Editorial: NDIS: Less a scheme than a scam
Advocates for small government frequently argue that any large government program will invariably feature similarly large levels of bureaucracy, indulgence and waste.
Opinion
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AUGUST 31: Less a scheme than a scam
Advocates for small government frequently argue that any large government program will invariably feature similarly large levels of bureaucracy, indulgence and waste.
Those advocates have a point when it comes to the National Disability Insurance Scheme, which in the hands of government-funded bureaucrats has become the National Disability Insurance Scam.
AUGUST 30: Labor’s wheels are falling off
Senior Labor identities seem to have more than a little difficulty following basic rules.
This evidently involves everything from party donations to bicycle travel.
During yesterday’s ICAC hearings, former federal Labor senator Sam Dastyari turned up on a bike — which, in contravention of NSW road rules, he rode on the footpath.
Still, Dastyari’s bicycle breach is currently the least of Labor’s problems, which remain focused on now-dumped Labor boss Kaila Murnain and an illegal $100,000 cash donation to the party from Chinese billionaire Huang Xiangmo.
It emerged on Thursday that during closed ICAC hearings last week Dastyari, a former friend and confidante of Murnain, had told of her disenchantment with the ALP immediately following the federal election.
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“She was whingeing to me about how everyone had abandoned her and she’d been left alone in the LP office and we all moved on to our other careers and she was there to clean up the pieces,” Dastyari, who quit the senate last year, said.
Unsurprising, Murnain herself told ICAC: “I’m no longer a close friend of Sam.”
All the day needed to complete the image of Labor chaos would be the wheels falling off Dastyari’s bike, because they’ve fallen off everything else the party touches.
For Murnain, downfall has been especially swift. Just a few months ago, in May, a Daily Mail Australia piece wondered if the 32-year-old might become “Australia's Jacinda Ardern”.
“She's a very strong person and that's important as a leader,” Labor strategist Bruce Hawker told the publication.
“She runs a tight show which is also important and is very hands on,” Hawker continued.
“She doesn't sit back and allow everybody else to do the thinking for her. She's in there with her sleeves rolled up driving the agenda.”
That article, as they say, has not aged well. Murnain on Thursday struggled to remain composed during questions over the $100,000 Huang donation.
“You appear to be having difficulty, in the sense of emotional difficulty in answering those last …?” asked counsel assisting Scott Robinson.
“Oh, no,” Murnain replied. “It’s everything.”
Struggling Murnain may be, but that’s as good a summary of this debacle as you’ll ever hear.
AUGUST 29: A low-rent bid for China cash
Wednesday’s ICAC latest day of investigations into allegedly illegal donations to the NSW Labor Party began routinely enough.
Retired Chinese property developer Steve Kwan Yeung Tong spoke with emotion of his apparent unwilling entanglement in Labor’s donor scandal.
Tong gave some insight into just how odd was this donor system, if a system it was.
Then NSW Labor general secretary Kaila Murnain, a former staffer to ex-Labor leaders Kristina Keneally and Michael Daley, took the stand.
The early section of Murnain’s testimony was unremarkable. But following a break in proceedings, things suddenly became explosive.
Murnain claimed she only learned about an alleged $100,000 donation from Chinese billionaire Huang Xiangmo after being told by “agitated’ then-MP Ernest Wong.
The pair met at the back of state parliament to discuss the issue. What a fascinating conversation that must have been.
After her chat with Wong, Murnain and two Labor heavyweights allegedly held further meetings notable for their unconventional circumstances.
Discussing the Wong claim with then-federal Labor senator Sam Dastyari, for example, Murnain recalled they drove around the block as she explained matters to him.
And then Murnain went to ALP lawyer Ian Robertson’s offices to reveal what she knew about a “massive f… up”.
Murnain said she told Robertson that Wong had informed her a donor had denied being the real donor, but that person had “not come forward”.
According to Murnain, Robertson told her “don’t record this meeting”. Moreover, according to Murnain, she was told: “Don’t put it in your diary. Forget the conversation happened with Ernest (Wong).
“And I won’t be billing you for this either. And don’t tell anyone about it.”
It is striking just how low-rent these alleged matters are.
Labor is a major party that will inevitably one day once again govern in NSW.
And here it stands accused of playing around with cash in Aldi bags and associating with people who allegedly use any name they can find in order to dodge donation laws.
These hearings may well delay even further that eventual return to power.
The Daily Telegraph, printed and published by the proprietor, Nationwide News Pty Ltd A.C.N. 008438828 of 2 Holt St, Surry Hills NSW 2010, at 26-52 Hume Highway, Chullora. Responsibility for election comment is taken by the Editor, Ben English.
AUGUST 28: Teachers could do much better
The NSW Teachers Federation has long opposed NAPLAN testing. In June, Federation president Maurie Mulheron called for NAPLAN to be scrapped.
“NAPLAN is a crude, unsophisticated and damaging test,” Mulheron wrote at the official Federation website.
“The test has supplanted the syllabuses, led to a narrowing of the curriculum, privileged low-level drills over complex skills, created a test-cramming industry, drowned schools in unreliable data and, arguably, led to a decline in student outcomes.”
“It certainly is time for this flawed test to go. We could do so much better.”
So could many of our students, who according to the latest NAPLAN results have gone backwards in some important education categories.
Year 7 and 9 literacy results have fallen significantly below the NAPLAN 2011 average.
Additionally, our students continued to lag behind students in other nations.
“Despite individual bright spots, overall student performance is declining in international tests,” Peter Goss, School Education Program Director for the Grattan Institute, points out.
“An unacceptably high number of our students are not ready for life after school.”
That is no reflection on the students, who can only rise to the levels set by educators. But it does point to the real reason why the Teachers Federation is so hostile towards NAPLAN.
They know that NAPLAN is an indication of teaching standards, and they plainly don’t like it when those standards are placed under serious scrutiny.
The left-wing Federation also does not enjoy any questioning of its priorities. Just one week ago, the Federation announced its support for students who planned to skip school for climate change protests.
“Climate change is one of the most critical issues facing Australia and the world,” the Federation’s August Council announced. “Our children and future generations face a grim future unless action is taken to reduce carbon emissions now.”
This is from the same organisation that claims to be worried about schools drowning in “unreliable data”.
Our children face grim employment futures unless action is taken to improve NSW education standards. Teachers should get to work on that, then save the planet later.
AUGUST 27: Who knew about Labor’s bags of history?
The Australian Labor Party is a party of tradition. More than any other Australian political party, Labor reveres its past and celebrates its various leaders and icons.
Even the ghost gum outside Barcaldine railway station in Brisbane, where a manifesto was read in 1892 leading to the formation of Labor, became a heroic element of Labor’s story.
All Labor fans are aware of the sainted Tree of Knowledge.
But other Labor traditions are not so admirable. The party does have a history of, to say the very least, questionable financial strategies.
One of the those strategies, a 1974 bid by the federal government of Gough Whitlam to raise billions in development loans from Middle Eastern sources, led to the collapse of the Whitlam government.
In NSW, especially, we have seen numerous ALP identities — including Rex Jackson, Eddie Obeid and Ian Macdonald — imprisoned for their improper personal financial dealings.
And now the Independent Commission Against Corruption has heard claims from Labor staffer Kenrick Cheah that the then-NSW ALP general secretary Jamie Clements allegedly gave him $100,000 in cash following a visit by the Chinese property billionaire Huang Xiangmo.
Huang was expelled from Australia by ASIO last year over foreign influence activities.
Two elements of Cheah’s testimony were particularly noteworthy. Firstly, he said the $100,000 was contained in a plastic Aldi shopping bag.
Future Labor mythology may refer to it as the Bag of Knowledge.
And secondly, Cheah said he took the cash to his own house that evening because “he was not aware of any secure facilities at the ALP offices”.
Make of that what you will.
There are certain places you wouldn’t want to leave a stray $100,000 lying around, that’s for sure.
ICAC’s broader mission here is to examine Chinese donations to the NSW ALP and to determine if any donation laws have been broken.
Wednesday's’s hearing largely centred on a Chinese fundraising dinner that was attended by several senior Labor leaders.
According to Labor’s information to the NSW Electoral Commission, the March 2015 dinner at Haymarket’s Eight Restaurant resulted in a $138,000 windfall for the party, including $100,000 in cash.
The Electoral Commission’s curiosity was piqued by how that donation was assembled. It mostly comprised many individual donations of $5000.
Several donations of that amount came from family and friends of Emperor’s Gardens restaurant owner Jonathon Yee, who was then president of Chinese Friends of Labor.
And a few $5000 lump sum donations also came from Yee’s restaurant staff, who are seemingly very well paid.
It was an offence at the time for individuals to donate more than $5700, which was another aspect of Wednesday's’s hearing.
ICAC counsel assisting Scott Robertson described as implausible the notion that “restaurant workers would have the financial capacity to make lump sum donations of $5000 or $10,000”.
Robertson pointed out the Electoral Commission’s suspicion “that the $100,000 in cash was donated on behalf of a person or persons other than those who appeared in NSW Labor and Country Labor’s disclosures”.
For a state Coalition government that has lately become mired in problems of its own creation, this ICAC investigation is perfectly timed.
“Prior to the 2019 election, NSW Labor labelled this investigation a political stunt,” Treasurer Dominic Perrottet said.
“But now we’ve heard disturbing allegations that a senior NSW Labor Party official received a bag containing $100,000 in cash at the party’s Sussex St headquarters.
“The question is who at Labor HQ knew about these alleged donations and did nothing.”
This is, indeed, the key question. And while some political pointscoring is evident here, Perrottet is quite correct to look towards Labor’s higher ranks for answers.
Meanwhile, Labor’s poor old Tree of Knowledge is no longer with us.
It was poisoned and killed in 2006.
Perhaps it knew too much.
AUGUST 26: The Greens are interflexible
Opponents of the proposed bill to decriminalise abortion in NSW rightly focus on an element of the legislation that would allow immediate terminations up until the 22nd week of pregnancy.
Under that provision, abortions would be granted throughout the state upon demand.
This means a decision to terminate could be made depending on the foetus’s gender.
Moreover, that decision need never be declared, because there would be no legal requirement.
But matters may become even more complicated in certain very rare cases.
It is one issue to decide on an abortion because a foetus is male or female.
What happens, however, if a foetus cannot be easily classified as either? What if the foetus is intersex, or as obstetrician Dr Gregory Jenkins puts it, has “undifferentiated genitalia”?
The Greens presently call for “an end to in-utero testing of foetuses for biological variations underlying intersex, and an end to the termination of those foetuses on that basis”.
That appears to be a very solid platform with no grey areas.
But the Greens’ previously firm adherence to that policy is now set to be abandoned because Finance Minister Damien Tudehope plans to endorse the very same idea. Tudehope’s proposed amendment to the abortion bill would prevent sex-selective as well as intersex abortions from occurring in NSW.
The precise wording of the amendment, soon to be moved in the upper house, requires that “termination not be used for sex selection if the foetus is confirmed or suspected to be a female foetus, a male foetus or an intersex foetus”.
Yet so eager are the Greens to introduce the abortion bill that they will now vote against their own party platform.
“The intentions of those proposing amendments are very clear,” says Greens MP Jenny Leong, one of 15 NSW MPs who are co-sponsoring the bill, “and they are the complete antithesis to the Greens’ principles and policies of equality, diversity and inclusiveness.”
So the Greens will reject protection for intersex foetuses. Instead, they will seek equal, diverse and inclusive terminations across the board.
If the Greens are this flexible on abortion, how seriously should we treat their commitment on other issues?
AUGUST 22: Care first, then chase the cash
As anyone who has ever required emergency medical treatment or surgery to correct life-threatening health problems is aware, the experience can be disorienting and distressing.
This is in addition to the pain and anxiety frequently involved in medical procedures.
As well, the families and friends of those in such circumstances also suffer. Matters of life and death are obviously the most serious matters anyone can possibly deal with.
Yet The Daily Telegraph can now reveal that patients who should be allowed to recover in peace from their hospital treatment or even to begin receiving required hospital treatment are instead being badgered by those hospitals to bill treatments to private health funds.
All told, public hospitals are earning $1.6 billion a year by charging health funds for treatments that patients are entitled to for free under Medicare.
It’s a massive earner for the hospitals — and often a massive financial penalty for patients.
Some of the individual cases involve burns victims, people who have endured life-risking heart attacks and women who have suffered miscarriages.
They subsequently face significant costs after yielding to public hospital pressure to bill care to their health fund.
This amounts to a serious and worrying shift in public hospital priorities, and should be seen as putting revenue ahead of care.
Typically, triage in hospital emergency departments now begins with an administrative officer attempting to convince the injured or ailing to bill health funds. Only after the administrative officer does a nurse become involved.
Clearly, it is unfair to expect someone who has just presented at an emergency department to make a considered and sound financial decision.
It is overwhelmingly likely that a person in that situation might have other concerns, such as remaining alive.
Even worse, death offers no release from this pressure.
As former hospital staffer and whistleblower Frank Collins told The Daily Telegraph, relatives of deceased patients are being urged to change their payment plans.
“If they were in a health fund we had to get their family to sign so the health fund covered their care,” Collins said.
To say the least, this is not how hospitals should function.
AUGUST 21: Abortion bill a case of hurry and wait
As late as Tuesday morning, NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian denied the bill to decriminalise abortion had been rushed.
“I have been in parliament for nearly 17 years and I can’t remember a bill having so much debate in the lower house,” the Premier told reporters.
“The hours spent, the number of speakers … I can’t remember anything taking so long in my 17 years in parliament.”
One of the reasons why there were so many speakers was because a considerable number were furious at the circumstances of the bill’s introduction.
In large part, they were debating why the bill was rushed rather than the details of the bill itself. It’s a big distinction.
That issue aside, the Premier later told MPs during a Liberal Party room meeting the government will allow amendments to be moved when parliament resumes next month.
This gives the government three weeks of breathing space on legislation Premier Berejiklian believes wasn’t rushed in the first place. Lessons have apparently “been learned” from this process, as the Premier told her parliamentary members.
There may be harder lessons to come. That three-week delay is unlikely to temper feelings among some of the abortion bill’s government opponents.
Liberal MPs Tanya Davies and Matthew Mason-Cox on Tuesday called for a “proper” joint parliamentary committee to examine the proposed legislation over six months.
Davies, in particular, is not holding back. “I believe it is a crisis of government that we are facing because my community is absolutely outraged that they have been shut out and denied any opportunity to participate in this process,” she said.
Interestingly, Davies and other Liberal MPs have been more direct and hard-hitting on this issue than have many on the Opposition benches.
Labor shadow treasurer Walt Secord accused the Premier of delaying the vote to “save herself”, but didn’t go much further than a standard political swipe.
“Make no mistake, this has been bungled by the government,” Secord said. “Women of NSW have been waiting for 119 years and now the Premier is delaying it to save herself.”
Perhaps Secord is aware that on this fraught subject, the Berejiklian Coalition government is more than capable of providing its very own opposition.
AUGUST 20: Price of ice is jail and worse
The images and realities associated with drug use very rarely match.
Cocaine, for many years the drug of choice among the eastern suburbs’ so-called glamour set, should be more properly associated with dependence, overdoses and bankruptcy.
As for ice, it is seen in the public eye as being both produced and consumed by the lower classes. Yet The Daily Telegraph now presents a case that blows that particular stereotype out of the water.
Young Bathurst couple Aidan Hartnett, 24, and Erin Clayton, 22, seemed to be living in solid, respectable fashion in their tidy suburban home.
The couple are raising a two-year-old daughter and appeared to be, as a social media message attested, the “cutest little family ever”. Online photographs show the family at Wiggles concerts and at the local pool.
The couple were also hardworking and ambitious. Hartnett was employed in a lucrative labouring role and Clayton was enrolled in animal studies at Bathurst TAFE.
So much for the image.
Hartnett recently pleaded guilty to large commercial drug supply. His partner Clayton has pleaded guilty to knowingly participating in a criminal group and will soon be sentenced.
They were ice dealers, and not small-time ice dealers.
According to court documents, Hartnett at one point supplied a massive 1505 grams of ice in just six months. That amount is estimated to be worth at least $500,000 on the streets of regional NSW.
During one four-month period, Hartnett was observed supplying more than $90,000 worth of ice out of his home within four months.
Now look at the broader picture, beyond one couple and their scandalous ice operation. Look at the damage done to the wider community by a drug that is possibly the most ruinous to have ever been concocted.
Rural and regional NSW has for years battled a drought that ruins farms and drains bank accounts. At the same time, these areas are battling an insidious drug scourge that is wrecking the lives of entire families.
That is the reality of the ice epidemic in NSW country towns. It is robbing these towns of the young adults who will be vital to post-drought rebuilding.
Short-term gains from drug dealing represent long-term losses for towns across our state.
AUGUST 19: Flying into her own firestorm
Let’s hope Gladys Berejiklian’s trade mission to Europe was a rip-roaring success.
The NSW Premier will need to generate some serious coin if she is to cover what will likely be a punishing international phone bill, what with all of her troubles back home.
Now returned to deal with those troubles, entirely caused by her own government, Berejiklian has set about righting her wayward Coalition.
First cab off the rank: ordering an immediate review of the planning rules cited in the rejection of the new luxury Ritz Carlton tower at Pyrmont.
Planning Minister Rob Stokes, who lately has performed as the exact opposite of his title, has been directed to contact Greater Sydney Commission chief Lucy Turnbull to request that review.
“I am sending a strong message that Pyrmont is open for business and ready to be taken to the next level,” Berejiklian said following her arrival in Sydney. The Premier is suddenly sounding very much like the pro-development candidate who convincingly won this year’s state election.
“Sydney is Australia’s only true global city and we have a unique opportunity before us to transform Pyrmont and the Western Harbour precinct into an iconic destination,” Berejiklian continued, adding further positive notes.
Her encouraging words, however, will need to be supported by concerted and prolonged action. If they are not, Berejiklian and her government risk losing further popular backing. Already, as an exclusive poll in The Daily Telegraph reveals, almost a third of Coalition voters indicate they would have voted differently if they had known about the controversial bill to decriminalise abortion before the election in March.
Almost 84 per cent of people who took part in the poll were against abortion based on the unborn baby’s sex. Yet as the abortion bill currently stands, terminations would be available for any reason at all up to 22 weeks — including gender.
Untangling that issue will definitely not be the work of a moment. Although the bill was proposed by an independent MP, it had the support of Health Minister Brad Hazzard.
The government’s hands are all over this. It is a debacle created by the Premier’s team.
Coming weeks are crucial to the Premier’s future. Good luck.
AUGUST 17: Pacific Island allies cry up a storm
The internet has given us a whole range of new expressions. One of them, “crybullying”, very much applies to events this week at the Pacific Island Forum.
A crybully is defined as someone “who engages in intimidation, harassment, or other abusive behaviour while claiming to be a victim”.
At the Forum, the crybullies were Pacific Island nations attempting to shake Australia down for extra climate cash.
Never mind Australia’s $500 million climate funding for the Pacific Islands. And never mind Australia’s $1.4 billion annual investment in the region.
That is not enough for these crybullies, who besides wanting even more money also demand Australia end coal mining and not open any new mines.
Maybe these leaders don’t need any additional climate cash. Maybe they need calculators, because Australia sure as hell won’t have any spare cash left over for the Pacific Islands if we shut down our largest export revenue earner.
Among Forum low points, Tuvalu’s Prime Minister Enele Sopoaga used Tongan counterpart Samuela Pohiva to provide a literal crybullying example.
“The Prime Minister of Tonga actually cried, in the retreat, did you know that?” Sopoaga said during a press conference at which Australian PM Scott Morrison was present.
“The leader of Tonga actually shed tears in front of the leaders, because of the passion referring to the presentation from the two young warriors of climate change the other day.”
Perhaps Pohiva simply didn’t enjoy their performance.
In any case, Australia is targeted by these nations not because we’re massive contributors to climate change — Australia only generates 1.3 per cent of global emissions — or because we’re responsible for islands disappearing.
We are targeted because we are nearby, wealthy and susceptible to white guilt. The Pacific Islands have been playing on this for decades.
At the Forum, they naturally found a supporter in New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern. ‘‘When combating climate change, it’s good to have an ally like New Zealand in your corner,” Solomon Islands deputy opposition leader Matthew Wale said. “Together, we can save Tuvalu, the Pacific, and the world.” Good luck with that. Meanwhile, Australia will get on with saving Australian jobs.
AUGUST 16: Turning a buck from a bad debt
Mark Twain, author of Huckleberry Finn, was one of the world’s most successful writers. But he was also undoubtedly one of the worst investors.
Wild business speculations completely exhausted the Twain fortune, and in 1894 the celebrated man of letters was forced to file for bankruptcy with debts equal to about $3.5 million in today’s currency. “Most of it was lost through bad business,” Twain at one point admitted in court. “I was always bad in business.”
But he was good in life.
Twain subsequently threw himself into a global speaking tour, appearing at multiple venues across Australia, among other far-flung nations, and eventually rebuilt his finances.
And then, although his bankruptcy filing meant he was not legally obliged to do so, Twain paid back all of his creditors.
Compare Twain to shady Australian business operators who liquidate businesses in order to avoid paying their debts in a deceptive practice known as “phoenixing”.
Your typical phoenix operator will gather debts before selling assets at far below value. They then set up new businesses using those cheaply-bought assets and carry on trading.
Anyone owed money from the original entity is left in the cold. No money for them, but a fresh start for the debt dodgers.
“We see phoenixing as effectively stealing from employees who aren’t paid wages and superannuation that they’re entitled to [and] stealing from other businesses who aren’t paid for the goods and services they provide,” Australian Taxation Office Deputy Commissioner Will Day said.
“It’s also stealing from taxpayers through not paying the right amount of tax, which should be returned to the community.”
By some estimates, phoenixing costs the Australian economy up to $5 billion per year. It also erodes trust in the business community and is a powerful disincentive to investment.
The Morrison government began moves some months ago to tighten regulations that allow these scams. A bill that would criminalise phoenixing and put offenders behind bars for up to 10 years has now been reintroduced to parliament.
Regrettably, this bill is sorely needed. Few can write like Mark Twain, and very few have Twain’s sense of honour.
AUGUST 15: First came the night of chills
Descriptions of Mert Ney’s behaviour on Monday night prior to his alleged knife attack are deeply concerning. The account given by Courtney Ridgeway and Nathan Tgiy, a homeless couple from Campbelltown who shared emergency accommodation with Ney, depict an unstable and threatening young man.
“He was really provoked, acting as if he wanted to stab us,” Ms Ridgeway told The Daily Telegraph.
“He sat next to me, not Nathan, and then asked Nathan ‘come chill’. He scared me a bit.”
There should also be concern over an apparent lapse in co-ordination between police and NSW welfare agencies.
The timeline of Ney’s movements has him checking himself out of hospital, at which point police were apparently notified.
Yet the fact that Ney had then taken a room in emergency government housing, where he told the couple he’d been approved a four-day stay with a three-day extension, seemingly did not register on police radar.
In general, authorities have performed brilliantly over recent years in halting terrorist attacks and other potentially deadly events.
Ney, however, whose record and recent behaviour might have drawn greater attention, fell between the cracks.
Various state government bodies have either put in place or have worked to put in place structures that allow rapid cross-checking between law enforcement and other agencies.
In theory, this should make quick work of any search. In practice, whatever systems are currently in place obviously require urgent refinement.
Stopping any planned crime or act of violence prior to them taking place is no simple task. It must be said at the same time that the NSW government directs enormous resources towards this issue.
As The Daily Telegraph reports, Ney was an individual of interest to police because his family had listed him as a missing person and also due to a domestic violence incident.
NSW Police Commissioner Mick Fuller has confirmed that his officers had received a “keep a lookout for” notice regarding the whereabouts of Ney.
“That is not unusual in terms of what we see day in and day out,” he said.
To say the least, Ney’s case became very unusual indeed.
AUGUST 14: Sydney heroes use all it takes when it comes to quick response
Regrettably, we live in a time when our bravery and sense of community may at any moment be tested to the utmost. None of us, especially those without combat experience or police training, can know precisely how we will respond in a situation where lives are under threat and action is required.
But thankfully there are people who do step forward and who do place themselves at risk in order to protect others.
Tuesday’s CBD horror, which saw one defenceless woman found dead and another stabbed, might have frozen a lesser city.
People in close vicinity to the alleged assailant might have chosen to flee, possibly allowing the alleged attacker to continue his rampage.
Instead, a remarkable sequence of events quickly unfolded. An older gentleman retrieved a wicker chair from a cafe and advanced on the young man as he stood in the middle of the street, holding a knife in his blood-soaked hands and shouting “Allahu Akbar”.
The older gent’s intervention, as can be seen in video coverage, plainly confounded the alleged attacker. For several vital seconds, he didn’t know which way to turn.
That delay gave others their opportunity to join in. One brought another chair. A milk crate — possibly now Sydney’s most famous milk crate — was introduced to the fray.
Paul O’Shaughnessy, one of three instant responders, who hail from Manchester, England, described his brother Luke’s reaction: “He said, ‘There’s a man wielding a knife.’ He saw a man on top of a bonnet of a car … clearly he could see blood and a knife. So immediately we just got the troops, we said, ‘All right, come on, let’s go and see if we can help’, so we ran towards him. Not saying we were heroes or anything … we just ran in.”
If he won’t describe their counter-attack as heroic, The Daily Telegraph is more than happy to oblige. And so is Detective Superintendent Gavin Wood. “They were significantly brave people,” Detective Wood said from the scene of Tuesday's outrage.
“To approach a person, with a mindset of obviously what this person did with clear evidence of stabbing, these people are heroes.”
Detective Wood makes a very good point about the nature of that response. Those brave men did not know if the alleged attacker carried any additional weapons or indeed if he had any nearby accomplices.
They only knew that a threat was present and that they were compelled to deal with it using anything available: chairs, a milk crate and even a crowbar.
“This is how Sydneysiders respond,” an awed Police Minister David Elliott said last night.
“If you want to put lives at risk in this city, just beware that it’s not only the police who respond. It’s the citizens, the fireys, the ambos and anyone else.”
To all who took part, The Daily Telegraph extends our total admiration and gratitude. To the friends and families of the dead woman and to the surviving victims, we express our deepest sorrow.
Tuesday’s events may also point to various legal processes and mental health security issues. The alleged attacker, who according to police has a history of mental health problems, was released without a conviction for possessing a weapon just two months ago.
He was caught carrying a USB stick that would, as Police Commissioner Mick Fuller said, “suggest he had some ideologies in relation to terrorism”.
NSW Attorney-General Mark Speakman already hinted at a possible review of mental health laws following the alleged murder last month of Sydney woman Rita Camilleri by her daughter, who had numerous times been released into family care.
The need for a full review of the state’s mental health security is now urgent.
As is the need for all Sydney residents to brace for the moment they too will be tested.
AUGUST 13: Abortion fury now up to 10
The attempt by Mike Baird to outlaw greyhound racing throughout NSW was the beginning of the end for the former Liberal premier.
Until that point, Baird was an engagingly popular leader who had successfully liberated billions of dollars for public works by selling or leasing stagnant government-owned utilities.
At the same time, Baird’s faith in and encouragement of free enterprise drove renewed investment across the state.
But that greyhound decision was a step in the wrong direction. It was a highhanded, moralistic strategy aimed at crushing an industry owned and run by battlers.
Public reaction was so massively and emphatically negative that Baird was not only forced to back down, but he also felt compelled to resign.
Now consider the backlash faced by current Coalition premier Gladys Berejiklian and her government over their handling of abortion legislation.
According to Police Minister David Elliott, the response from his constituents is running at ten times the level of the greyhound outrage. And it is almost all against the bill as it stands.
This is because, just as with the greyhound decision, the abortion bill is rightly seen as elitist bullying by an arrogant political class.
The people of NSW were not broadly consulted prior to the bill being tabled in the lower house. Abortion was not an issue during the election.
Yet here we are, with the upper house now set to consider the abortion bill by midweek.
Readers of The Daily Telegraph have been loud in their condemnation of the bill’s wording and its potential to introduce unintended consequences — such as permitting abortion by gender selection.
While many — included The Daily Telegraph — see a need to decriminalise abortion, they believe with some considerable justification that decriminalisation is being used here as a cover for abortion laws that go well beyond current community standards of acceptability.
Those standards are also offended by images of grinning MPs rejoicing following the abortion bill’s initial passage. Delighted thumbs-up gestures are not usually associated with matters of life and death.
Gladys Berejiklian has completely misread the public mood on this. She is out of touch, and again out of the country.
AUGUST 12: School rule that fits for adults
There have long been anecdotal tales floating around of people abruptly grabbing a friend’s mobile phone and throwing it away because it is interrupting conversation.
Obviously, The Daily Telegraph would never endorse such behaviour. Tossing a phone is definitely a rude move.
But, then again, so too is peering intently at a phone screen rather than paying attention to a conversationalist’s point.
Fortunate students at The King’s School at North Parramatta will now likely never reach that particular breaking point, thanks to a ban on mobile phones and all electronic devices during school hours.
The ban, mirrored by similar restrictions at a growing number of Sydney private schools, initially met some resistance from some students but is now widely welcomed.
“I like the new phone policy,” explains 15-year-old King’s student Angus Williams, “because you can now have a fully immersive conversation with someone at lunchtime, rather than a person looking at the phone and the conversation getting off track.”
Phrases like “fully immersive” don’t enter teenage vocabularies through social media. This policy appears to be paying off in more ways than one.
“We have a beautiful environment and we wanted the boys to engage with that environment and engage with each other,” deputy headmaster Stephen Edwards said.
“One of the housemasters said it was the first time in years the cricket bat has come out and all of a sudden the boys were doing things together and they weren’t sitting on their phones.”
The example set by these schools may apply elsewhere.
Speak with any businessperson whose work requires substantial travel, and they will often report that the most blissful moments of their journeys is when they shut down their phones and enjoy a few hours of uninterrupted peace.
Of course, they also fire up those same phones within seconds of landing. Smart phones are clearly addictive.
Still, achieving a balance is possible. Some Sydney dinner hosts these days require phones to be handed over at the door. It’s a sensible schoolyard rule being used on adults.
And it avoids the stress and tension of a sudden phone rage attack.
Surrender the mobile phone and nobody gets hurt.
AUGUST 10: Libs go left and go wrong
Gladys Berejiklian’s government, in the same manner as Coalition governments led by Barry O’Farrell and Mike Baird, governs well when it sticks to solid economics.
But when Coalition governments veer into social engineering territory, watch out.
Mike Baird’s disastrous attempt to please ABC viewers by attempting to ban greyhound racing in the wake of an ABC documentary should have provided a lesson to his successor.
Do what you do best, which in the case of Coalition governments is balance the books and build surpluses.
Don’t do what you do worst, which is to follow policies that only your political opponents would endorse.
But Berejiklian and her team have not learned from the Baird fiasco, which saw one of the state’s most popular premiers suffer the greatest mainland popularity decline in polling history.
“The tight bright blue suits, brown shoes and buckets of hair product its ministers sport always give the Berejiklian government away,” a perceptive piece in The Spectator Australia recently noted. “It so wants to be ‘with it’ and trendy.
“It loves pitching to people who will never vote Liberal.
“And what better way than to embark on a massive rewriting of abortion laws less than six months after an election where it was silent on the issue?”
Perfect call. NSW has raced from silence to all talk all the time on the abortion issue.
The only people shut-out of these discussions, however, have been the people who do not have the privilege of holding a seat in parliament. How nice for them.
And how enlightening this is for the rest of us.
The people of NSW now have a very clear view of how they are seen by this government and by the broader political class.
They are seen as impediments. They are seen as obstacles to be avoided while handing down what they believe to be correct legislation.
Bright blue suits and buckets of hair product don’t make selling this debacle any easier. Those fashionable touches just emphasise how of-the-moment, and therefore temporary, this group of politicians is.
And now we have them attempting to sweep aside laws that have been on the books for more than 100 years.
AUGUST 9: Fix it — and send Google the bill
At the dawn of the internet era, many pundits foresaw nothing but positive outcomes. Information would become democratised. Almost every citizen on Earth would soon have instant access to all of the planet’s accrued science, literature, art and knowledge.
People would be able to establish deep and lasting connections with other people from around the globe.
And education would be transformed, with rapid electronic means of learning taking the place of old-fashioned books and blackboards.
Needless to say, the internet era has not entirely delivered on its positive promise.
For every individual using the internet to seek historical insights, there are hundreds more using it to bully children and degrade civilisation.
That is not to say the internet has been a total bust. It is just that the negatives are now obvious. And additional drawbacks keep piling up.
The eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant now warns that strangers can directly contact schoolchildren because of a glitch in software available to NSW public school students.
“We understand the email naming conventions used by some state and independent schools may be easy to guess and validate, if account privacy and security settings are inadequate,” Grant says.
“This could increase the likelihood of a person who presents a risk to a child using their school email address to initiate contact with them.”
Grant has called on schools to close a loophole that potentially allows predators to verify a student’s email address using Google Hangouts and contact them directly.
This raises another issue.
Closing that loophole could prove expensive and time-consuming. State education funds could be exposed to some considerable debt.
Yet Google, one of the wealthiest companies on earth and whose Hangouts structure presents the possibility of access to student details, seems safe from any financial impact.
To offer an old world scenario, this is analogous to schools having to pay for fixing faulty uniforms when a clothing company is to blame.
The NSW government should seek redress from Google if it is proven that Google bears any responsibility.
AUGUST 8: Time for the city to live once again
Many medical treatments are intended to address immediate health problems, and may become injurious if persisted with after an individual is returned to health.
Powerful pain killers such as Endone and other opioids, for example, are extremely effective in emergency pain-relief situations.
Yet their continued use, as is well known, can lead to addiction and severe health problems, including death.
Likewise, metal leg calipers were often used in the treatment of polio. Applied to a person cured of polio, of course, such medical aids would be a pointless hindrance to easy movement.
Back in 2014, Sydney faced an urgent crisis.
The tragic deaths in Kings Cross of Thomas Kelly and Daniel Christie in preceding years highlighted a culture of alcoholic excess and violence throughout our inner city.
The government’s answer, fully encouraged and supported by The Daily Telegraph at the time, was to introduce lockout laws and other measures designed to kerb inner-city chaos.
Among other restrictions, citizens in and around Kings Cross, Oxford St, Cockle Bay, the Rocks and Haymarket were no longer permitted to enter drink-serving venues after 1.30am.
After 3am, alcohol became strictly off limits.
These drink-reducing strategies were the night-life equivalent of emergency medical intervention. And they worked.
Of 35 high-risk inner-city venues identified in 2014 by the Department of Liquor and Gaming, more than 50 per cent have now closed.
“Four years ago, the wider community was sickened by the senseless injury and death,” Paul Toole, then the Minister for Liquor and Gaming, said last year.
“There was an intense demand for the Government to do something to put a stop to those tragedies.
“The overall impact has been a significant reduction in assaults in the inner-city area.”
NSW Police agree with that assessment, noting in 2018 a “dramatic reduction in assaults and alcohol-related crime”.
But we have now reached a point where the cure has taken effect and the continued enforcement of strict drinking laws is no longer helpful to Sydney’s hospitality industry, evening atmosphere and international image.
The application of some drinking regulations now goes far beyond their intention.
Recently, a group of four young women attended an evening at the Sydney Opera House for a presentation of Madama Butterfly, choreographed by Graeme Murphy.
After the show, at around 10.30pm, the four women found a small bar where, rather than each buying a single glass of white wine, they asked to buy a bottle to share.
This was disallowed. No bottle sales at that hour. Who knows what mayhem may erupt if a few Puccini fans get a little loose with the Semillon.
A visitor to one of the Central Coast’s more popular bars last week asked a member of the bar staff for a Maker’s Mark on ice.
This particular brand is an upscale favourite among bourbon fanciers, who would not ever dream of diluting its Kentucky character with cola or other mixers.
Again, the request was refused. No straight spirits allowed, even at 7.30pm on a Saturday night.
The Daily Telegraph has had differences of opinion with Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore over numerous issues, but it is difficult to disagree with the Lord Mayor on the current status of Sydney night-life.
“There’s an understanding that the lockout laws — While a circuit-breaker at the time — have taken the oxygen out of Sydney’s night-time economy,” Moore said this week, after giving evidence to a parliamentary inquiry examining the effect of those laws.
In Moore’s view, Sydney now has “no life after dark”.
Merivale CEO Jonathan Hemmes, too, says the lockout laws have done their job — and now need to be made less stringent.
“Our city of Sydney has matured,” Hemmes points out.
“We have seen first-hand over the past five years that mindless anti-social behaviour has been dealt with swiftly by police and punishments handed out to the offending individuals.”
Sydney can accommodate liberalised drinking laws without compromising public safety, which must always remain paramount.
The worst of the problems have been solved. Let’s live again.
AUGUST 7: Let us debate early and late
In 2015, the New York Times ran a delightful photograph of five-year-old Alexis Hutchinson playing with her sister.
Charm aside, that image might not be of interest to readers in NSW.
But it is actually extremely relevant to an issue currently before our state parliament, which was introduced and is being pursued in the near total absence of any serious community consultation.
Alexis, you see, was born premature at just 22 weeks — at which stage of gestation the proposed NSW abortion bill would allow termination upon request.
The accompanying article discussed a shift in the consensus of when a premature birth is considered viable.
At the time, more than four years ago, the broad view put the earliest viability at 23 to 24 weeks.
But even then, prior to continuing post-natal advances, some experts were inclined to shift viability to 22 weeks.
Those findings, drawn from a study of thousands of premature births, raise important questions about what exactly constitute early and late term abortions. If survivability at 22 weeks becomes frequent, perhaps it is more late than early.
This topic, among many others, would likely have been debated at length during the recent election campaign — if abortion had been an issue.
It wasn’t, of course. Yet now we have the unseemly spectacle of our state’s political class rushing ahead with various proposals associated with an apparently urgent abortion bill.
In new developments, Attorney-General Mark Speakman and Planning Minister Rob Stokes will suggest amendments to the abortion bill.
One would require that “after 22 weeks, any terminations to be performed in a public hospital, or in a private hospital” be “approved by the Minister by regulation”.
Another amendment would require “after 22 weeks, any termination to be performed by an obstetrician or by a medical practitioner with appropriate additional expertise”.
But what of babies who have not yet reached 22 weeks? According to Dr Edward Bell, who co-authored the premature birth study, 22 weeks is a new marker of viability.
“That’s what we think, but this is a pretty controversial area,” Dr Bell told the Times.
“I guess we would say that these babies deserve a chance.”
And we would say voters deserve a chance to talk about it.
AUGUST 6: Time to axe the awareness tax
Any individual who at this point is unaware of climate change has either been locked in solitary confinement for three decades or is a precognitive infant.
Yet the NSW government is still lifting money from your pocket to, among other things, “increase public awareness of climate change”.
This is done through a government directive requiring the state’s main electricity distributors, Ausgrid, Endeavour Energy and Essential Energy, as well as Sydney Water, to pay a steep annual levy to the NSW Climate Change Fund.
The latest demand is for $276 million. And while the government says those companies are only allowed to pass 25 per cent of the cost of the levy to residential consumers, it cannot explain how this rule is enforced.
“Take an axe to it,” is the sound advice of NSW upper house MP Mark Latham, who estimates the climate levy costs residential and business owners an average of about $80 every year — on top of already ridiculous power charges.
“It’s become a giant slush fund at the expense of electricity consumers,” Latham said. “The $1.3 billion it has stockpiled in reserve should be given back to electricity customers to bring down costs.”
Latham is proving a worthy addition to state politics. Institute of Public Affairs policy director Gideon Rozner makes further useful points.
“It is telling that the government has stopped reporting the exact amount of emissions cut by the scheme,” Rozner told The Daily Telegraph.
“The whole of Australia accounts for only 1.3 per cent of global carbon emissions and NSW would obviously be a fraction of that.
“How on earth is the NSW Climate Change Fund supposed to make any difference whatsoever to the earth’s climate?”
It can’t and doesn’t, but it does make various climate causes much wealthier.
Last winter, the knitting charity Knit One Give One reported it had donated more than 55,000 items of clothing to Australian families who could not cover their power bills.
“Were not even talking necessarily about the homeless,” founder Ros Rogers said. “We’re talking about families who can’t afford to run their heating.”
And meanwhile those bills remain obscenely high in NSW for no sound reason at all.
AUGUST 5: Gunman’s gutless move before unleashing evil
Bad and even occasionally life-altering decisions are frequently made in haste.
Under pressure, an individual may make a choice that inadvertently sets in train all manner of deleterious events.
Sometimes those instantaneous life decisions may be driven by selfishness, illogic or blind vengeance.
Sometimes, in fact, those rapid decisions may be driven by a kind of instinctive, spontaneous core wickedness.
And then there are acts of evil that involve substantial planning. This is evil on an unfathomable, unforgivable level.
Consider the behaviour on Sunday in the US of 21-year-old Patrick Crusius, who drove for nine long hours from his home in Allen, Texas, to the border city of El Paso.
The sole savage purpose of his journey was to slaughter innocent people.
Nine hours on the road gives a person a great deal of time to think.
Additionally, Crusius would presumably have had to occasionally stop for food and fuel, allowing him even more opportunity to dwell on his deadly plan.
Any individual not entirely consumed by cowardly hatred might have at some point abandoned that drive and peacefully returned home.
Not Crusius, however. In the craven manner of his pathetic inspiration, New Zealand mosque gunman Brenton Tarrant, he stayed on course.
“In general, I support the Christchurch shooter and his manifesto,” Crusius wrote in what is believed to be his manifesto of sorts, posted online shortly before the attack.
As a final indication of his sheer gutlessness, Crusius actually went to the trouble of putting on safety goggles and earmuffs prior to unleashing his high-powered weapon against defenceless shoppers.
When you’re murdering 20 people, including a four-month-old baby and an 82-year-old, it obviously makes sense to take self-protection measures.
Judging by his other online comments, Crusius appears not to be blessed with any gifts of insight or imagination.
“Working in general sucks, but I guess a career in software development suits me well, ” he wrote on his LinkedIn page.
“I spend about eight hours every day on the computer so that counts as technology experience I guess.”
Every one of Crusius’s victims led a better life than did he.
AUGUST 3: Dine out and save local jobs
Locating an excellent Sydney restaurant of any type and in any price range is the work of a moment. And if you’re uncertain, simply ask around for recommendations.
Everybody has a personal favourite. At The Daily Telegraph, staff are particularly fond of various Lebanese, Japanese and Indian restaurants in and around Surry Hills.
Yet our restaurants and much else are now at risk due to a delivery culture that is blamed for a significant decline in the rate of new restaurant launches.
The number of new dining venues opening has declined by almost 50 per cent since companies such as Uber Eats and Deliveroo began operating in Sydney a few years ago.
As these companies become more successful, they reduce the number of restaurants from which they can deliver and where people previously went out to eat.
It’s a destructive and self-defeating business model that lures viable outlets into failure.
But restaurants, to their immense credit, are fighting back.
Rather than cop an additional 30 per cent to 35 per cent on the price of individual meals to have them transported door to door, restaurants are cancelling their Uber Eats and Deliveroo accounts.
“We got into hospitality to share our food with people, to talk to them and welcome them into our restaurant like they’re a part of our family,” Carol Salloum, who runs Darlinghurst’s popular Almond Bar, said. “Not to put food in a plastic container and send it off.
“For the past year I have noticed less people coming into the restaurant and instead ordering deliveries more, even some of our regulars.
“That’s not what we wanted.”
So Salloum, aware she might lose some business, took the risky step of ending her delivery arrangements. Happily, that move has paid off.
“Since announcing that Uber Eats and Deliveroo will no longer be available we have had an amazing response,” Salloum told The Daily Telegraph.
“People are coming back into the restaurant to eat.”
The rise of a delivery culture also impacts upon the social aspect of dining. A number of factors are already pushing people into more solitary and less rewarding lifestyles.
Dependence on delivered food makes matters even worse.
For your own and Sydney’s good, eat out this weekend.
AUGUST 2: Art Gallery revamp the latest fail for NSW government
Another day, another debacle for the NSW government of Premier Gladys Berejiklian.
In just the past week or so, the government has endured controversies over the Sydney Football Stadium’s demolition and construction, the Ritz-Carlton hotel rejection, and an abortion bill in parliament.
Now the government has been forced to re-open a critical tender process to build the $344 million Art Gallery of NSW expansion.
At issue is the expected cost of the gallery expansion. Lendlease has re-tendered for the build in the new process, after previous cost disputes.
It is all becoming very messy for the government. In fact, “messy” might be an ongoing government theme.
Labor landed very few hits on the Coalition during the election campaign, and previous leader Michael Daley proved no match at all for Gladys Berejiklian in their leadership debate.
He was all over the shop during that particular encounter.
But the government has now created a sequence of mini-disasters all of its own. No wonder, then, that Labor is finally scoring some points.
“There is a cloak of secrecy around the Sydney Modern project,” Opposition arts spokesman Walt Secord said yesterday, referring to the Art Gallery of NSW expansion.
“There are major concerns in the arts community about the lack of transparency surrounding the actual cost of the Sydney Modern Project.”
Outside of the arts community, similar concerns are held. After all, every NSW taxpayer has a stake in this laudable gallery improvement.
At the moment, despite a powerful election triumph and a complete absence of leadership tensions, the Berejiklian government appears to be stumbling and bumbling as the federal government was during the final few weeks of Malcolm Turnbull’s prime ministership.
The outcome is highly unlikely to be anything as dramatic as it was for Turnbull, yet there must now be at least some pressure on Berejiklian and her team to deliver a controversy-free few days.
Once a government or a political party — or even an individual politician — is perceived by the public in a negative way, it is usually extremely difficult to reverse that perception.
Over to you, Coalition.
AUGUST 1: Stumbling Gladys struggles to pick up pieces on key issues
Premier Gladys Berejiklian has now returned to Sydney from her brief overseas holiday. And she’s returned to a state government in some degree of chaos.
The government’s Department of Planning, which recommended against construction of the proposed Ritz-Carlton hotel in Pyrmont, now cannot even agree with the hotel’s developers over how many floors the building would have.
According to the developers, the $500 million structure would have featured 61 storeys.
But the Department of Planning inflates that figure to 66 storeys.
A spokeswoman for the Department claims the Ritz-Carlton was 66 storeys when you include the mezzanine, podium and plant levels, “which are all new components”.
They’re evidently a picky lot at the department. Similar confusion also exists over construction of the new 45,000-seat stadium at Moore Park.
Back in December last year, the Berejiklian government announced that Lendlease was “the construction contractor”.
But on Monday the Premier admitted that Lendlease was only ever awarded a contract to demolish the now-departed Sydney Football Stadium.
Right now, the Berejiklian government is doing a passable imitation of former Labor leader Michael Daley during the election debate in March.
Just like flailing Daley, the government is plainly unaware of important details and appears to be presenting some claims plucked from thin air.
Speaking of which, the abortion bill soon to be presented in parliament is a further sign of a government that in very recent times has lost direction.
Not mentioned at all during the election campaign, the abortion bill has since emerged from nowhere to become a consuming political issue.
Those aiming to pass the bill, which includes politicians from major parties and independents, have frequently mentioned the desperate, can’t-lose-a-minute urgency of introducing pro-abortion legislation.
But if this is the case, why was the subject not up for discussion during the election campaign?
How did something that clearly was not a matter of urgency earlier this year suddenly become urgent just in recent days? What changed?
Premier Berejiklian needs to regain control of parliament. It’s a right old mess at present.