In which era do Australian judges dwell?

Every so often a news report comes along which just confirms my suspicion that Australian judges live in another time and place from the rest of us mere mortals.
The Northern Territory News came up with this last Thursday:
"CHIEF Minister Paul Henderson said yesterday he did not believe a 13-year-old girl could consent to having sex with her teacher.
He made the comments after a Supreme Court judge said a teacher was not a rapist "as that word is ordinarily understood" because there was no evidence the sex he had with his student was not consensual.....
Justice Mildren said the teacher was not a "sexual predator" - but had suffered from a "life of loneliness".
WTF? Sexual abuse of a child is A O.K. if the person with all the power has a lousy life?
Justice Dean Mildren, gawd help us all, lectures to aspiring lawyers at the Northern Territory University besides supplying ready-made justifications to human predators.
Mildren is a serial offender when it comes to offering excuses for those caught abusing children.
This is de judge in 2008:
"Justice Dean seems to think that because teacher Paul Incani was "in love" with his sixteen year-old student {fifteen at time of the offence}, and the student was a "willing" partner in the relationship, that Mr Incani has been poorly treated and deserves to be freed from jail forthwith."

NSW: The prison state

If further evidence is needed to show that the NSW government has adopted a "lock 'em up and throw away the keys" approach to sentencing offenders, look no further than a sentence imposed by a magistrate in a NSW local court this week.

An offender appeared in a local court on a charge of driving with a mid-range prescribed concentration of alcohol. Admittedly the offender wasn't a clean-skin, but when a suggestion was made that the offender be sentenced to periodic detention the magistrate was told by a court officer there were no places available in periodic detention so that was ruled out as an option. Result: the offender was sentenced to six months’ jail. Read a report on the matter here.

Also, NSW magistrates have stated that their hands are often tied in relation to mentally ill persons when they appear in court. Those persons often end up in jail due to the lack of proper facilities that would better cater for their situations.

A magistrate said, “You shouldn’t have mentally ill people in jail – (it's) just not the place for them. There are clearly people who I’ve had before me – if you look at the facts and their background – and clearly there is a mental health issue – and yet a lot of the times they are held in custody when they should really be in hospital."

The magistrate's comment concurred with a media statement from the Mental Health Council of Australia which stated that jail exacerbated mental illness for sufferers, making the system counter productive." Read about this here.

But things don't end there.

Now, the NSW Attorney General, John Hatzistergos, is pushing for violent offenders to be kept in prison beyond their sentences if they show signs of being insufficiently rehabilitated by the NSW prisons system. Hatzistergos reckons special categories of offenders should go to prison for indeterminate periods, until the government decides their time is up. Read more about this here.

Does Target know something about about the Rudd Government's income management scheme that the rest of us don't?

"In its submission to the Senate inquiry into the new policy, the Society of St Vincent de Paul said: "Income management is returning social policy in Australia to the Depression-era Sustenance Allowance, commonly referred to as the 'susso'. The present legislation seeks to turn back the clock to provide the modern equivalent to a food ticket."
Of the 80 welfare organisations that made submissions to the inquiry, only two were in favour. Government reports have noted bad outcomes from income management over the last two years, including the 2008 Yu report and the 2009 productivity report.
The reports said that since income management began domestic violence reports in the targeted communities have increased 61%, substance abuse by 77%, school enrolments have remained unchanged, child malnutrition is higher and the total number of confirmed cases of child abuse rose from 66 in 2006-07 to 227 in 2008-09." {The Green Left in April 2010}

Nearly fell over backwards this week when I discovered that Target stores in New South Wales are advertising the Rudders-Macklin Centrelink BasicsCard beside their cash registers.
Maud up the Street swears that one store on the North Coast insisted that this income management scheme went operational this month across the state.
Now I know Big Brother government has spread like wildfire in Australia, but surely even Mother Macklin wouldn't impose national welfare payment quarantining for the unemployed, families and students before the NT state-wide trial of this scheme had even commenced.
So has this big multinational chain store got it wrong or is welfare payment rationing being advanced by stealth?
Either way it's not a good look and Maud reckons she's going to think twice about shopping at a store which obviously relishes its role in beating up on the less well-off.

The little town that doesn't....

Doesn't want McDonald's plastic hambugers and wall-to-wall litter that is.

Pic found on Facebook

Mercurius on Hockey-ed Wingnuts

Can't do better today than to read Mercurius across at Larvatus Prodeo as he hold forth on Wingnut as she is spoke: “Personal responsibility”.
Here's the journalist's take on Aussie Shadow Treasurer Joe Hockey's free market credentials Joe Hockey blames government intervention for global financial crisis; and here is Uncle Joe's speech IN DEFENCE OF ENTERPRISE' ADDRESS TO THE EIDOS INSTITUTE 12:30PM WEDNESDAY 14 APRIL 2010.
Particularly enjoy the fact that the boy thinks that:
"Enterprise separates the human species from the rest of the Earth’s living creatures. Without it, human beings would have achieved nothing beyond our most basic animal needs".
Yup. Forget empathy, altruism, collective effort and opposable thumbs - 'twas the individual and free markets which set us firmly on the path out of pre-historic Africa.

My old mum was right - Teh Tube makes us dumb

One from the locker that I forgot to post!

I don't know how many times as a teenager I was told that the television in the living room was an 'idiot box'.
All those visions of Frankie Ifield yodelling, rope petticoats swirling and (by today's standards) sedate rocking around the clock apparently set the old grey matter permanently on snooze mode.
Only grandads glued to the cricket on the radio were immune to its insidious effects.
And it looks like my old mum was right - lotsa Aussies have finally forgotten how to turn the thing on!


mUmBRELLA says: "Total prime time TV audiences have fallen below 5m in Australia, according to a new analysis of viewing data so far this year. This is despite the arrival of the new Freeview and subscription TV channels to tempt viewers. According to the analysis of figures across the prime 6pm to 10.30pm slot, the average audience has fallen from 5,027,868 in 2008 to 4,969,810 in 2009. This marks a decline of around 60,000 prime time viewers per evening – or a fall of just over 1%. This is despite the Australian population growing by more than 2% during the same period."

Pic from GraniteGrok