quote:

HUNDREDS of military personnel are suspected of committing sexual offences over the past few years, including dozens of report­ed cases involving allegations of child grooming or child porn­o­graphy, confidential documents reveal.

The figures, compiled from military police records, are contained in a briefing prepared for the then chief of the Australian Defence Force, General David Hurley, in May last year.

They provide the first evidence of widespread sexual offending involving children within the modern ADF, as well as demonstrating the scale of the challenge facing senior commanders who have publicly committed to stamping out sexual abuse.

Since 2008, there have been 104 reports of aggravated sexual assaults, including rapes by milit­ary personnel, the briefing reveals. Military investigators have also received 102 reports of “non-assaultive sexual offences against a child” over this time, almost all of which have been dealt with by civilian police.

The number of these child-­related crimes has remained relatively consistent over time, with 21 offences reported during the past year. Military sources said many of these were likely to involve transmitting pornography using mobile phones or over the internet, as well as a few child-grooming offences.

GRAPHIC: The Dark Side

Adair Donaldson, a lawyer representing the victims of historical military abuse, including child abuse, at the HMAS Leeuwin training base, said: “The mental scars that are left as the result of sexual offences and the abuse that has been occurring are as debilitating as a broken back.”

One victim of sexual abuse while in the military said it could have a lifelong effect. “It’s like being in prison. You’re not in prison, but you are, you’re in prison in your mind,” he said.

The confidential briefing note, as well as other figures obtained from the ADF, also reveal the sheer scale of alleged sexual offending within the ranks.

Military investigators have identified 393 “Service Suspects & Persons of Interest for Sexual ­Assault and Related Offences” since 2008, the briefing states.

In June last year, one month after the document was drawn up, the Chief of Army, Lieutenant General David Morrison, promised to “be ruthless in ridding the army of people who cannot live up to its values’’. “The standard you walk past is the standard you ­accept,” General Morrison said.

More recent figures obtained by The Australian show that there were 137 reports last year of sexual offences allegedly committed by military personnel, 31 more than the year before and more than any of the five preceding years.

“It is difficult to conclusively ­establish (a) reduction in the incidence of unacceptable behaviour in recent years,” the ADF said in a statement. “However, available evidence shows increased confidence in ADF’s commitment to eliminating unacceptable behaviour and consequently increased reporting of incidences of unacceptable behaviour.”

Military sources confirm there has been a definite crackdown on those found to have committed sexual offences within the ranks since General Morrison’s speech last year, made in the immediate aftermath of the so-called “Jedi Council’’ scandal.

That scandal, in which the military email system was used to exchange explicit images of women taken without their consent, led to 10 officers and soldiers being thrown out of the army. It came in the wake of the 2011 Skype scandal, in which officer cadets used the internet to broadcast a woman having sex, again without consent.

In total, the military has termin­ated the careers of roughly 200 personnel, mostly from the army, in each of the past two financial years, with dozens of these decisions made “in relation to misconduct or unacceptable behaviour” or “in relation to civilian offences”.

“The ADF is using all available mechanisms to actively hold people who fail to live up to our values and expected behaviours to account,” the ADF statement said.

Defence Minister David Johnston was unavailable for comment last night.

clusterfuck posted:

clusterfuck posted:

To polish or not polish the turd

hooman posted:

This is the question the editor of the Australian asks him or herself every day.

No matter the answer however, they still end up with a lovely rag.

hooman posted:

This is the question the editor of the Australian asks him or herself every day.

No matter the answer however, they still end up with a lovely rag.

Doctor Spaceman posted:

Mungo MacCallum died?


Noice.

SKY COQ posted:

No, people reported it without actually checking. He's currently having a coffee over the road from the Byron Shire Times, iirc.

Doctor Spaceman posted:

Yeah, saw people saying stuff on Twitter, wasn't sure what was happening.

clusterfuck posted:

In the 'straya I grew up in written correspondence in poo poo was a craft.

hooman posted:

Clusterfuck, b. 2014 Muir, R 2013

The Conversation posted:

The most important finding in the final report of the Royal Commission into the Home Insulation Program is the one the Abbott government is least likely to heed. One of the two crucial flaws Commissioner Ian Hanger identified was the decision to build the Home Insulation Program (HIP) around a laissez-faire market-delivery model. By offering an easily accessed rebate, the Rudd government decided that start-up companies, not the public service, would have oversight of the program.

Hanger’s report also exposes the fact that this choice of business model, a “turning point in the [Home Insulation Program]”, was imposed on the then Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts (DEWHA) by forces close to then prime minister Kevin Rudd: the Office of the Coordinator-General (a role Rudd created to oversee the stimulus measures) and Senator Mark Arbib.

Former Labor attorney-general Mark Dreyfus is right to say that the A$20 million spent on the Royal Commission has not vastly altered the account of the insulation scheme that the previous eight inquiries had provided. The picture of a rushed program run by public servants with little understanding of the potential hazards of working in ceiling spaces was well-established.

Prime Minister Tony Abbott must also be lamenting the failure of the Royal Commission to confirm the multiple “direct personal warnings” that Coalition MPs had claimed were issued to Rudd and Environment Minister Peter Garrett.

A rush to outsource responsibility

However, the findings do raise profound lessons for government. The dominance of market-knows-best ideology among the senior public service and Labor ministers and their staffers was critical to the mistaken and deadly assumptions behind the insulation program’s design. Linked to this, the commission has highlighted the disastrous role of private consultants and particularly the program’s “external risk expert”, Minter Ellison’s Margaret Coaldrake. Underpinning all these problems was the lack of program delivery experience and capacity within the environment department.

The Hanger report is the first to identify the abrupt imposition of a new delivery model, two months into the planning process, as a “critical” decision (page 4), “indeed the cause of later failures by the Australian government" (p. 157). Until a meeting on 31 March 2009, environment department officials had planned to contract major regional firms for recruiting, training and supervising the new insulation installer workforce.

This “regional brokerage” model (similar to that administered by the states in the Building the Education Revolution school halls stimulus program) itself relied on outsourcing, albeit to experienced companies with “skin in the game”. But Minter Ellison’s first risk assessment found the department’s inexperience made it virtually impossible that the contracts would be signed off in time for the July 1 roll-out announced by Rudd. Minter Ellison’s suggested treatment for this and most other risks was to transfer “the largest risks to third parties (effective outsourcing)” (p. 117).

As Hanger notes, it was likely this risk report that informed the decision by the Office of the Coordinator-General (OCG) and Senator Arbib (p. 106) to push for a wholly new model for the home insulation program. The resulting “market-delivery” (p. 127) rebate model was unilaterally imposed on environment department officials without warning at a meeting that Hanger found was “structured to impose the OCG delivery model on DEWHA” (p. 136).

Letting the market rip

Rather than contract large companies to deliver the program, the government would provide a Medicare-administered rebate coupled with a low-barrier-to-entry online registration system. Market forces would do the rest. It was this recipe of funding and easy registration that drove the 15-fold increase in installations as the number of installation companies grew from 200 before the insulation program to 8,359 (p. 2).

As well as a zeal for meeting Rudd’s July 1 roll-out deadline, the OCG-Arbib model was “designed to allow market forces to work and deliver the most efficiency/effectiveness without providing a centralised solution” (p. 128). It would be a “light-touch regulatory model” (p. 131) that would “let the market operate with few restrictions” (p. 131).

The insulation program was constructed in response to the Global Financial Crisis, which Rudd and others categorised as a crisis of “neoliberalism”. And yet the public servants, and even Labor ministers involved in designing the scheme, were driven by the notion that public involvement should be minimised while, in the words of the public servants, they “let the market rip” (p. 144).

And rip it did. Every month that the program ran, a year’s worth of insulation activity was generated. The government orchestrated this situation and Hanger has found (p. 3) that the government was responsible for the results:

quote:

1.1.18 The reality is that the Australian Government conceived of, devised and implemented a program that enabled very large numbers of inexperienced workers – often engaged by unscrupulous and avaricious employers or head contractors, who were themselves inexperienced in insulation installation – to undertake potentially dangerous work. It should have done more to protect them.

The commission has found that even when government outsources work, “risk cannot be abrogated” (p.309). This has profound implications for the delivery of government programs by both sides of politics.

The delusion of outsourcing risk

As incredible as it may now seem, the public service saw the market-driven delivery model that relied on the ballooning of start-up companies as reducing the risk profile of the program. This can only be explained because the notion of risk that prevailed among program designers had nothing to do with the provision of a safe program.

Risk management was instead concerned to minimise the financial, political, legal and reputational risks to the Commonwealth. While shared across the insulation program management team, this concept of risk was embodied by the Minter Ellison risk expert Margaret Coaldrake. She told (p. 111) the commission:

consultant "risk expert" Margaret Coaldrake posted:

The focus for the project was on risks to the Commonwealth and [the insulation program’s] implementation because the Commonwealth cannot manage a risk for someone else.

Hanger’s report sharply rejects Coaldrake’s understanding, saying (p. 119):

Commissioner Ian Hanger posted:

That view is flawed … The risk to the Commonwealth of the [Home Insulation Program] includes the risk to the safety of one of its citizens undertaking work as part of the program.

Despite employing a “bevy” of risk experts, until the electrocution of 25-year-old insulation installer Matthew Fuller in October 2009, the risks facing installers were not mentioned in Minter Ellison’s 20-page central “Risk Register”. When questioned about this, Coaldrake told the commission that her role was merely facilitation and that no one in the department had informed her that workers could be injured as part of the program.

In fact, the commission uncovered evidence that injury to installers had been raised at an early DEWHA risk workshop. It was listed in early drafts of Coaldrake’s own risk register. However, between 10.54am and 12.05pm on 27 March 2009, this risk disappeared from the register, and neither Coaldrake nor any of the DEWHA staff redressed its omission during the crucial next six months of the program.

Governments have lost in-house expertise

Hanger finds that the Commonwealth did not have the in-house expertise to purchase and manage the “expert services” of Coaldrake (p. 312) whose role in the insulation program Hanger describes as “patently inadequate” (p. 5).

This finding echoes that of the Building the Education Revolution Implementation Taskforce, which found that state and territory education departments lacked the in-house skills and expertise to act as an “informed buyer” in dealing with the construction firms that delivered that program. Without in-house architects, planners and project managers, the government was open to accepting exorbitant management fees and unable to prevent sub-standard delivery.

Lack of public service capacity is the first point Hanger addresses in his lessons for the future. He notes (p. 301) that “the retention of outside experts did not always overcome the knowledge gaps that existed in the department”.

Hanger’s report paints a damning picture of the results of decades of outsourcing under the neo-liberal rubric of market efficiency and down-sizing. Unless public service capacity is rebuilt and the market-knows-best mentality inside the government replaced, it is only a matter of time before we repeat the mistakes of the home insulation program.

webmeister posted:

Random question time - I've got a bunch of old DVDs that I've ripped to disc and haven't used in years. I'd like to donate them to charity, but have no idea which charity would be the most appropriate one?

Normally I just take stuff to Vinnies, but I'd rather be a bit more targeted with this.

webmeister posted:

Random question time - I've got a bunch of old DVDs that I've ripped to disc and haven't used in years. I'd like to donate them to charity, but have no idea which charity would be the most appropriate one?

Normally I just take stuff to Vinnies, but I'd rather be a bit more targeted with this.

GoldStandardConure posted:

Local hospitals might be willing to take DVDs, especially for the wards that are used to people staying for extended periods of time, they usually have TVs and DVD players for the patients to stop them going completely bonkers from cabin fever.

Lizard Combatant posted:

Where was my DVD player when I was hospitalised for the 2013 election week?!

quote:

Left-wing group the Socialist Alternative was deregistered as a club by the Monash University Student Association on Tuesday, the same day a student from the same group at La Trobe University was threatened with expulsion following allegations of harassment of a Jewish student on campus.

The Monash association has simply said the Socialist Alternative is "prejudicial to the interests of clubs and societies", but the Socialist Alternative has blamed a recent article by Education Minister Christopher Pyne to The Australian calling on universities to respond to increasing anti-Semitic behaviour on campus.

The deregistration would mean the group can no longer hold political meetings or information stalls at Monash University's Clayton campus.

Socialist Alternative member Sarah Garnham, said the delisting was an "extremely harsh measure" and the group has said it would consider pursuing a legal case against the Monash Students Association.

The events at Monash University follow investigations by La Trobe University into allegations of harassment and intimidation of a Jewish student on campus.

One Socialist Alternative member at La Trobe University said he received a letter from the university threatening expulsion for intimidating the student.

The university would not confirm the sending of the letter, but a spokesman said, "We are currently investigating some complaints made by students in accordance with our normal processes."

The student making the complaints at La Trobe, Jessica Cornish, 25, is now represented by Arnold Bloch Leibler in her complaints of harassment and intimidation against the Socialist Alternative and Students for Palestine.

She said that after she voted down a motion condemning Israeli's "ethnic cleansing" and "genocide" in Gaza, posters were pasted on campus walls accusing her of supporting genocide. She also faced taunts by the students who called her a "Zionist piece of poo poo" and "genocidal pig". at the end of July, believing it to be "inciting violence" she faced hundreds of posters pasted on campus naming her and accusing her of supporting genocide. She also faced taunts by the students who called her a "Zionist piece of poo poo" and "genocidal pig".

"It's been the worst semester I've ever had," Ms Cornish said.

"I've missed so much class. I haven't been able to concentrate. I'm very stressed," the speech pathology student said.

Ryan Higginson, the La Trobe student threatened with expulsion, posted on Facebook that he rejected the allegations levelled against him as "an outrageous slander".

"All we have done is campaign in support of Palestinian rights, and against Zionists in the student union. These allegations, and the threat of expulsion, is a massive assault on political freedoms at La Trobe University," he wrote.

But, in a document leaked to The Age, a former member of the Socialist Alternative, who chose not to be named, said the Socialist Alternative was "known to shut down and intimidate students with opposing views", to "bully other students" and to engage in "cultish behaviour".

"They are known to surround students from opposing factions and shout them down and reportedly physically assault them," he wrote.

He noted a recent student conference "in which 60-80 members of the SA [Socialist Alternative] surround three or four members of the Student Unity in a corner and went ballistic. Many prominent members of the Monash SA were involved in orchestrating this."

He also said the group would interrupt lectures to advertise an event and members have "at times physically resisted" when removed from lectures.

Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/socialist-alternative-student-club-deregistered-20140905-10d5yl.html#ixzz3CiIceRvX

Quasimango posted:

Farewell, sweet princes, you never scored:

Quasimango posted:

Farewell, sweet princes, you never scored:

Brown Paper Bag posted:

ERMAGERD SECOND ROYAL BABBY, GUESS NO OTHER NEWS WILL HAPPEN THIS WEEK

quote:

SKY NEWS is launching an international television news service in November to replace the ABC’s Australia Network, which was axed in the federal budget. While the Australia Network cost taxpayers $223 million over 10 years, Sky News’s Australia Channel, a subscription service via the internet, will broadcast to 180 countries, including China and the Middle East, at no cost to the taxpayer.

Ghost Who Votes posted:

Newspoll

Primary Votes: L/NP 39 (-1) ALP 35 (+1) GRN 14 (+3)
2 Party Preferred: L/NP 48 (-1) ALP 52 (+1)

Abbott: Approve 35 (-1) Disapprove 54 (-1)
Shorten: Approve 36 (-3) Disapprove 43 (+3)
Preferred PM: Abbott 37 (-2) Shorten 37 (-3)

Nuclear Spy posted:

Sky News’s Australia Channel, a subscription service via the internet

epipen posted:

hold on, people will pay to watch pro-australia propaganda?

Doctor Spaceman posted:

Ghost Who Votes posted:
Newspoll

Primary Votes: L/NP 39 (-1) ALP 35 (+1) GRN 14 (+3)
2 Party Preferred: L/NP 48 (-1) ALP 52 (+1)

Abbott: Approve 35 (-1) Disapprove 54 (-1)
Shorten: Approve 36 (-3) Disapprove 43 (+3)
Preferred PM: Abbott 37 (-2) Shorten 37 (-3)

EvilElmo posted:

Well, I guess we're about to go to war.

Ghost Who Votes posted:

#Newspoll Action taken in Iraq so far by Australian Govt: Support 62 Oppose 25