When you’re angry with police loot Nike stores
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-europe-66062542

Bill and Julia’s lovechild, Daily Telegraph:

A Western Sydney woman is at the centre of a multimillion-dollar NDIS fraud sting after early morning raids on four service providers by the federal government’s new crack team of investigators.

On Thursday, Fraud Fusion task force members hit locations at Casula, Potts Hill and Liverpool, seizing boxes of paperwork, mobile phones, computers, banking documents and other evidence allegedly showing fraud against the National Disability Insurance Scheme totalling $11.3 million over the past five years.

“Fraud to the value of $11 million in unsubstantiated NDIS claims isn’t petty theft, it’s organised crime,” NDIS Minister Bill Shorten exclusively told The Saturday Telegraph.

“To steal from Australia’s most vulnerable is disgusting.”

The 54-year-old woman came to the attention of the National Disability Insurance Agency’s fraud investigations unit in May.

Operation Ivory was established to investigate the woman’s control of four Western Sydney service ­providers, both registered and ­unregistered.

Her network was also the subject of more than 15 “tip-offs”, including the reporting of collusion with participants through the payment of kickbacks.

Investigators will allege about 40 per cent of the money claimed was used for investment in real estate, withdrawn in cash, or held in bank accounts controlled by the woman.

Well-placed sources claim the network helped participants gain false access to the NDIS, claim for support not provided, and over-claim for support provided.

Investigators will allege the network engaged in suspicious financial activity, with cash withdrawals in excess of $1.1 million.

CCTV footage from a bank allegedly captures the woman attending the branch with a man to withdraw $30,000 from her business account.

There is other evidence of large cash withdrawals by the woman’s associate on 31 occasions, which totals $800,000.

The task force will allege the woman is in control of the associate’s NDIS provider business and has used him to avoid detection.

On Thursday at 6am the taskforce sent teams to the four locations.

An AFP spokesman confirmed officers assisted the execution of the warrants.

“There is no immediate threat to the community as a result of this activity,” the spokesman said, adding “as this is an ongoing matter, it would not be appropriate to comment further”.

In Casula, investigators knocked on the door and served the warrant on the woman before seizing three mobile phones, one computer, and a quantity of banking and business documents.

A second team of investigators served a warrant on a 65-year-old man at his work address at Greenacre, and then, in his presence at a Potts Hill premises, seized a mobile phone, a notebook and a quantity of banking and payments records.

In Casula they executed a search warrant where a 50-year-old male “person of interest” was located on site.

Two “gel blasters”, one USB memory stick and one 1TB hard drive ­containing a copy of iPhone data were seized.

Then at Liverpool a large quantity of documents, notebooks and passwords for businesses were seized.

Sources say the investigation will now move to press charges and bring the matter before the courts, with offences to include committing acts against several federal programs, ­including Family Day Care, Australian Taxation Office GST tax fraud and avoidance, and moving money contrary to the Anti Money Laundering and Counter Terrorism Financing Act.

During the probe, taskforce investigators discovered 112 disability insurance participants were associated with the woman and her network, and their welfare and access to care has been a key focus.

The Labor government set up the Fraud Fusion taskforce in October 2022 to target fraudsters who have fleeced more than $290m from the National Disability Insurance Scheme.

Mr Shorten said “the back door was left wide open to NDIS fraud under the Libs”. (that old chestnut)

“The scheme was left at the mercy of crooks with potentially billions meant for people with disability lost to fraud.

“The Fraud Fusion task force, that we set up since the election, is working – we’re bringing NDIS funding back to who it is intended for, people with ­disability.”

The task force consists of 15 government agencies, with a core group of seven agencies forming the Inter-Departmental Committee, led by the NDIA and Services Australia, as well as Attorney-General’s Department, Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission, Australian Federal Police, Australian Taxation Office and the DIS Quality and Safeguards Commission.

Comes with a pic of the alleged mastermind, pixelated face but appears to be a woman in a hijab. $11m is a lot of moolah.
And also Tits doesn’t really get around to explaining the er, ‘back door’ that was supposed to be left open. Can anyone assist Tits?

The French might need those armoured cars they sent to the Ukraine.

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.

– George Orwell

I read a bit of the wedding website decision.
Using your creative ability to design a website is speech and therefore protected.
Unfortunately that doesn’t extend to putting slogans on wedding cakes.

If you limit your search to African American women that’s what you get.
If you widen your search to include African American men you get a Clarence Thomas.
Back when Thomas got an affirmative action spot at Harvard, he was a child of segregation when black people where being actively discriminated against and whites who were less able got preference.

“Back when Thomas got an affirmative action spot at Harvard, he was a child of segregation when black people were being actively discriminated against and whites who were less able got preference.”

————————–

Yet when the races are reversed it’s is virtuous. Heaven forbid that anything be based upon talent or ability.

“But over the next 20 years, when those numbers change, Wall Street knows they have their girl in their corner. And all the while, the corporate media will refer to her as a progressive, social justice champion.”

—————————

I’ve read Jackson’s dissenting opinion this morning.

It’s as though a liberal History major is reviewing the decision.

She’s certainly not on SCOTUS for her expertise in constitutional law.

“To steal from Australia’s most vulnerable is disgusting.”

Did the scan consist of diverting money from individual people’s allocations (e.g. some claimant was allocated $5,000 for a wheelchair and the scammers took $1,000 leaving only $4,000 for the intended recipient), or did they create dummy claims that NDIS paid?

In the former case it would be preying on the vulnerable, in the latter ripping off taxpayers.

Depicting the latter as ‘stealing from Australia’s most vulnerable’ is an untruth meant to provide an opportunity for diversionary umbrage.

And, did the Libs create this ‘back door’, or did they simply not close one Labor had created?

Unfortunately for Labor, their own past success in making the Libs a topiary in the shape of a party but in reality cropped vegetation without heart, mind, muscle, or balls, means the Libs would never dare fix NDIS because if they did they would be torn apart in the press (unfairly but so what) for trying to….steal from Australia’s most vulnerable.*

Probably explains why the Libs became so useless in reining in spending anywhere – so Labor inherited a a pre-depleted treasury-chest whereas they normally inherit healthier accounts which they can then raid to spurge on flashy gimmicks (and rewarding their mates).

* It is a bit like the old rule of highway where misfeasance is actionable, but not nonfeasance.

Worried about the Indigenous voice to parliament? Wait until you see the treaty
janet albrechtsen Follow @jkalbrechtsen janet albrechtsen
Yes campaigners have tried to distance themselves from Thomas Mayo, writes Janet Albrechtsen. Picture: Chris Crera

12:00AM July 1, 2023
304 Comments

Australians will discover that if they vote Yes, the constitutionally entrenched Indigenous voice is not the conclusion of the intended makeover of our national governance arrangements. It is but the first step. While the voice is a major change to our Constitution, it is a mere enabler for activists’ overriding objective of a treaty with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

What few voters understand is that while the voice provides the necessary negotiating platform and leverage for activists to achieve the desired treaty, the new constitutionally enshrined race-based body is only secondary to the treaty. That is because the voice does not in itself give ATSI people the two things activists really want: namely, sovereignty and a form of self-government, and reparations. Only a treaty can do that. That’s why voters should realise that a Yes vote will likely guarantee many more years of agitation and division until, and perhaps even after, a treaty is achieved.

Anthony Albanese can be expected to do his usual Chicken Little routine, accusing those who are curious about what comes next as fearmongerers. The shame is that the Prime Minister is intent on ­concealing what comes next.
Read Next

The next stages are obvious, not because I say so, but because this is what the Uluru Statement from the Heart, and the academic writings that have driven the treaty movement, say.

The Uluru statement is the starting point. It calls for a “First Nations Voice enshrined in the Constitution” but acknowledges this is not the culmination of their ambition. As the statement says, “Makarrata is the culmination of our ­agenda … we seek a Makarrata Commission to supervise a process of agreement-making between government and First Nations and truth-telling about our history”.

Given Albanese said in his election victory speech “on behalf of the Australian Labor Party, I commit to the Uluru Statement from the Heart in full”, Australians need to understand clearly what this treaty – the end point of the Uluru statement – means.

The definitive description of what the treaty means can be found in the 2020 edition of the book Treaty by George Williams and Harry Hobbs. Williams is a prominent legal academic from the University of NSW and was a member of the constitutional expert group that advised the government on the drafting of the proposed constitutional amendment. Hobbs is also a Sydney legal academic.

Sovereignty, the first aim of a treaty, raises fundamental questions about how the country will be governed in the future. As the Uluru statement shows, those pushing for treaty, including Williams, Hobbs and other members of the academic legal movement, do not accept the traditional view that we have in Australia a single sovereign entity in whom exclusive legal and political power is vested.

The High Court in Coe v Commonwealth in 1993 made clear that the Mabo decision does not support “the notion that sovereignty adverse to the Crown resides in the Aboriginal people of Australia. The decision is equally at odds with the notion that there resides in the ­Aboriginal people a limited kind of sovereignty.”

Williams’ and Hobbs’ response to this is to question Australia’s very legitimacy, saying the “reality” requires us to recognise that “the Australian nation-state has a legitimacy problem that remains unresolved”.

With that as their starting premise, it is not surprising that Williams and Hobbs call for a treaty which meets three conditions: “First, it must recognise Indigenous peoples as a polity, distinct from other citizens of the state on the basis of their status as prior self-governing communities. Second, the agreement must be reached by a fair negotiating process conducted in good faith and in a manner respectful of each participant’s standing as a polity. Third, the agreement must settle each party’s claims … (t)his must include the state recognising or establishing some form of decision making and control for the Indigenous people that amounts to a form of self-government.”

The first element requires us to accept that Australia is not one indivisible nation. It has two polities. The first and third elements call for some form of self-government by Aboriginal people.

While Williams and Hobbs are not prescriptive about what form that takes, they quote the UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples which says Indigenous peoples have the “right to autonomy or self-government” in relation to their “internal and local affairs”.

As an example of what this might mean, Williams and Hobbs quote Canada’s treaty with the Nisga’a people which recognises the Nisga’a right “to exercise self-government over a range of local and internal affairs, including lands, language, culture, education, health, child protection, traditional healing practices, fisheries, wildlife, forestry, environmental protection and policing.”

There is a proviso, that says in the case of an inconsistency, federal or provincial laws prevail. But even with that, a similar treaty in this country would carve out for one group, based on race, a separate set of laws and policies that other groups do not have open to them. In other words, a treaty would divide Australia, not unify it.

What about reparations? In the foreword to Treaty, Mick Dodson says there must be a recognition “that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders have been injured and harmed through the colonisation process, and just recompense is owed”. Williams and Hobbs have a stab at estimating the size of possible financial settlements by referring first to the precedent of the settlement between Western Australia and the Noongar people in 2016 that gave the Noongar a package valued at $1.3bn consisting of “a sizeable land base, non-exclusive rights to resources over an extended area, a large and sustained financial contribution from the state government, and enhanced cultural heritage protection”.

More expensively, they point to the Timber Creek decision in 2019 in which “the Ngaliwurru and Nungali peoples were awarded about $2.53m for 53 acts carried out on 1.27sq km of native title land. As there are about 2.8 million sq km of native title holdings across the country, the potential total amount of liabilities will likely be in the ­billions of dollars.”

If a treaty, with its promise of sovereignty and self-government, accompanied by billions of dollars of reparations, is the main game, how does the voice help? The voice is the enabler because it delivers massive leverage when it comes to negotiating the treaty.

Yes campaigners have tried to distance themselves from Thomas Mayo, a prominent backer of the voice body, who said, in 2021, that the power of the voice was its ability to “punish politicians that ignore our advice” on legislation and funding.

But Mayo’s honesty is refreshing. “We need the power of the Constitution behind us so we can organise like we’ve never organised before,” he said that same year.

“We are sick of governments telling us no; we are sick of governments not listening to our voice. We are going to use the rule book of the nation to force them.”

Even if the government has no legal duty to consult the voice in the absence of a request to do so, the voice can easily create a duty to consult by the simple device of asking to make representations.

The voice need only send a letter on the first day of its existence to every government department, agency or body saying it wishes to make representations on all “matters relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples”. asking for advance notice of all such matters and for the time and resources to consider such matters properly, and thereafter each such government entity will have a constitutional duty to comply.

Once those entities of executive government have complied with that request, the voice will have all the rights conferred by administrative law to ensure their representations are allowed due process and that decisions about them comply with the rigorous standards of administrative law. Failure to do so means any decision that is the subject of a representation may be stopped until litigation about compliance with constitutional and administrative law is completed. In short, the voice can, if it wishes, work to bring the processes of government to a grinding halt.

The activists who dictated the maximalist drafting of the proposed amendment – especially its reference to “executive government” – know this. Those few words will leave the government at the mercy of the voice when it comes to negotiating a treaty.

The lesson is this. A Yes vote in the referendum is not the end of the process but rather the starting gun to a long and divisive treaty negotiation where the voice has the whip hand. This will likely lead to separatism and bitterness, not ­reconciliation.

So if you are worried about the voice, wait until you see the treaty.
Janet Albrechtsen
Columnist

Using your creative ability to design a website is speech and therefore protected.

In the case of free speech everyone in America is a protected class

Sotomayor is a leftist activist. She can only understand conflict and conflict demands making one side win and one side lose. Women are in conflict with men, so men must be made to lose. Blacks are in conflict with whites. And gays are in conflict with religious people and religious people must be defeated.

She cannot see free speech as a right where there are no losers, she sees it instead as one of the ways for people to lose in other conflicts – all those thoughts and ideas delegitimised as ‘hate speech’.

What about reparations? In the foreword to Treaty, Mick Dodson says there must be a recognition “that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders have been injured and harmed through the colonisation process, and just recompense is owed”.

Mick Dodson, who’s father was an Irish shearer?

Indolent says:
July 1, 2023 at 8:52 am
New Zealand Government Now Rations Healthcare to Non-Indigenous Patients for Racial Equity

——————-

There is no way I would holiday in NZ now for fear I would get sick or have an accident and then be shoved in a corner of a hospital.

Then we have the unpleasantness in Northern Territory, the conflagration in France, the open swerve in San Francisco. I wonder if all of these are encouraged to depress travel and tourism.

I’ve read Thomas’s autobiography, he also rued taking a university place where he was constantly under pressure to prove his worth because of the taint of affirmative action.
I have no doubt his grandfather’s conversion to Catholicism and the enormous encouragement Thomas received from the religious sisters who taught him underpinned his later success.
I believe he invited the good sisters to his swearing in.

Thomas’s father didn’t die when he was two, he just abandoned his family then. Thomas mentions wandering in and out of their lives a couple of times in his autobiography.

“Linda Burney, born in a small Riverina township, is deservedly praised for making her way from a humble Aboriginal home…”

Aside from the material benefits on offer, why do people create these narratives about themselves?

If your life is so bereft of meaning that you have to conjure up an identity out of the genuine adversity less fortunate people have faced, what does that say about your character?

How come this new blog format?

Bloody hell, can’t post comments now. How come dover?

“is that his side is suffering a few losses.”

Certainly are. Queer beer, SCOTUS shitcanning affirmative action, Trump’s polls, French diversity, Juneteenth celebrations at Nike stores… quite a score card for the leftards.

Test

Test5

Test8

And isn’t Albanese’s account of his early life also that of Dickensian poverty?

I suppose it is meant to intimate the uncommon grit and talent needed to pull yourself up to dizzy heights, that you are not part of an insider-clique, and of course what they imagine to be the golden moral halo only poverty can supply.

“The wedding Web site decision is a complete joke. There was no injury, no standing, no customer, no Web site. Talk about activist judges, they just manufactured new law out of zero context to overturn half a century of precedent.”

Shut up dickless. Forcing people to work for other people is slavery. Being a leftie you support slavery; to compensate for your dicklessness. Now go and tend to the milko’s kiddies.

“And isn’t Albanese’s account of his early life also that of Dickensian poverty?”

Yep! .. he always leaves out the bit about one of his grandad’s owning a printing works in Mascot & paying the private school fees …..
The reality is Mum was living in “houso” cos being a single parent was still frowned on, socially, among many families back then ……..

Mother Lode says:
July 1, 2023 at 10:35 am

And isn’t Albanese’s account of his early life also that of Dickensian poverty?

The left used to be eager to show that they weren’t poor working class yobs. Don Dunstan talking about Petrarch, Gough using words like exegesis, Hawke spouting verbiage such as resile and animus, Keating with his Italian suits and antique clocks.
Even dear old Simon Crean when asked who his hero was, replied “Quintus Fabius Maximus”

Now they have to conceal their real background and pretend to be “working class”.

“Nazis” on the streets of France;

War Monitor
@WarMonitors
·
3h
??An interesting thing happened today.

French nationalists took to the streets to confront the rioters and beat them up with baseball bats…

https://twitter.com/WarMonitors/status/1674883174818562048

Then it goes without saying Monty is fully on board with a stacked progressive Supreme Court ripping up the American Constitution.

“Then it goes without saying Monty is fully on board with a stacked progressive Supreme Court ripping up the American Constitution.”

While cheering on his teams efforts at child grooming and child abuse (aka trans experimentation)

Can you lot try a little harder, please?
You are up in arms because judges are ruling against your held principles. Like murdering babies in utero. Like ruling for people free to practice their religion.
So add these latest things to your held principles that arseholes should be able to run down teenagers in SUVs over their conservative politics. That conservative women need to be hounded and indeed assaulted. That servicemen are just in it for shits and giggles.
Your disdain for anything outside your fat bubble is plain arseholery.
Is your missus indeed a woman? Can you describe a woman?

Someone (Rosie?) suggested the SCOTUS “website” decision provides no comfort to the Christian bakers who refuse to bake cakes for gay weddings.
I disagree.
If … if … SCOTUS precedents are followed by lower courts it definitely does.
Of course, activist lower courts will go their own way as usual, but the baker in that case could proceed to higher courts with absolute confidence that eventually they will prevail, with costs.
Their opponents know that too, so the Christian bakers of this world now hold a handful of trumps.

 Zatara says:

July 1, 2023 at 11:37 am

Looking through the copy of the Constitution I keep in the truck trying to find reference to “protected classes”.

You won’t see it until the Civil Rights Act of 1964. 

An Act?
Passed by Congress?
What takes precedence?
An Act passed by Congress?
Or the Constitution?
Are we saying the Civil Rights Act is unconstitutional?
Gasp!

Dunny Brush at 11:01
This is also true of Gummint adverts.
Almost every single advert will have a carefully curated assortment of First Nations, hijabs, turbans and QWERTYs.
Not an Anglo to be seen.
Except for domestic violence adverts.
Suddenly Mr Ozzie Blue-Singlet gets the casting call.

Thanks Dover and my Name, Email and Website are now being saved in this Browser. I like the new format BTW.

recognise Indigenous peoples as a polity, distinct from other citizens of the state on the basis of their status as prior self-governing communities.

I may be a pedant, but I can’t see that the indigenous people can be both “a polity” and “self-governing communities”. This indiscriminate nomenclature reflects the problem they have with the diverse language and clan groups before the Anglo settlement.

I suppose they are at least acknowledging that they were “communities” and not “nations”. The latter is an absurdity and most voters must realise this.

Christians hold the solid majority of powerful positions in society, despite being in a vanishing rump sect.

I am not sure of that at all. Many people may tick the box of some Christian denomination on the Census paper, but they are not practising Christians in the sense of attending service.

Vocal, practising Christians seem to attract the venom of Lefties.

I still have to figure out the sidebars business this afternoon. Time for lunch.

Thank you for your work, DB. Much appreciated.

Now they have to conceal their real background and pretend to be “working class”.

How can Laybore do that? They are not working and they have no class.