017.
“99 per cent of the time it’s sunny Queensland but the solar panels definitely make a difference in summer when the aircon is running non-stop.”
Mrs Daley said they are also considering installing a battery system amid the current energy crisis and following weeks of unpredictable weather.
“It’s just one of those things we haven’t quite got to but you try to do everything in your power to reduce costs,” she said.
Ms Daley said her house is running 24 hours a day with “the business, three young kids, two washing machines and two dryers”.
“If we are not living in it (the house), I’m working in it.”
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The reality of owning an electric car in Australia: Driver struggles with useless ghost chargers, other motorists stealing his spot and taking a whole day to finish a trip between Canberra and Sydney
An electric vehicle owner has shared the brutal reality of going on a roadtrip in his $72,000 car - taking a full day to drive from Sydney to Canberra and back again after repeatedly struggling to find spots to charge it.
A video posted to TikTok by user Suthocam on June 10 showed the issues EV drivers who do not have access to the Tesla supercharging network face.
Suthocam detailed his charging port debacle after a Sydney to Canberra round trip in a Hyundai IONIQ 5 using only third party chargers.
'The car itself is a great road trip vehicle - it's super spacious, great seats, great speakers and has a cool big sunroof,' Suthocam said.
Suthocam said the $71,900 vehicle, with an estimated range of 450km, was able to make the trip to Canberra in one charge but he decided to give it a top-up which would allow him to drive the car around the city once there.
His first stop was a charging station in Goulburn, 196km from Sydney, where the only available port was out-of-order.
The NRMA ChargeFox charger screen notified the driver that the 'station had faulted' and had not been fixed since the beginning of the year despite an 'estimated' repair date of January 14.
Suthocam waited until a working charger became available and then had to park halfway in a disabled parking spot for the cord to reach his car's battery - a scene he described as 'just a bit sketchy'.
'Once we got going again we made it... so worth it,' Suthocam said. 'It was pretty in Canberra but we had to get back on the road so we had to go find some chargers.'
The first charger the EV driver found was located in a carpark and did not work.
The Tesla wall chargers did not work with his Hyundai and the other chargers that did work were often taken up by other cars.
'Finally we found a free charger (in an Ikea carpark) in what felt like a really long time but it was super slow,' Suthocam said. 'I didn't want to wait four hours to get 100 per cent so I had to find a fast charger.'
Suthocam drove to a third charging station but to his frustration it was blocked by a petrol ute.
He then drove to a fourth charging port but was unable to locate it despite it appearing on the car's map. He found a fifth, but it was being used by a Tesla.
A sixth station was found but to Suthocam's dismay it had a similar speed to the Ikea carpark charger. 'We ended up having to jump back into Goulburn, charge there, and then finally made it home,' Suthocam said.
The charging port ordeal added two-and-a-half hours to Suthocam's round trip - a drive which typically takes six to seven hours.
The video, which he captioned 'we need more chargers tbh', has received more than 190,000 views and almost 700 comments.
'I love the idea of EVs but good lord I’d go insane if I had to spend 50 per cent of my day worrying about charging just to get to Canberra and back,' one user commented. 'You’ve convinced me to give it another two to three years before considering getting EV,' a second user wrote.
'Same issues in the UK. Until they sort out charging infrastructure I'm going to stick with dinosaur juice,' a third chimed.
The Electric Vehicle Council (the national body representing Australia's EV industry), reported an 85 per cent increase in the number of ultra-fast charging stations across the country and a 29.6 per cent increase in standard stations since August 2020.
However, drivers are reluctant to make the switch to plug-in cars as the nation's infrastructure for fast-charging ports has not caught up to the demand.
In Australia, just 1.5 per cent of cars sold are electric and plug-in hybrid, compared to 17 per cent in the United Kingdom and 85 per cent in Norway.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is set to introduce policies to boost the take-up of electric vehicles but will stop short of imposing a ban on petrol or diesel cars as part of his plan to tackle climate change.
The Labor Party will introduce tax benefits to reduce the price of electric cars and plug-in hybrids, forecasting that 89 per cent of new car sales will be electric by 2030.
By making electric cars cheaper and more convenient, Mr Albanese hopes there will be 3.8 million on the road by 2030, with 15 per cent of all cars on the road by then being zero-emission.
Electric cars will be exempt from a five per cent import tariff that would reduce the cost of a $40,000 vehicle by $2000. The move would result in savings of up to $8700 for a $50,000 vehicle. The tax cuts will be introduced on July 1 this year and will be reviewed in three years.
Labor will also invest $39.3 million, matched by the NRMA, to deliver 117 fast charging stations on highways across Australia.
This will provide charging stations at an average interval of 150km on major roads, allowing Aussies to drive from Adelaide to Perth or Darwin to Broome with an electric car.
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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)
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Tuesday, June 14, 2022
As ever, price control reduces the supply
The high price of inputs such as coal is making electricity generation more expensive -- meaning that generators need to charge more to recover their increased costs. But making electricity more expensive is deeply unpopular so Australa's brilliant bureaucrats capped the amount generators can charge for their product -- price control.
So to protect their income the generators have been reducing their output to a bare minimum. Doing that also breaks the price caps so it is a stoush between the bureaucrats and the generators -- with the public at risk -- being faced with blackouts
Power generators are exploiting the chaotic energy market by withdrawing power supply from the electricity grid and waiting until strict rules to prevent blackouts kick in, forcing the energy market operator to direct them to fire their plants back up and triggering profitable compensation payments.
There’s no law stopping power companies from withdrawing their electricity generation from the market, and in the past two days they have reduced the volume available by 2 gigawatts in Victoria, 3 gigawatts in NSW and 1.5 gigawatts in Queensland.
The withdrawals were prompted by the Australian Energy Market Operator’s (AEMO) decision to put a cap on spiralling prices that electricity generators are charging for wholesale power, which crimped the profit margin of some generators, which are battling coal prices that are soaring because of sanctions on Russian exports.
But the electricity market is tightly regulated and AEMO has powers, designed to prevent blackouts, which enable it to force generators to fire up units and start supplying electricity to the grid. Whenever AEMO does this, companies are awarded compensation.
AEMO was unusually forthright in a public statement yesterday when it said that directly after price caps were imposed on power companies “available offers were reduced”.
These withdrawals represent more than 10 per cent of the east coast energy grid’s total generation capacity of 55 gigawatts and come on top of an energy crunch created by a series of breakdowns and maintenance outages that have forced about one-quarter of the east coast’s coal-fired power stations out of action.
Melbourne University energy expert Dylan McConnell said while power companies may have reduced their output for legitimate reasons, the scale of withdrawal across the industry raised concerns over its social licence.
“It’s not in good faith and fairly unconscionable conduct. Yes there is some sort of justification for it, but it’s the wrong thing to do,” McConnell said.
Federal Energy Minister Chris Bowen was asked on Tuesday if power companies were gaming the system and said the compliance regulator was monitoring the situation “very, very closely”.
“The Australian Energy Regulator reminded [power companies] of their obligations of the law this morning,” Bowen said.
The market regulator has reassured ministers that it believes there is still sufficient power available to the grid – but it’s likely that power companies will continue to be directed to switch their units back on, triggering more compensation payments.
“I have been in contact with [AEMO] and they are confident the situation can be and will be avoided in NSW and Victoria in particular in coming days,” Bowen said on Tuesday. “Nobody should turn off any power usage that they need for their comfort or their safety ... nobody is asking for that to happen.”
A spokesperson for the Australian Energy Council, which represents major power generators including AGL, EnergyAustralia and Origin, said its members faced a “complex issue” but were seeking solutions to the power crunch.
“The price cap unintentionally means that some plants can’t recover their fuel costs. Participants are legitimately seeking ways to resolve the problem,” the spokesperson said.
NSW Treasurer and Energy Minister Matt Kean said he was in close contact with AEMO and had “every confidence” there was enough power available to avoid blackouts, and he identified compensation payments as a cause of shortfall warnings that had sparked concern.
“The reason that generators are waiting for the market operator to direct them, rather than taking a loss in the market is because they are eligible for some compensation from the Australian Energy Regulator,” Kean said.
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Federalism comes to coal
The clause below
"until the transition to renewables and storage is complete"
both shows an awareness of the energy problem and tells us how foolish the faith in "renewables" is. To transform to 100% renewables you would need "storage" (batteries) on an umimaginable scale
Individual states and territories will decide whether to exclude coal and gas power from a temporary capacity mechanism, designed to secure enough baseload generation until the transition to renewables and storage is complete.
The Energy Security Board’s draft capacity mechanism, to be released within two weeks, is understood to be based on a technology-neutral model and will not endorse subsidies to keep coal-fired power stations and gas in the system longer than needed.
The ESB brief from federal, state and territory ministers is that the capacity mechanism should not conflict with ambitious renewables and storage targets, and that different jurisdictions can opt in to preferred technologies.
Energy ministers are keen to avoid costs being passed on to customers when energy retailers lock in long-term electricity supplies under a capacity mechanism, which other countries facing supply pressures have adopted.
Amid an east coast electricity crisis fuelled by global factors and outages across the National Electricity Market, more coal-fired power capacity will come online this week to reduce the reliance on high-priced gas.
Queensland’s CS Energy, which contributes 10 per cent of the NEM’s output, is preparing to bring three of the four units at the 1525MW Callide power station online next month, increasing output alongside its 750MW Kogan Creek plant. The Callide plant’s C4 generator, which was shut after an explosion last year, will not resume activity until April next year.
Queensland Energy Minister Mick de Brenni said the government would “not be shutting the gate on our power stations, their workers or their communities and instead will invest in their future”.
“The energy ministers meeting was clear – we will finally have a sensible plan to boost our energy capacity across the nation,” he said. “But we were also clear – in Queensland, the diversity of our energy system is what delivered reliable power, and our power stations will continue to sit at the heart of that. Because Queenslanders own their own energy assets, we have avoided the energy chaos that has gripped southern states in the wake of nine years of the divided Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison government.”
Grattan Institute energy and climate change director Tony Wood said the proposed capacity mechanism was not a “coal-keeper or gas-keeper … it’s the lights-on-keeper”.
Mr Wood said a capacity mechanism was unlikely to lock in long-term investment in coal-fired power stations, and predicted fierce opposition to “perverse incentives” extending the life of coal plants. He raised concerns about high coal prices on the spot market, which were “just as bad” as gas.
“If the capacity mechanism is designed properly, it will only be there while we need it,” he said.
“Other countries have forms of a capacity mechanism, Western Australia has a capacity mechanism. You can design a bad one or you can design a good one. You can design one that rules out certain technologies but there will be consequences if you rule out certain technologies.”
Mr Wood said guidelines provided by energy ministers to the ESB last year would give cover to some, including Victorian Energy Minister Lily D’Ambrosio, to say “we don’t want to have coal or gas getting capacity payments”.
He described the mechanism as a “shock absorber or comfort blanket” for governments that would “not stay in any longer than necessary”. “I do not know how you have a capacity mechanism without coal and gas because you’ve only got a couple of large pumped hydro projects and one of them is already running late,” he said.
“The collective ministers (need to be convinced) that this is not a coal-keeper, or gas-keeper or fossil fuel-keeper. This is a policy that says if we are going to achieve (high renewables targets) we’re going to need capacity to be there when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining. One way to do that is to pay for it.”
Energy ministers will discuss a new net zero emissions energy market plan at their next meeting in July to better align federal, state and territory strategies to decarbonise the sector.
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Peter Gleeson: Some people are born bad so let the grubs rot in jail
There’s an 18-year old man languishing in a jail cell right now, having killed a young couple and their unborn baby while driving a stolen car, high on alcohol and drugs.
Before that fateful killing in Brisbane on Australia Day last year, the perpetrator had a 12-page rapsheet, a juvenile delinquent in every sense of the word.
We can’t name him because he was 17 when the offence of manslaughter was committed. So he will retain his anonymity for a crime that shocked the country.
He will also be out of jail on Australia Day, 2027, having served six years for a crime so heinous – so far reaching and evil – that it has sparked an outpouring of anger and grief. The teen ran a red light and collided with a truck before rolling and hitting the couple as they were out on an afternoon walk.
The families of Kate Leadbetter and Mathew Field gave victim impact statements to the sentencing court that were as raw and emotional as they were shocking.
Kate’s mother Jeannie Thorne said she is now living another life – the life that she never wanted. “I should be in my other life, the one that’s been ripped away,’’ she told the court.
All she wants is her old life back with her daughter, son-in-law and the prospect of being a grandmother to the boy they were going to call Miles.
Instead, they are living every parent’s worst nightmare, having to lay to rest two beautiful young souls, taken in the prime of their lives by a young man who was a menace to society and an accident waiting to happen.
It is little use debating the pros and cons of soft sentencing. On any measure, serving six years in jail for the callous disregard and loss of human life experienced during this tragedy is clearly not in keeping with community expectations.
Everybody knows a similar case in their own backyard.
But Judge Martin Burns has a job to do, noting no sentence would ever be enough for the families, giving the offender a sentence commensurate with what the law allowed.
Here’s what I think. Throw the key away for the little grub. Let him rot in a jail cell forever. Change the law. Mandatory life for such a terrible crime.
This cretin should never enjoy the comforts and luxuries afforded to law-abiding people. His social licence has been revoked. Some people are just born bad. He is one of them.
Mind you, vigilantism is never the answer. Yet, I’ve had several emails in the last few days from men suggesting they’d take justice into their own hands if it was their daughter and son-in-law. It’s an emotive and some would say entirely natural response.
But the big question remains; How do we weigh up the rehabilitation prospects of a young man who clearly has no regard for the law, or for the general wellbeing of people?
Is this person capable of redemption, of being able to go straight and learn from this enormous tragedy?
Or is he to be forever consigned as bad to the bone, a threat to society, a person who will die early, either through his own actions or those of somebody else?
My sense, my fear, is that this guy is evil. As such, when he gets out in 2027, he’ll go back to his old ways.
Hopefully, I’m wrong. However, the real truth in this sad story is that two families, and the many friends of the dead couple, are living a life of sheer hell. For that, there will never be justice.
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Australians will pay dearly for the green pipe-dreams of Mike Cannon-Brookes and his ilk
A polar blast from Antarctica has left many Australians shivering in their homes, as icy winds have torn down power lines. It feels like a portent of things to come. Even without electricity outages, Australians are contemplating turning off their heaters and putting on extra cardigans as the national regulator announced price increases of up to 18 per cent from the start of July.
The cold snap won’t bother Mike Cannon-Brookes. He’s unlikely to be switching off lights in spare rooms at his $100 million Point Piper mansion or any of his other trophy homes. On the contrary, he was cock-a-hoop. ‘Wow. A huge day for Australia,’ he tweeted on Monday. Having bought just over 11 per cent of the shares of AGL, Australia’s largest energy provider, the rich lister climate activist successfully intimidated management into dropping its plan to split its retail business from its coal-fired power plants, sparking the resignation of the CEO and the chairman of the board, as well as two other directors. Management was convinced that a majority of shareholders supported its plan but they needed 75 per cent and rather than put the proposition to a vote they turned tail and ran.
Caving into to Cannon-Brookes didn’t impress AGL shareholders, with the stock price falling this week, but that is unlikely to worry the billionaire who has money to burn and has been retweeting the thoughts of António Guterres, secretary-general of the United Nations, and a former socialist prime minister of Portugal. Guterres is grumpy that ‘We still see funding for coal & fossil fuels from some of the biggest names in finance, hedge funds & private equity,’ and tweeted that ‘Investing in fossil fuels is a dead end – economically & environmentally,’ and ‘No amount of greenwashing or spin can change that,’ exhorting his followers, ‘Don’t work for climate-wreckers.’
No prizes for guessing who are ‘the climate wreckers’ that are still investing in fossil fuels. China’s Yankuang Energy Group is keen to buy out other shareholders in Yancoal, an Australian coal producer and developer operating open cut and underground coal mines in New South Wales, Queensland and Western Australia.
China’s enthusiasm for fossil fuels doesn’t worry Australia’s climate zealots. Australia’s emissions of carbon dioxide peaked in 2009 at 390 megatons (Mt) and have now fallen to 376 Mt, less than 45 per cent of our emissions in 1990 whereas China’s emissions are more than 2600 per cent greater, at 9,876 Mt, and it has said it will not even try to cut them until at least 2030 or to reach net zero until 2060, ten years later than other countries.
Despite this, during the federal election campaign Allegra Spender, the new teal member for Wentworth told Sky’s Chris Kenny, that China’s climate policies were ‘incredible’. The most incredible thing about China’s climate policies is that Ms Spender would praise them. China’s plans for 169 new and expanded coal projects will boost domestic coal production by 559 million tons per annum, and could boost global methane emissions, the most powerful greenhouse gas, by 10 per cent. It also increased its raw coal output by 10.5 per cent in the first four months of 2022 and expanded coal imports in April by 8.4 per cent year-on-year.
India is also planning to import Australian coal this year, for the first time since 2015, amid fears of power shortages during peak demand over the summer. This is despite the fact that the price is more than three times higher than at the end of last year, driven up by Europe seeking to replace Russian supplies following the invasion of Ukraine. Rather than fuelling increased investment in renewables as the green dreamers claim, the high price of coal may simply spur India, like China, to mine more coal domestically.
Despite the rising global demand for fossil fuels, new Labor prime minister Anthony Albanese has decided to force taxpayers to bankroll the profits of wealthy renewable investors like Cannon-Brookes and Macquarie Bank by using government money to foot the bill for expanding and upgrading the energy grid to handle more renewables. Labor hopes to trick taxpayers by hiding the costs off-budget, as it did with the public money it sunk into the NBN. It is music to the ears of green champagne socialists – public subsidies to cover the costs of building new infrastructure while private investors milk the profits.
AGL was planning to close the last of its coal-fired power plants between 2040 and 2045 instead of 2048, but Cannon-Brookes wants those dates brought forward to 2035 and to invest A$20 billion in renewable energy and storage solutions. Yet even with taxpayers covering the cost of upgrading the grid, the early closure will mean greater reliance on energy sources which will be more expensive than existing coal-fired power plants. One analyst estimates that AGL will have to spend at least $10-$15 billion to replace $1 billion of earnings coming from coal assets. In addition, having dumped its demerger, AGL will also have to establish new debt facilities in a far more difficult environment, with higher interest rates and even greater environmental hurdles.
Cannon-Brookes thinks his plan is in the best interests of ‘shareholders, customers, Australian taxpayers and the planet’, no less. Yet one wonders how in touch he is with his customers few of whom could afford to take up a green loan of $100,000 he wants AGL to offer to back their ‘decarbonisation journeys’ to convert their households to 100 per cent renewable electricity.
Indeed, there is a distinct air of unreality about the wish list of Cannon-Brookes’ backers who want Paris-aligned climate goals, a genuine decarbonisation plan that maintains jobs without a huge increase in prices, and enhances and protects shareholder value, while providing comprehensive support for impacted communities. AGL has said it is open to new approaches from third parties, but as one analyst remarked, ‘who would be willing to take on the whole business in the current political climate is beyond me’.
Cannon-Brookes says he will be seeking assurances from what is left of AGL’s management that the new plan they come up with is not simply to sell off AGL’s assets piece by piece. But whatever plan they come up with his green pipe dreams will cost the rest of us dearly
https://spectator.com.au/2022/06/cannon-brookes-fodder/
************************************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)
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Monday, June 13, 2022
Why girls’ schools succeed at producing women who lead
There is probably some truth in the claims below by the partisan Loren Bridge but she ignores the elephant in the room: Girls schools are almost all private, even if they are Catholic schools only.
And private schools are almost all selective in some way. Most require fees for attendance and that selects for parents who can afford such fees -- almost all being from better-off families. And richer people tend to be brighter, which their daughters inherit. So the pupils at such schools will mostly be of above-average IQ. And high IQ helps with almost everything in life
And at least some of the claims above are simply untrue. She says that boys and girls have equal basic ability at maths. But all the psychometric research shows otherwise. And how many Fields medals were won by women? Just one, an Iranian lady
And I haven't even mentioned testosterone
The whole article below is suffused by Leftist bias, so should be taken with a large grain of salt
Much has been said about this exciting “teal wave” of forthright, trailblazing, smart women. Five out of the eight female independents who will take their place on the crossbench of this parliament – Dr Monique Ryan, Dr Sophie Scamps, Dai Le, Allegra Spender and Zali Steggall – are graduates of girls’ schools.
This would be no surprise to anyone familiar with the benefits of single-sex education for girls, but for those who aren’t, it’s important to put this figure into perspective — girls’ schools make up just 2 per cent of schools in Australia.
Clearly, there is something inherent to the girls’ school environment that better prepares women for high-level leadership.
So what is it about a girls’ school education that ignites in young women the determination, inspiration and motivation to lead? What gives them the courage and grit to be change-makers in a world that continues to squeeze women onto the edges of the centre stage positions that men carve for themselves?
In girls’ schools, students are intentionally equipped with the knowledge and skills required to overcome social and cultural gender biases, and in doing so, actively break the stereotypical norms that define women in society. This is achieved through an education that rewires the implicit biases that so often limit women.
Women are expected to walk a tightrope between exhibiting the characteristics society expects of women and being seen to have the “strength” to lead. They are in a double bind. The obsession with former prime minister Julia Gillard’s empty fruit bowl in her kitchen illustrated this perfectly.
To resist this concentrated pressure, girls must be encouraged to take a leap of faith. They must leap from the tightrope and defy gendered pressure. To do this, they need the confidence to lead and be disruptors.
A study by the University of Queensland found that confidence levels for girls in single-sex schools matches that of boys, while girls in the general population consistently demonstrate lower confidence levels than boys.
In other words, the study found that a girls’ school provides the environment for girls to develop and maintain innate confidence and healthy self-belief. And it is confidence, or a lack of confidence, that is frequently attributed to the under-representation of women in senior leadership roles.
Let’s be clear — girls aren’t innately less confident or assertive than boys, they aren’t less capable in maths and sciences and they certainly don’t have more body image or mental health issues than boys as infants. It is our patriarchal society that stereotypes women diminishing their self-belief and self-efficacy, quashing their voice and ultimately, their power.
A girls’ school turns the tables on gender stereotypes, and this can be life-changing for a girl.
Girls’ schools provide significant leadership opportunities — 100 per cent of the leadership positions (not just 50 per cent) are held by girls. The power of mentoring and role modelling provided by past students, and the predominantly female leadership of girls’ schools, provides girls with leadership development opportunities beyond those available in co-ed schools. With no requirement to cater to boys, girls’ schools balance the inequality in broader society through purposeful, targeted education.
Data from a US study shows that girls’ school graduates are more likely than co-ed school counterparts to be involved in political activities, demonstrate social and political agency, and be supportive of societal improvements. They are more likely to be change-makers.
Research shows unequivocally that girls thrive in an all-girls environment; they do better academically, socially, and emotionally. Regardless of socio-economic factors, data — not just from a single study but from a plethora of unique studies from all over the world — indicates that girls simply do better in girls’ schools.
Girls in co-ed schools tend to be more self-conscious and less confident; they are less likely to speak up in class, ask questions or take on a leadership role. They are also more likely to have a negative body image and considerably more likely to experience sexual harassment or bullying. In contrast, girls in girls-only environments participate more freely in discussions, are more competitive and take more healthy risks with their learning — skills that are advantageous for life success.
Girls’ schools are at the forefront of gender equality, deliberately challenging gendered norms and purposefully building girls’ confidence, conviction and self-belief, making sure that girls have the skills and knowledge to speak out and to break down barriers.
These are skills our new female MPs will certainly need as they step into the male-dominated Parliament House, famed for its sexism and misogyny. May their voices add power to changing that culture and progressing the ongoing fight for a more equal society.
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‘Outright lying’: Australian scientist hits out at TGA after ‘life-changing’ Covid vaccine injury
An Australian scientist, left unable to work for eight months after a debilitating neurological reaction he blames on the Covid shot, has likened the treatment of people suffering vaccine injuries to that of returning veterans with health issues after the Vietnam War.
Dr Rado Faletic has slammed the Therapeutic Goods Administration’s (TGA) adverse event reporting process, saying the medicines regulator tasked with vaccine safety surveillance was “simply uninterested” in investigating his symptoms despite submitting multiple reports.
“I’m similar to thousands of Aussies. After the vaccine I had a huge constellation of symptoms from head to toe,” the 46-year-old said, describing it as similar to “mutant long Covid”.
“The worst has been an oppressive brain fog. I’ve had headaches, chest pains, abdominal pains, unbelievable muscle twitching, issues focusing my vision. Basically I’ve been unable to work for eight months. I’m only now just starting to feel a little bit normal. This is not a mild side effect – this has been life-changing.”
Dr Faletic said doctors and specialists were unable to find anything obviously wrong with him.
“You go to the hospital, they take your blood, do an echocardiogram or X-ray or MRI and don’t find anything,” he said. “They say, ‘Well you look fine, go home and rest.’”
He added, “I don’t necessarily blame the doctors. The problem is there hasn’t been a test to find out what’s wrong. I know some people are getting misdiagnosed with anxiety or functional neurological disorder – that’s not what’s going on. It’s a physical injury.”
Dr Faletic, who earned his PhD in hypersonic technology from the ANU and now runs an international research consulting firm based in Canberra, says his faith in the scientific and medical community has been badly shaken by his experience.
He received his first Pfizer dose on October 19 last year and his second on November 9. He had a bad reaction to both “within hours”, but says the second was “dramatically off the charts”.
“I waited a little while (to take the vaccine) – I work with technology and have a science background, so I understood that with a new product, new technology, there could be some things we don’t know about,” he said.
“I thought, enough time has passed, surely our government would have flagged any reactions of concern. I took it and all this stuff happened to me. It’s not a matter of it being a coincidence – it all happened within hours of the shots. Then I thought, surely the government would be interested in what’s happened to me? Nope.”
Dr Faletic says it soon became clear to him that the TGA wasn’t interested. “I’ve done 50 rounds with the TGA on this,” he said.
“They’ve said, ‘We can find no safety signals,’ which I think is disingenuous if not outright lying. In my small personal circle I know over a dozen people with different long vax problems, [ranging from] ongoing headaches, memory problems or brain fog to some people who were basically bedridden for months.”
When he went searching for answers, he found “hundreds of people” in online groups who had experienced similar symptoms and submitted reports themselves.
“The TGA still claims there is nothing to see,” he said.
“We are being treated with the same type of derision and condescension as Vietnam vets when they came back damaged. The government doesn’t want to acknowledge us, people in the community look down on us. There are a lot of parallels.”
In the 1970s, Australian troops who had returned from Vietnam began to experience high incidences of cancer and other illnesses, with the government initially denying exposure to Agent Orange and other chemicals sprayed by the US military was to blame.
While health regulators and drug manufacturers including Pfizer have previously denied any causal link between the vaccines and neurological symptoms, the tide appears to be slowly turning as a growing number of experts call for more investigation.
Earlier this year, Sydney woman Daniella Lenarczyk, 34, spoke out about her persistent symptoms that included migraines, tinnitus, neck pain and numbness in her arm.
In the US, the National Institutes of Health conducted a small observational study last year of patients who reported neurological problems within one month of Covid vaccination, including pins and needles in the face or limb, orthostasis – sudden decrease in blood pressure when standing or sitting – heat intolerance and palpitation.
That paper, currently in preprint, concluded that “a variety of neuropathic symptoms may manifest after SARS-CoV-2 vaccinations and in some patients might be an immune-mediated process”.
“There doesn’t seem to be a majority theory,” Dr Faletic said.
“Whilst we’ve all been damaged in the same way, our cluster of symptoms vary from person to person.”
In a statement, the TGA said it “monitors the safety of Covid-19 vaccines using information from a variety of sources, including analysis of adverse event reports submitted to the TGA, emerging published literature, worldwide safety data submitted by vaccine sponsors and information shared by international regulators”.
“If the TGA identifies a safety concern it will take regulatory action to address the safety issue and promptly provide information to the public,” a spokeswoman said.
“The recognised adverse effects of Covid-19 vaccines are included in the approved Product Information (PI). These are updated as new safety information is identified. To date, the TGA has undertaken 26 actions with the sponsors to include new safety information in the PIs for Covid-19 vaccines.”
Those have included the addition of hypoaesthesia (reduced sense of touch or numbness) and paraesthesia (an unusual feeling in the skin, such as a tingling or crawling sensation) to the PIs for Comirnaty (Pfizer) and Vaxzevria (AstraZeneca).
Meanwhile, new figures obtained by news.com.au reveal the federal government’s vaccine injury compensation scheme has approved just 16 payouts in six months of operation.
The Covid-19 vaccine claims scheme allows people to claim a one-off payment ranging from $1000 to $20,000 for lost wages or other expenses if they suffer a bad reaction, and in cases of death the family may be able to claim funeral costs.
But the scheme has been criticised by legal experts and victims as overly complex and narrowly targeted towards a very limited number of officially recognised adverse effects.
Services Australia confirmed it had received 2225 applications as of June 2. Of these just 16 have been approved, 49 have been withdrawn and 671 are “waiting further information from applicants”.
“The assessment process can be complex, and claims may also be reviewed independently by medical and other appropriately qualified experts,” a spokesman said.
“In many cases, Services Australia has had to seek additional information from applicants in order to further progress consideration of their application. In other cases, applications have also been withdrawn. If found eligible, applicants are given up to six months to accept an offer of compensation, therefore finalisation of claims may also take some time.”
Services Australia declined to provide any data on the amounts of payouts or types of claims, citing privacy concerns due to the small number involved.
According to the TGA’s most recent safety update, there have been 129,995 total adverse event reports from 59.4 million vaccine doses administered to June 5.
Eleven deaths have been ruled as likely linked to vaccination, all after AstraZeneca.
No deaths have been officially linked to Pfizer in Australia from around 41 million doses administered.
In New Zealand, three deaths have been ruled as likely due to vaccine-induced myocarditis after Pfizer, from around 11 million doses.
Last month, the family of one of the 11 Australians who died after receiving AstraZeneca spoke out for the first time.
Victorian woman Robyn, a “fit and healthy” 77-year-old, died in September last year from Guillain-Barre syndrome.
Speaking to ABC Radio, her children said while they still supported Covid vaccination, they felt let down by the lack of government support.
They said they believed they were entitled to a lump-sum payment of $70,680 plus funeral expenses, but were critical about the complexity of the application process.
Her son Ross said reading through the vaccine claims policy, it felt callous. “It’s a policy that’s designed to protect medical professionals from legal repercussions if something happens, like to my mother,” he said.
“My understanding is that it is to facilitate the actual vaccine rollout, so the doctors aren’t scared to administer vaccines. But for people who have suffered from the side effects, it feels like we’re just an afterthought to that.”
Dr Faletic said he had also looked over the scheme carefully and “it’s absolutely clear they’ve written it to not include people like me”.
“From a philosophical point of view we had these massive, broad, sweeping economic sanctions on all of us – lockdowns, travel shutdown – all done because someone may transmit Covid, the precautionary principle,” he said.
“But when it’s these vaccines it’s the exact opposite – you have to prove every single thing.”
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Matt Canavan: Energy pie in the sky is great but how do we cook it?
We need coal still -- and gas mining opposition in NSW and Victoria needs to be stopped
The saying “pie in the sky” was coined by American labour activist Joe Hill. He penned a song criticising Christian labour activists who, in his view, let people live on “hay” in this life, but promised them “pie in the sky” in the next.
For a long time we have been promised our energy version of pie in the sky as long as we just keep investing in renewable energy.
Australia has swallowed this gospel and then some. We have installed renewable energy at a faster rate than any other country in the world. Australia has been building renewables at a rate of 200 watts per person per year. This is more than four times the rate of growth in Europe and North America.
Yet here we are are, with no pie, and power prices that are out of control in a country blessed with energy resources.
To get power prices down we must drop our obsession with pie in the sky solutions that we are told will work in the next world. Wind and solar that is not reliable is the most fashionable but there are a variety of pies that have been promised.
Hydrogen, batteries, pumped hydro and the latest, small modular nuclear reactors. None of these things have been successfully used at scale anywhere. Yet the energy charlatans continue to promise their latest snake oil to a gullible public.
I do think we should consider nuclear but the case for it is undermined when some push the myth that a small scale nuclear reactor can just be bought off the shelf. Modular reactors are still in the design and testing phase and could be years or decades away from commercial application.
We have an energy crisis today and we need solutions that will work within years not decades. The scale of the crisis is hard to fathom and has blindsided our energy regulators who had been drunk on the renewable energy Kool Aid. Since the Liddell coal fired power station shut its first unit in April (its remaining three will shut over the next year) wholesale power prices have skyrocketed to more than 5 times their average levels.
The wholesale power price makes up about a third of the electricity bill you pay in your home. So unless something is done soon your electricity bill will more than double.
The creation and distribution of electricity is a complex engineering challenge that few understand. But because of that there is a tendency to think that the economics of energy is complex too. It is not.
To bring down power prices we simply need to increase the supply of reliable power. To fix the crisis we have now we need to focus on options that work today, not ones that might help tomorrow.
Hundreds of High Efficiency, Low Emission coal fired power stations have built around the world yet we do not have one with the latest technology in Australia. We have the world’s best coal that is best suited to these modern coal fired power stations. We should build some to replace our ageing coal fired power fleet.
We should remove the red and green tape on the gas industry that is creating gas shortages especially in southern Australia. Victoria continues to demand that Queensland send more of its gas to it despite having a complete ban on fracking.
As Ronald Reagan said there are no easy answers but there are simple ones.
We simply need to generate more reliable power because more supply of electricity will bring the price down. If we don’t focus on the real solutions soon our only hope will be to pray for an intervention from the sky.
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Public sympathy won’t pay costs of false refugee status
JENNIFER ORIEL
On the day Labor won the election, illegal immigrants set sail for Australia. Under the Coalition government, there had been no boat arrivals for two years. In the three weeks since Labor came to power, three vessels from Sri Lanka have been intercepted. Border security and immigration played a key role in Labor’s demise as a political force for nearly a decade. It is already showing weakness on national security and adopting a populist approach where firmer resolve is required.
By ministerial intervention, Sri Lankan couple Nades and Priya Murugappan were granted bridging visas last month. After fighting deportation for years, the Murugappans have a kind of celebrity status in the Australian media. Their protracted fight to gain citizenship is depicted as a battle between the persecuted poor and a conservative government that insisted on strong border security. Labor pledged to release them from detention if it came to power and made good on the promise when Jim Chalmers, acting as interim home affairs minister, intervened to grant them a bridging visa.
The media has painted the Murugappan story in a sympathetic light, portraying them as victims. New Labor Prime Minister Anthony Albanese joined the chorus of lament, describing the Murugappans being taken in the middle of the night by authorities and saying Australia should do better than that. Ethnic Communities Council of WA president Suresh Rajan said: “Despite everything we as a nation have thrown at them, they appear to be incredibly loving and incredibly fond of Australians.”
The widespread sympathy is at odds with reality, given multiple court proceedings found the Tamil family were not refugees. After the High Court of Australia rejected an application to hear an appeal from them last year, then immigration minister Alex Hawke said it “followed a series of previous decisions by the Department of Home Affairs, Administrative Appeals Tribunal, Federal Circuit Court, Federal Court, Full Federal Court and High Court in relation to the family”.
One of the most notable decisions was made by the Federal Circuit Court, which rejected the Tamil family’s appeal against deportation. Justice Caroline Kirton found the initial Immigration Assessment Authority denying them refugee status was valid. She noted the Sri Lankan civil war had ended in 2009 and Nades, who claimed a fear of persecution, had returned to Sri Lanka three times during the civil war without harm. Former home affairs minister Peter Dutton said the Murugappan case was “completely without merit in terms of their claim to be refugees”.
A Department of Home Affairs spokesperson told the ABC the Tamil family’s case had been assessed over many years by various tribunals and courts and consistently found not to warrant refugee status. The spokesperson said: “Foreign nationals who do not hold a valid visa are expected to depart voluntarily.” But the Murugappans declined to do so and in January, Federal Circuit Judge Heather Riley ruled that three members of the family could reapply for bridging visas.
The victory for the Tamil couple in gaining prime ministerial support for their permanent residency bid could be a green light to people-smugglers. Sri Lankan authorities have suggested the country’s current economic woes are a major push factor driving illegal boat arrivals on Australian shores. Yet it was a major issue back in 2019 when Dutton visited Sri Lanka.
Speaking to The Weekend Australian, Sri Lankan navy spokesman Indika de Silva said the navy had been apprehending at least one boat a week for the past month. He noted that people-smugglers are fooling the population into believing they will have a better life in Australia, even though Labor has not announced plans to welcome illegal boat arrivals. The Labor government has committed to maintaining the Coalition’s key border security policy, Operation Sovereign Borders. But people-smugglers are liars and cheats. They exploit legal loopholes, look for signs of weakness in government policy and play the victim when caught. One common tactic is to plead refugee status falsely. Some use boats to bypass proper vetting procedures because their passengers are economic migrants, not genuine refugees. Others ferry criminals across borders to escape justice in their home countries where the law may be less liberal. The reality of terrorists exploiting weak border policy was brought into gruesome clarity by the jihadi attacks on Western soil at the height of Islamic State power.
Albanese knows the history of Labor government includes disastrous border security failures. When last in office, Labor dismantled Howard-era policy for what it claimed was a more humane approach to people seeking asylum. The compassionate approach resulted in more than 50,000 people arriving by boat and 1200 dying at sea. More than 8000 children were left in detention. The Coalition cleaned up the mess and estimated the cost at more than $17bn.
In recent months, Australia has followed the rest of the developed world in facing inflationary pressures as a result of the Covid pandemic. Rising interest rates and the high price of basic necessities will force many Australians into financial hardship. The priority of the government must be ensuring a return to prosperity. Short-term feel-good policies must give way to long-term strategic planning. At the last census, more than 116,000 Australians were homeless. In the turbulent economic times ahead, priority must be given to helping existing citizens including newly settled refugees and migrants. We should welcome those who demonstrate respect for our country and rule of law by undertaking proper processes to gain visas.
The Murugappan case might be the exception to the rule, but people-smugglers will sell it as the rule. However well liked by the Biloela community, their case will encourage other foreign nationals to think they have a chance of permanent residency in Australia even with asylum claims not recognised by the courts. Labor will be faced with the consequences and taxpayers will be left with the bill.
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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)
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Sunday, June 12, 2022
Aboriginal mother claims she was followed around a Kmart store by 'racially profiling' staff and her bags searched as she shopped with her family
This woman's treatment certainly seems extraordinary and oppressive. She undoubtedly deserves an apology at least. But what happened should be understood nonetheless.
In their ancestral hunting lifestyle, Aborigines have developed enormous skills pertinent to that lifestyle. And those skills make them extraordinarily skilled sneak thieves. Combine that with their disrespect for white society and you get a lot of property crime from them. And in a working class suburb like Merryylands, retailers would be well aware of that.
So Aborigines in general are a problem there and that makes individual Aborigines suspicious. The lady bore the brunt of the perceptions that her fellow Aborigines have created. Sad for her but probably inescapable
An indigenous musician claims she was racially profiled and accused of stealing while shopping with her children at Kmart.
Australian rapper Barkaa, real name Chloe Quaylee, was shopping at her local Kmart store in the western Sydney suburb of Merrylands on Wednesday night.
She claimed she and her family were watched and followed by three staff and stopped from leaving the store until they checked her bags.
'I walked into Kmart with my family and was spotted by one of the women who worked there, who continued staring at us,' Barkaa wrote in an Instagram post.
'She then grabs two young men (one that was in uniform and one that wasn't) and all three followed me through the toy section with my young kids, snickering things under their breathe and laughing.'
Barkaa confronted the woman asking whether 'she was ok', the woman replied: 'yes, just looking at this' - which she then told the woman: 'I know you are following me, can you please stop, it's rude.'
The mother-of-three called her children to follow her and leave the store when two young men allegedly followed them through the aisles.
'As we were leaving the two young men followed us so I decided to start video recording as it was distressing and humiliating for me,' Barkaa wrote.
'Once we got to the check out and checked all of our items through and proceeded to walk out, we were then stopped by a young woman who said "I have to check your bag".'
Barkaa claimed three Kmart workers pulled out all the items she bought out of her bags and insisted they 'had to because it was their job' - while other customers left with their bags unchecked.
'I said to them, 'I have no need to steal, I'm in here with my kids, I have more than enough to pay for these items,' Barkaa told the Kmart staff.
The artist felt 'humiliated and ashamed' but believed she had to speak out against racism and discrimination and had the platform to do so - sharing the experience with her 59,700 followers.
'I have the platform to do so and I wish this wasn't my job, but so many of us are still being discriminated against and racially profiled, followed around in stores and targeted just for being who we are,' she wrote.
'Tonight I felt humiliated and ashamed, I had people looking at me and my young kids like we had done something wrong.
'I felt like crying when I got out of the shop but instead I had to walk off and explain to my kids what just happened and comfort my eldest daughter. 'I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired.'
The budget retailer, which is a subsidiary of Wesfarmers, said it was aware of Barkaa's experience and was investigating the matter further. 'We are aware of Barkaa’s experience in our store and we are investigating internally and taking it extremely seriously,' Kmart told Daily Mail Australia.
'We have been in contact with Barkaa and are speaking with her to understand more about her experience. 'We want all our customers to have a great experience every time they are in one of our stores and we understand we have not delivered on this experience this time around.'
In two Instagram story posts on Friday night, one of which was deleted, Barkaa labelled users leaving negative comments as 'whinging racists'. 'It's 2022, I don't need racists for permission to be a Blak [sic] woman in this country with a voice,' she wrote. 'What happened was unacceptable... I'm not backing down and I have every right to be upset... it was traumatic for myself and my babies.'
'Fancy being called a thief on stolen land,' she wrote and then quickly deleted.
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This is the electricity crisis we had to have
It's all about gas
This is the electricity crisis we had to have. It forces leaders in business, politics – state and federal – and regulators to face the big structural problems, feet to the flame.
Thankfully the new Labor government has not had a knee-jerk response to the crisis. Instead ministers claw their way up the learning curve. This is “not an easy fix” they say. Translated this means customers, retail and manufacturing will feel pain for some time.
The crisis has at last demonstrated to Australians just how important gas is as a reliable firm power that, unlike coal, can be turned on and off with the flick of a switch.
What just happened in the past couple of months? The crisis is both simple and very complicated.
The East Coast lost more power more suddenly than the USS Enterprise on a bad day. It was not gas which failed, it was coal. Like it or not, coal still normally provides 60 per cent of the grid’s electricity, but incredibly, up to a third of it is out of action.
A plethora of failures at the largest coal-fired power stations have caused this, from unplanned shutdowns to coal supply chain problems triggered by wet weather. Coal power stations once down, take time to come back. On Friday came the grim news that AGL had lost half its capacity at NSW’s Bayswater, and Loy Yang in Victoria would take an extra two months to fix.
At the same time a cold snap has caused customer demand for energy to rise. Unfortunately wet weather has meant that renewables have not been at their best.
This supply-demand mismatch has everyone scrabbling for more gas to fill the gap.
But there are limits to the amount of gas that is easily accessible. In part, that is because the system has been set up to export most of the gas in production. And in part it is because for years now opportunities to access new gas, in NSW and Victoria in particular, have been frustrated. Victorian Premier Dan Andrews is insincere to deny this.
What is missing are the huge transmission links between states that would help the grid to balance energy capacity. Poles and wires infrastructure is woefully behind.
What is also missing is the capacity market called for by the former Energy Security Board chief Dr Kerry Schott – with instructions last year to “just get on with it”. Schott’s proposal was that the market would pay for firm reliable power generators, be they hydro, battery, gas or indeed coal, to have energy capacity available when urgently required.
Labor’s crisis meeting with state counterparts agreed to a market where firm renewables could be part of the capacity market but not coal.
Now Snowy 2.0, the flagship renewables project that would provide oodles of firm power is delayed another 19 months.
Farcically, even when that project is built, there is still no clear date for the transmission line, the Hume Link, to take that power to Sydney.
What a mess. What a contrast to Labor’s grand Powering Australia plan which promises that by 2025 family power bills will be $275 a year cheaper than they were at the end of 2021.
And Labor knows that any major intervention to permanently cap retail prices risks knocking investment confidence. It is looking for $58bn from the private sector to help build the infrastructure to deliver low price renewable power.
Back to Scotty in the boiler room needing more power now: the East Coast can’t get it from coal, nor from renewables. It has to be more gas.
Last week the market operator AEMO had to put a temporary cap of $40 a gigajoule on gas prices which had spiked to $800, a price that would blow up any manufacturer needing gas. On Thursday, that temporary cap was extended in NSW and Victoria.
Two questions immediately come to mind.
Why can’t the East Coast demand a 15 per cent domestic gas reserve, effective immediately and divert gas destined for the export market back into the home market?
And second, why can’t more loose gas that isn’t locked up and destined for export be found?
To the first, breaking an international gas contract with customers is not just a force majeure that threats Australia’s sovereign risk status. It also threatens the energy security of our Asian neighbours relying on Australian gas in Japan, Korea and elsewhere. These customers could be left scrambling for gas at record prices after Russia turned off the tap.
When the newly elected Labor government went first to Tokyo for the Quad meeting, then to the Pacific Islands and most recently to Indonesia, the No.1 agenda item was national security.
Two of the three big LNG joint ventures on the East Coast are already supplying 10 to 15 per cent of production to the domestic market anyway. Only Santos has difficulty.
To the second question, it is likely that more gas can be found than the sector cares to admit. This is where Labor needs to quickly get to know the bosses running the major oil and gas companies.
Business has a far more sophisticated understanding of the market. New Nationals leader David Littleproud says gas companies ride high in the stirrups and can see where the resource is accessible. Right now, that available spot gas sells for a terrific price on international markets.
This is where government jawboning around intervention comes in.
Last week, Energy Minister Chris Bowen branded the Coalition’s gas intervention mechanism as useless. But it was the threat of its use that has in the past squeezed more out of gas players.
This week Labor sensibly changed tack, ordering a review of the domestic gas security mechanism.
It is also a furphy that the pipeline bringing gas down is at capacity. It might have been at capacity on one day, but it is not at capacity at all times.
For new projects a gas domestic reservation plan seems sensible. Santos’ Narrabri gas project (which has been locked in red tape for nearly a decade) is all destined for the domestic market.
But the real urgency is to shore up coal-fired power where companies face every incentive to under-invest. Even coal supplies are running tight because miners can get much higher prices on the international market. So do coal generators lock in three-year coal contracts knowing there is risk of earlier closure as activist pressure continues?
Australia’s two biggest power players are under pressure. Origin’s accelerated closure of its Eraring coal-fired power station was on the premise that Snowy 2.0 would be up and running by 2025. It will not be. AGL has its own corporate crisis. Like politics, energy transition is the art of the possible and our political leaders are going to have to get their hands dirty.
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The Teals are useless, powerless and irrelevant
I sometimes struggle with similes. If a person is said not to have any particular utility, there’s no shortage of idiomatic phrases available. Ashtrays on motorbikes. Pockets on singlets. Ejection seats in helicopters. But these tend to be cliché. So, I’m going to settle on being as useful as a Teal independent in the parliament.
We saw the rise of the Teals at the federal election. I predicted their triumphs in Liberal blue-ribbon seats in Melbourne, Sydney and in Perth. We should have been immediately suspicious because truth be told, their rah-rah merch is more turquoise than teal. Alas, turquoise is a difficult spell – way too many vowels stuck together, and the plural form sounds clumsy.
See, I would have gone with Tree Tories but would have been shouted down in the focus group.
Much has been postulated about the rise of the Teals post-election. Demographers have scrambled to make sense of it and lapsed into furious disagreement. Some put it down to a shift to high density dwellings, the introduction of a new aspirational class of younger voters snapping up apartments and townhouses which might explain Kooyong and even Goldstein but in Mackellar not so much.
Others speak of global political trends towards progressivism among the professional classes combined with dwindling confidence in the major parties which might be right but a one off does not make a trend. It could easily be a blip.
Labor fretted and fingered the runes of electoral defeat in 2019 and flung policy overboard when it could have saved itself some angst and time in the post-match review and come up with two crisp words to understand it: Bill Shorten. Likewise, the Liberals might end their soul searching by the use of a similarly brief explanatory: Scott Morrison.
Conservative commentators and the odd conservative politician have determined these freshly turquoise-ed electorates lost once to the Liberals should be forsaken for ever more, left to their own devices, entire electorates reverted to p[arty political wastelands where candidates are pre-selected over a cucumber sandwich and herbal tea in a person’s loungeroom who claims he or she is a voice for the community.
The Teals are party that isn’t a party who aimed for the support of a critical demographic of forgotten people who drive Porsche Cayennes, enjoy negative gearing on their Sydney property portfolios, assorted middle class tax breaks on equity markets investments, have disposable income up the wah-zoo, and still think they’ve somehow been dudded by government.
Overall, the Teal phenomenon seems to be an assertion that the rich might be a waste of money, but the poor are a waste of time.
Now we come to the pointy end of the Teals’ political raison d’etre. Parliamentary politics. In what will surely be a crushing disappointment for the turquoise-bedecked, they find themselves stuck on a cross bench with Labor enjoying a workable majority on the floor of the House.
The first poignant reminder of their lack of political utility will come when they take their seats in the chamber no less than five metres away from Bob ‘The Hat’ Katter. Dispiriting for them, hugely amusing for the rest of us.
At the first sitting of the 47th Parliament, the Teals – nine of them in total, the freshly inducted members for Kooyong, Goldstein, Wentworth, North Sydney, Mackellar and Curtin will join the old salts already on a first-name basis with the staff at Aussies Café, the members for Clark, Indi and Warringah and maybe Mayo, too, depending on whether Rebekha Sharkie has shifted from the orange hue of the Centre Alliance or the more Zeitgeist packed turquoise.
And then down to business. The Teals have a trifecta of political purpose. The first is the Teals demand more parliamentary representation from women but of Labor’s 17 fresh faced MHRs, ten are women. Of Labor’s 77 seats in the chamber, 35 are women. Ten of the 23-member cabinet are women. This does smack of the Teals who aren’t a party being late to that particular party.
When it comes to the business of integrity, the Albanese government will create an independent anti-corruption commission. While the exact nature of the body is yet to find legislative form and will be subject to discussion and consultation across the parliament, the fact remains the Albanese government will have created it with or without the Teals.
And then we get to the biggie. Climate change. The Prime Minister has signalled an end to the climate wars, but no one seems to have told the Teals about the armistice. There is a global energy crisis driven in no small part by the conflict in Ukraine.
Resources Minister Madeleine King has said the solution to it is a sensible mix of coal, gas, and renewables.
“We need a sensible plan of action that looks at all the energy mix. That will be a combination of fossil fuel energy, coal for the moment, certainly gas for some time, but importantly renewables and hydro. Pitting them against each other or turning this into a political football – which we have done for far too long – has led us to this situation,” she told The Australian.
“My starting point is that all of our energy mix must be in the plan for the future. As things fluctuate, you have outages. The question becomes: how do we back them up? It’s gas right now. Will it be renewables in the future? It will, provided there’s proper investment and the battery storage capacity is built up.”
But there is little or no sign of flexibility coming from the turquoise sector on the crossbench, although Curtin’s Kate Cheney and Clark’s Andrew Wilkie seem at least to understand the nature of the problem.
Others, including Goldstein’s Zoe Daniel and Wentworth’s Allegra Spender are babbling about gas company profits. Being ideologically intractable puts any politician up there with the behaviour of the Greens (indeed there is no sign they have matured) who were walking expressions of the aphorism, the perfect is the enemy of the good.
Should many or all of them remain uncompromising, the debate over the energy mix driven by raging power prices and gas supply shortages will simply pass the Teals by, their musings consigned to angry letters to the editor of the Guardian.
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Hydrogen hot air
When Prime Minister Anthony Albanese declared in his election victory speech that his new government would work to make Australia ‘a green energy superpower’, those who knew anything about the problems involved groaned aloud.
Australia is already a major power in energy markets as it has vast reserves of coal and natural gas that other countries want, despite all the talk about net zero, and which can be easily transported. Renewable energy is different. Every country can generate its own energy, with equipment imported from China, and it is far more difficult to transport over long distances.
Admittedly some countries have less space for such activities, such as Singapore, Japan and the UK, but renewable energy activists are full of ideas for offshore wind generators and even floating generators, or photovoltaic panels on every rooftop and never mind what happens in the rainy season. They also all want to be energy superpowers, or ‘the Saudi Arabia of wind’ as UK Prime Minister Boris Johnston put it when he announced plans to build yet more offshore wind turbines around the UK.
In other words, why would any country buy expensive energy from Australia when they can generate their own expensive energy, especially as the problems of transporting energy many thousands of kilometres from Australia wind farms and solar installations will add greatly to the cost of that energy?
This point was forcefully made by renewable energy advocate Andrew Blakers, a professor of engineering at the Australian National University, on the Conversation in early April. He says that the federal government has already set aside hundreds of millions of dollars to help create a major green hydrogen export industry, particularly to Japan, for which Australia signed an export deal in January. However, he also points out that Japan has more than enough solar and wind energy to be self-sufficient in energy and – assuming all that energy is harnessed – does not need to import either fossil fuels or Australian green hydrogen. Whether or not you agree with Professor Blakers that Japan can realistically meet all of its energy needs from local renewable energy the country can certainly generate hydrogen locally.
In fact, Japan is already doing so with a government-supported facility for producing hydrogen derived from a token 20 MW of solar power, which started operating in March 2020. (Major coal power plants generate 2,000 MW plus.) The resulting small parcels of the gas are shipped in hydrogen tube trailers to be used in stationary fuel-cell systems and in specially adapted cars and buses. This is hardly world shattering but it far more than Australia is doing at the moment. However, Japan has pledged to develop the first full-scale hydrogen supply chain and is interested in importing the fuel, having built the Suiso Frontier, the first ship in the world designed to carry hydrogen. This has shipped one load of hydrogen from Australia which was produced using steam and natural gas, the usual method of producing hydrogen for industrial processes and far cheaper than using electrolysis (sticking two bare ends of wire attached to the same power source into water).
The Suiso shipment in January attracted some media attention without the stories noting that the shipment only involved a test quantity of around 70 tonnes. A good-sized LNG carrier will take 72,000 tonnes. The exercise would also have represented a net power loss, for the process of making, condensing and shipping hydrogen is known to be technically challenging and wasteful.
Professor Blakers cites an estimate that converting energy to hydrogen, shipping it to where it is needed and then converting back into energy could consume 70 per cent of the energy generated. Michael Liebreich, a senior contributor to BloombergNEF (new energy finance) wrote in 2020 that as an energy storage medium, hydrogen has only a 50 per cent round-trip efficiency – far worse than batteries. As a source of heat, he estimates that hydrogen costs four times as much as natural gas. Hydrogen pipelines also cost three times as much as power lines.
Activists who talk so glibly about using hydrogen to store energy are no doubt thinking of liquid natural gas, which is now the basis of a thriving international trade using purpose-built container vessels. The international trade in LNG, in which Australia is a major player, started growing in the 1960s with the large-scale adoption of techniques for liquifying the gas in giant facilities called ‘trains’ and for keeping it liquid for long periods in what amounts to giant thermos bottles. LNG requires low temperatures, minus 160 degrees centigrade, but the gas itself is a source of energy and some of that energy can be used to power the liquification process. Once at that temperature the liquid form of the gas can be stored relatively safely at atmospheric pressures.
But hydrogen is not methane. It is a much smaller molecule so seals and pipes that would comfortably prevent methane leakage do not keep hydrogen in. The liquification temperature for hydrogen is also much lower, specifically minus 253 degrees centigrade or just 14 degrees above what physicists call absolute zero – you can’t get any colder – requiring considerably more energy to achieve and maintain. The Suiso Frontier cargo was liquified in a special facility that was powered from the grid. Hydrogen is also a considerably more dangerous gas than methane. Transmission lines are safer, but the same problem with demand arises. One group has been trying to raise interest in building a $16 billion transmission line from northern Australia to Singapore for years. But if the Singaporeans felt the need for intermittent energy why not take it from neighbouring Malaysia which also has all sorts of schemes to generate green energy and transmission would not be so expensive? While activists are on the subject, they could calculate just how much intermittent energy would have to be transmitted over the proposed line to justify the investment.
But as demonstrated by the suspension of senior HSBC executive Stuart Kirk by HSBC pending an internal investigation into a presentation he made at an event, the Financial Times Moral Money Summit, in late May, reality in renewable energy debate is not the issue. Kirk’s presentation, entitled ‘Why investors need not worry about climate risk,’ pointed out that most of the projections of economic loss due to climate change either have to fudge the figures or come up with numbers that are too small over the long periods involved to matter at all. Among other valid points in his presentation, Kirk likened the climate crisis to the Y2K bug that predicted a widespread computer glitch at the turn of the millennium and declared that ‘unsubstantiated, shrill, partisan, self-serving, apocalyptic warnings are always wrong’. But as far as the greens are concerned reality and economic analysis are simply not relevant.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/06/hydrogen-hot-air/
************************************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)
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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
