Serco operated high security prison in Queensland found to be one of two privately run gaols at risk of significant corruption

This is what Serco says of itself at www.serco.com:

Serco is trusted by governments and organisations around the world to transform and deliver essential services. Employing over 50,000 people, we operate across more than 20 countries in Justice, Immigration, Health, Transport, Defence, and Citizen Services.

Serco provides essential justice services in Australia, New Zealand and the UK, from the safe and secure operation of prisons, young adult, and escorting services, to managing the reintegration of ex-offenders into society. We help governments deliver a more efficient and effective justice system, by employing the best people, getting the basics right, championing service innovations, and forming community partnerships. 

By taking a rehabilitative approach to justice, we help to make it less likely that people will return to the criminal justice system, help to rebuild lives, and reduce the financial and wider costs of crime to the public…….

Serco has been operating correctional services in Australia for almost 15 years. As a prison operator, safety and security is always our first priority. The new Clarence Correctional Centre is our most recent contract, which will begin operations in 2020. Once completed, this 1,700-bed state-of-the-art facility will be the largest correctional centre in Australia. 

The Clarence Correctional Centre is being delivered by the NSW Government in partnership with the Northern Pathways Consortium. To learn more about the project visit northernpathways.com.au.

This is the current reality in Australia…..

Sydney Criminal Lawyers, 28 March 2019:

The Queensland Government has announced that it will spend $111million over the next four years, returning two privately run prisons to state management.

The Arthur Gorrie Correctional Centre and the Southern Queensland Correctional Centre (SQCC), two high-security prisons, are currently run by private operators. 

However the Government will now take over these contracts in response to recommendations from the Crime and Corruption Commission’s Taskforce Flaxton, which last year conducted an investigation into the entire Queensland prison system.

The post-investigation report was scathing as a whole, finding a string of systemic issues, that put prisons ‘at risk of significant corruption.’

These included over-crowding, excessive use of force, misuse of authority, introduction of contraband and inappropriate relationships all within prison walls. The report also found that the number of assaults on staff was higher at privately run facilities, due to lower staff numbers and therefore less supervision.

The South East Queensland Correctional Centre is run by Serco.....

Serco came under fire in 2017 after the release of the Paradise Papers which detailed that Serco’s UK lawyers expressed written concerns that their client had been engaging in fraud, covering up the abuse of detainees at Australian detention centres, and even mishandling radioactive waste. The firm described Serco as a “high-risk” organisation with a “history of problems, failures, fatal errors and overcharging”.

Internationally, the company runs prisons in the UK and New Zealand. In Australia it has been operating for more than 15 years, managing prisons in Western Australia and Queensland as well as 11 immigration centres. It also holds several defence contracts and is currently building a mega-correctional facility near Grafton in New South Wales.

The Clarence Correctional Centre roughly 12 km from Grafton, NSW is due to open in June 2020.

Hopefully UK based Serco Group Pty Ltd through its subsidiary Serco Australia Pty Limited will by then have addressed all the issues in its chequered past.

Climate Change and Populations: where will you move to?

This graphic looks so far away doesn't it?

Children from a foreign country in the background, impossibly high calendar dates and population numbers as well as the word "Refugees".

But if one looks closely the first calendar date is only 11 short years away, the next just 31 years and the date after that 81 years.

And not all "refugees" will be foreign once climate change impacts accelerate.

There will be literally thousands of ordinary people living in Australia who will at some point be driven inland by rising water making their homes and coastal towns or villages uninhabitable or uninsurable.

There will be years on end where the entire population of inland country towns will be living in temporary accommodation as they try to rebuild what was lost to raging bushfires - if they ever do.

Little village communities supporting families on surrounding farmland will be disappear due to water scarcity which never ends.

These will be this country's home-grown refugees and all states and territories need to start reworking their natural disaster contingency plans to include the need to relocate a great many people on a permanent basis between now and 2100.

The scale of internal climate migration will ramp up by 2050 and then accelerate unless concerted climate and development action is taken. [World Bank Group, 2018, Groundswell : Preparing for Internal Climate Migration]

PROPAGANDA: When Murdoch media asset joins with a hard right lobby group & inhouse commentator to run a line from the Liberal-Nationals election campaign playbook

“It would not be impossible to prove with sufficient repetition and a psychological understanding of the people concerned that a square is in fact a circle. They are mere words, and words can be molded until they clothe ideas and disguise.” [Attributed to Joseph Goebbels, German Third Reich Minister for Propaganda 1933-1945]

Daniel Wild: I think the Greens are much more extreme and a much greater threat to the Australian way of life than One Nation. Why hasn’t anyone from the Labor Party come out saying the Greens are a threat and they will preference them last?

MORE: https://t.co/SHDZ2CeIUB pic.twitter.com/Pil7kKm0pC

— Sky News Australia (@SkyNewsAust) March 29, 2019

.@GemmaTognini: The Greens are drunk on their own urine. Thousands of jobs would be lost if their renewable energy targets were met. They are reckless and so ideologically driven that they don’t care about the implications of their policies.

MORE: https://t.co/eus3trsWJH pic.twitter.com/nsHtgUixMI

— Sky News Australia (@SkyNewsAust) March 29, 2019

More evidence of Australia’s national extinction crisis

Twenty years ago my garden and the street in which I live rang with the sound of frogs calling after dark - at times it was deafening and drowned out the sound of the television news presenter.

Frogs of different species were in my letterbox, in the garden trees, catching moths on the window sills, hopping about on my patio and frequently in the house.

No more.

Anyone living in urban areas of the NSW Northern Rivers region would be aware that fewer frog species and fewer numbers within those frog species have been part of garden, park and nature reserve landscapes over the last twenty years.

Loss of habitat due to land clearing, drainage or development, depredation by introduced species, over use of herbicides/pesticides by councils and homeowners, decease in available food sources and disease are taking their toll on local frog populations.

When one sees the scale writ large it is terrible to behold.......

The Guardian, 29 March 2019:

A deadly disease that wiped out global populations of amphibians led to the decline of 500 species in the past 50 years, including 90 extinctions, scientists say.

A global research effort, led by the Australian National University, has for the first time quantified the worldwide impact of chytridiomycosis, or chytrid fungus, a fungal disease that eats away at the skin of amphibians.

The disease was first discovered in 1998 by researchers at James Cook University in Queensland investigating the cause of mysterious, mass amphibian deaths.

Chytridiomycosis is caused by two fungal species, both of which are likely to have originated in Asia, and their spread has been facilitated by humans through activities such as the legal and illegal pet trade.

Forty-two researchers worked on the new study, published in Science on Friday, which pinpoints the extent of the disease and how devastating it has been for frog, toad and salamander species.

They found evidence that at least 501 species had declined as a result of chytrid fungus and 90 of those were presumed or confirmed extinct.

“The results are pretty astounding” Benjamin Scheele, a research fellow at the ANU and the project’s lead researcher, said.

“We’ve known that chytrid is really bad for the better part of two decades but actually researching and quantifying those declines, that’s what this study does.”

The scientists identified declines in amphibian species in Europe, Africa, Central and South America and Australia because of the disease.

Scheele said there were no declines in Asia because species had evolved to be naturally resistant.

The impact of the disease has been hardest in Central and South America and in eastern Australia, where it flourishes in cool and moist conditions. It does not survive at temperatures above 28C.

In Australia, chytrid fungus is present in upland areas along the Great Dividing Range, down to the Otways in Victoria, and the edges of South Australia and Tasmania.

It is also found in some of the cooler mountain areas of Queensland.

Scheele said in Australia alone, there were 240 species of amphibian, 40 of which the researchers believed had suffered population declines as a result of chytrid fungus.

Seven of those 40 are believed to be extinct. One of those is the mountain mistfrog, which was last year added to a group of species the Australian government has been assessing to determine whether it should be moved to the national list of extinct wildlife.

Other species, including both the southern and northern corroboree frog, have suffered because of chytrid fungus, but large-scale captive breeding programs have worked to prevent their extinction..... [my yellow highlighting]

In which Clarence Valley Council fails to take due consideration of biodiversity & only pays lip service to potential cultural landscape when voting on an inadequately researched council master plan

Wooded area above the dirt road seen in the bottom right-hand corner of this snapshot was that section of land covered by the Clarence Valley Regional Airport Master Plan which figured prominately in councillors' debate.

When the regular monthly meeting of predominately white, middle-aged male, elected councillors in a NSW local government area again deliberately choose to have the meeting opened with a prayer* by yet another 'ordained' representative of one of the Protestant religious institutions named in the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, it can only go downhill from there - and it did.

Predictably Cr. Williamson sought to close down debate at the earliest opportunity with regard to any alternative approach to planning issues surrounding adoption of a master plan on council-owned operational land.

Just as predictably Cr. Baker displayed a level of ignorance concerning everything from how far a 10 km radius surrounding airport land actually stretched (seems he believed it went as far as est. 25kms southeast to Wooli beach) through to the professional conduct of accredited ecologists and motives behind their reports ( a subject on which he sounded more than a little paranoid).

However, the incident that would have had regular council watchers sitting up in their seats occurred when the council general manager rather aggressively inserted himself into the debate uninvited and without permission, by directing a question to an elected councillor. 

Which immediately raised the question - has he caught a bad case of the dreaded Greensill-itis and if so can it be cured?

The Daily Examiner, 28 May 2019, p.1:

Clarence Valley Mayor Jim Simmons has apologised for a procedural error which led to a councillor walking out of the chamber during a heated debate.

At Tuesday’s Clarence Valley Council meeting Cr Greg Clancy accused the council of gagging debate on a proposed Master Plan for the Grafton Regional Airport, before departing from the chamber without seeking leave.

Cr Clancy had moved a motion calling for environmental reports and information about Aboriginal heritage in the area to be included in the plan, which sparked a fierce argument among the councillors.

After about an hour of questions and debate Cr Richie Williamson, moved the motion be put, but this sparked an outbreak of interjections.

“What, are we being gagged right down the line?” interjected Cr Peter Ellem.

Mayor Jim Simmons adjourned the meeting for 10 minutes to seek advice on the matter.

“When the meeting resumed Cr Clancy came in to gather some things and I did apologise to him at the time, but he didn’t stay.”

Cr Simmons said he didn’t think council would act on some strong language Cr Clancy used at the time.

“Greg is a very strong advocate for the environment and I can understand he was disappointed how things were going,” he said.

“I’m very disappointed how things panned out and other than some language about gagging debate, I can’t really recall what was said.”

Cr Simmons blamed himself for the mistaken ruling, which inflamed the situation.

“What I said didn’t help the situation and I take full responsibility for that,” he said.

He said the council code of meeting practice required councillors to seek permission to leave the chamber early, which Cr Clancy did not do, but he did not think councillors would seek to take this further.

“In my view it would have been better for Greg to stay in the chamber,” he said.

“Councillors voted against his motion, 5-3 I think from memory, so it was a close thing.”

Cr Simmons said the meeting did approve the plan on a motion from Cr Ellem, which called for involvement of the Ngerrie Local Aboriginal Land Council in any development planning for the site.

Clarence Valley Council posted the 26 March 2019 podcast of this meeting on its website where it will remain for twelve months and, at approx. 2hrs 4 mins into the podcast the debate of Item 15.031/19 can be heard - but don't expect to hear the entire debate.

Because it appears that at a vital moment in his response to being improperly gagged by the mayor Cr. Clancy did not have his microphone turned on.

I have been given to understand that one of his observations was words to the effect that democracy is dead in the Clarence Valley.

An observation that in my opinion is frequently applicable to both local and state governments.

* It should be noted that Cr. Clancy did not agree with a 2017 change to Clarence Valley Council's Code of Meeting Practice which formally established an opening prayer as well as a rota of ordained Protestant ministers praying over the elected councillors and members of the vistors' gallery at the start of each ordinary monthly meeting.

Quote of the Week

“People generally conform to the mores of their society, and if they believe racism to be acceptable they are more likely to behave in a racist way. Racist concepts are kept alive through communication of racist viewpoints and social mediation and the use of racist scapegoating as acceptable aspects of political debate. Where there is ‘social permission’ to be racist, racism is a permissible way of releasing frustrations and aggression. Conversely, discouraging racist attitudes and behaviour is likely to cause racism to decrease.”  [Tamsan Clarke, February 2005, RACISM, PLURALISM AND DEMOCRACY IN AUSTRALIA: Re-conceptualising racial vilificationlegislation]

Tweet of the Week

New Zealand today fell silent in honour of the mosque attacks' martyrs. Thank you PM @jacindaardern and New Zealand for your sincere empathy and support that has won the respect of 1.5 billion Muslims after the terrorist attack that shook the Muslim community around the world. pic.twitter.com/9LDvH0ybhD

— HH Sheikh Mohammed (@HHShkMohd) March 22, 2019

The Sydney Morning Herald, 23 March 2019:

The world's tallest building has been lit up with a giant image of New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern embracing a woman at the Kilbirnie mosque in Wellington.

The Burj Khalifa, an 829-metre-tall skyscraper in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, beamed out a photo taken by Wellington photographer Hagen Hopkins, as well as the Arabic word "salam" and its English translation, "peace".