Kevin Hogan where are you?

In December 2009 the Nats selected Kevin Hogan to run against Labor's Janelle Saffin in the Page electorate on the NSW North Coast.
Since then locals have caught sight of Kevin as he tried to get people to sign Hartsuyker's ill-fated bat petition earlier in the year, a bit later when he went head-to-head with Saffin in a Lismore health debate and then when he popped up to verbally kiss a certain Liberal lycra clad rear end. But we haven't seen hide nor hair of him lately even though he is supposedly travelling around the electorate listening to "concerns".
Is he trying to keep a low profile until the federal election writs are issued or has he absolutely nothing to say that the media has found interesting enough to print?
At this rate I'll turn up to cast my vote knowing nothing about the man except he's rather flat, was formerly a market trader, then it seems a talking head on the tellie and is now some sort of self-employed financial consultant and cow cockie.
If he doesn't speak up soon I might mistake the bloke for that other Kevin Hogan who was recently nabbed trying to pass counterfeit readies in Georgia.
So where the bl**dy hell are you, Kev?

Fess up - you grinned when you heard that Goldman Sachs was charged with fraud, didn't you?

"WALL STREET POWERHOUSE ACCUSED OF FRAUD: The government says Goldman Sachs & Co. sold mortgage investments without telling the buyers that the securities were crafted with input from a client who was betting on them to fail. Goldman denies the civil fraud allegations."
{Google News}

The Commission brings this securities fraud action against Goldman, Sachs & Co. ("GS&Co") and a GS&Co employee, Fabrice Tourre ("Tourre"), for making materially misleading statements and omissions in connection with a synthetic collateralized debt obligation ("CDO") GS&Co structured and marketed to investors. This synthetic CDO, ABACUS 2007AC1, was tied to the performance of subprime residential mortgage-backed securities ("RMBS") and was structured and marketed by GS&Co in early 2007 when the United States housing market and related securities were beginning to show signs of distress. {SEC versus Goldman Sachs & Co. and Another}

I know I had a grin from ear to ear when I heard that the financial anaconda had finally been caught out and I think I'm not alone in that. I'm not sure who demanded trial by jury but I'm willing to bet that there will be few in any American juror pool who will be unaffected by the sub-prime debacle and it aftermath.

"Ever since the financial catastrophe of 2007-08, Goldman Sachs has been hyper-vigilant when it comes to the media. Many like myself have been complained about and rudely denied access. The blogosphere has been patrolled 24/7 so that critics can be promptly pounced on.
Now we know why.
Yesterday's bombshell announcement that Goldman was charged with fraud by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is hardly surprising. This is Wall Street's last survivor, and it is about to be ordered off the island too, so to speak." {My confidence in the SEC is restored}

Tweets on the subject:
timbray: Any morning where Goldman Sachs is getting prosecuted by the Feds is a good morning. Pity it's civil not criminal.

theexpert: Please ... PLEASE, prove to me that Twitter has some relevance. Make Goldman Sachs a trending topic.

bobhayward: RT @Lucas_Wyrsch: In Goldman Sachs We Do Not Trust http://dlvr.it/XFbl http://myloc.me/65XdS

KeithSwiderski How can the government sue Goldman Sachs? I thought Goldman Sachs ran the government?

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.