Queensland Australia's most corrupt police state?

Almost 30 years later, all the signs of the pre-Fitzgerald era are back

Change to misconduct and corruption in the police force must come from the top. A culture shift is long overdue

Former Queensland police officer Rick Flori and Renee Eaves after Flori was found not guilty of misconduct. Photograph: Dave Hunt/AAP

The Fitzgerald inquiry was supposed to be a reckoning for the Queensland police, a sign that the bad old days were over.

Tony Fitzgerald’s findings were particularly scathing of the way police dealt with misconduct and corruption. “The Internal Investigations Section has provided warm comfort to corrupt police,” Fitzgerald said. “It has been a friendly, sympathetic, protective and inept overseer. It must be abolished”.

Almost 30 years later, and Queensland is back where it started, showing all the hallmarks of the pre-Fitzgerald era. Internal investigations have been replaced by the “Ethical Standards Command” which more often than not allows police to investigate their colleagues.

How long are the premier of Queensland, Annastacia Palaszczuk, and the commissioner of police, Ian Stewart, going to sit by while history repeats?

In 2011, I took legal action against a Queensland police officer and the state for deprivation of liberty, assault and wrongful arrest.

The officer had come into my home and handcuffed me, while I was pregnant, for an alleged driving offence. I was subsequently found not guilty. The same officer had previously pulled me over more than a dozen times. I complained to every department tasked with the oversight of police. I went to the officer’s station, where I was laughed at. I then went to the Crime and Misconduct Commission, who referred me back to the same station for a second laugh.

By the time I eventually made it to the district court in Brisbane five years later to sue him for damages, I was a single mother with no resources to fund lawyers.

The police internal investigation found my complaint about this officer “unsubstantiated”. But after a four-day trial, the officer was found guilty of false imprisonment and I was awarded damages totalling $93,000. Why did it take a judge to rule his behaviour was unacceptable?



The same officer was one of the six officers previously charged with deprivation of liberty over the “Pinkenba Six” incident in 1994, where three Indigenous boys were taken out to the bush and later gave evidence to the CJC that the officers threatened them, threw their shoes away and then drove off. The charges were dropped, after the magistrate ruled the boys had gone with the police willingly, which resulted in a mass protest. The officers, however, remained in the police service.


For my trouble, police then asked me to pay $5,000 for the officer’s meals, accomodation, lost earnings and a “care and consideration” fee because the trial ran an additional day. This is the sheer arrogance of this police service: asking a victim to pay for the care and consideration of the officer who had violated her rights.

This is the sheer vindictiveness of this police service: when a young father was bashed by police in the basement of the Surfers Paradise police station, they took no criminal action against the officers involved – one was given a “suspended dismissal” and sent back out on the beat. Instead they decided to charge another police officer, Sergeant Rick Flori, with misconduct for leaking the video of the incident.

The most senior officer in the video, David Joachim, is a relative of police commissioner Ian Stewart. In August 2015, Stewart was interviewed on ABC radio and talked about Flori’s criminal matter and the leaking of the video. Yet when his relationship with Joachim was later reported, he said that he had earlier removed himself from the case citing a conflict of interest. Six years after the bashing, in February 2018, Flori was found not guilty. But the damage to this officer, and to his reputation, was already done. The officer who had pursued the charges against Flori was soon after promoted to a role at the Crime and Corruption Commission, the body tasked to investigate the very same kind of matters.

The CCC is where people who fall victim to rogue police go for help. Julie*, whose address was accessed by a rogue police officer, then handed to her violent former partner, went to the CCC. She was referred back to police.

At a press conference last year, Stewart was asked about the case. The commissioner said he was happy to speak to the same victim again, if it would make her feel better. He had never spoken to her the first time. She explained to me she felt further betrayed by an organisation she once believed was there to serve and protect victims like her.

Leaders in government and public service should make decisions that are in the public interest. But they cannot properly serve the community if they continue down the same path: on the one hand pursuing officers who expose corruption, and on the other protecting those who fail in their duty to serve and protect.

You will never change misconduct and corruption from below. It must come from the top. A long overdue culture shift will only happen when the bar is set high, and does not accept anyone who falters or falls below the standard expected.

• Renee Eaves is a social justice advocate

* Julie is a pseudonym to protect her identity. She has also been referred to as Elizabeth in previous reporting about her case.

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/31/almost-30-years-later-all-the-signs-of-the-pre-fitzgerald-era-are-back

Support The Guardian

The Secret State: How you are kept in the dark

Somewhere in Melbourne, there's a public hospital where the risk of something going wrong is much greater than in another hospital across town


But you’re not allowed to know which hospital it is – because this type of data is hidden from patients and doctors.

A few kilometres away, buried in the files of the state Education Department, an explosive police report exists with allegations of a sex “grooming” ring linked to a suburban school.

Just don’t expect the government to release it because, bureaucrats claim, the report is exempt under Freedom of Information laws from ever being disclosed.
______

"I think there is still very much a culture in large parts of the [government] sector that’s more about, ‘How can I refuse disclosure?"
Victoria's Information Commissioner, Sven Bluemmel

And in the corridors of power at Town Hall, important decisions are being made about the City of Melbourne – about everything from new developments and contracts to transport improvements and rates.

The trouble is, more than a quarter of those decisions are made behind closed doors – and some remain confidential indefinitely.

Increasingly, Victoria is a secret state. Almost every aspect of our government, our legal system, and our public services is pervaded by a creeping lack of transparency.

From the Premier’s Office at Treasury Place to police departments, health, schools and the courts, a veil of secrecy is undermining democracy and having an impact on how we live.

What’s more, the laws that are supposed to ensure transparency – from the Freedom of Information Act to the Open Courts Act – are, in fact, resulting in exactly the opposite.

As Victoria's Information Commissioner, Sven Bluemmel, says, "I think there is still very much a culture in large parts of the [government] sector that’s more about, ‘How can I refuse disclosure?'".

In coming days, an Age investigation will examine how Victorians are being kept in the dark and the effect this is having on the public debate. We’ll also ask to hear your stories.

... cabinet always meets in secret; cabinet documents tend to be secret; and the public service is beholden to government of the day
Monash University politics lecturer Nick Economou

The notion of a secret government is not unique to Victoria. Its genesis goes back centuries to a time when monarchs protected themselves against rivals and official information was considered the property of the Crown.

In Australia, it was the colony of Victoria that set the pattern, according to an Australian Law Reform Commission report: in 1867, Victoria created the first secrecy provision in Australia, forbidding public servants from giving out information without the permission of a minister.

“It’s a throwback to the origins of our Westminster system – cabinet always meets in secret; cabinet documents tend to be secret; and the public service is beholden to government of the day,” says Monash University politics lecturer Nick Economou, who has been an observer of the state’s political landscape for decades.

Since then, various pieces of legislation have tried to cut against the grain and reverse the culture of keeping things hidden. The Freedom of Information Act, for instance, was introduced in 1982 to “extend as far as possible the right of the community to access to information in the possession of the Government of Victoria”.

The Open Courts Act was created to “strengthen and promote the principles of open justice and free communication of information”.

Both, largely, have failed.

The Age has uncovered:

 

More people are seeking access to information than ever before, yet even the watchdog who oversees the system says departments and agencies are plagued by a “culture of secrecy”. 

Number of FOI requests

First year of reporting: 1984-85

Government decisions

Top 5 public sector agencies with most requests:

1. Victoria Police
2. Melbourne Health
3. Alfred Health
4. Ambulance Victoria
5. Monash Health

Source: FOI Annual Report 2016-17

 Despite being accountable to the ratepayers who elect them, all but two of Victoria’s 79 councils held meetings behind closed doors in the last financial year, with East Gippsland Shire, the City of Melbourne, and Whittlesea Council among the worst in the state.

Top 5 most secretive Councils

Percentage of closed meetings 2016-17

 

Most secretive Councils by type

Percentage of closed meetings, 2016-17.

For all the attempts to improve transparency, secrecy permeates Victoria’s health system, from gag orders on doctors to fudged figures on hospital waiting lists, and sexual assaults being covered up in psychiatric wards.

Department of Health and Human Services

Waiting lists drop ahead of reporting system

Number of elective surgery patients on waiting list (total)

Almost 1600 court orders to suppress information were made between January 1, 2014 and December 31, 2016 – including court orders keeping some of Victoria’s worst paedophiles a secret. Their victims want this reformed.

Court orders

From January 1, 2015 to December 31, 2016, 1594 orders with the effect of suppressing information under various sources of power, with 1,279 orders made under the Open Courts Act. Of these ...

Daniel Andrews was elected partly on a platform to improve transparency. Four years later, Labor has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to block the rorts-for-votes affair in the courts; hundreds of “questions on notice” remain unanswered in the Victorian Parliament; and many of the government's transparency reforms have fallen short.

FOI requests

Source: FOI Annual Report, 2016-2017.

Victoria prides itself on being the “education state”. Yet schools say they're often kept in the dark about policy changes and parents claim they can't always get crucial information about how their children are faring.

The parents of a child with a disability at a primary school in Gippsland feared he had been inappropriately restrained after lashing out at the principal. But when they sought access to their son’s files - including staff diary notes, incident reports, and behaviour plans - they were told the request “would pose a substantial and unreasonable diversion of resources to process.”

Can any of this change?

Monash Adjunct Professor Colleen Lewis, an expert on public sector integrity, says there have been steps taken to improve the situation – but whether they're enough is open to debate.

Among Victoria’s public watchdogs, there is now an Ombudsman to deal with public sector complaints; an anti-corruption commission to tackle police misconduct and government corruption; an auditor-general to scrutinise the spending of taxpayer funds; and a local government inspectorate to oversee councils.

But, according to Dr Lewis, these integrity bodies are often hampered by lack of powers and resources, and are subject to the whims of politicians keenly focused on self-preservation and media pressure.

And all of this is happening in an age where we trust institutions less: of the 28 countries surveyed for the annual Edelman Trust Barometer published in February, Australia ranks 21st for the people's overall level of trust in institutions of all kinds, including government, business, the media and NGOs.

"One of things that would help with the lack of trust would be more accountability, more openness, more transparency,” says Dr Lewis.

Economou agrees.

“Ultimately, though, governments do this stuff because they’re fearful of the political consequences if too much of their information becomes public.

“And this government is like all the ones that preceded it: in favour of full disclosure in opposition, but far less so when it’s in office.”

Source: 29 Aug 2018, theage.com.au

Paedophile police rape women and the system hides it

From the 29 Aug 2018 by theage.com.au artcile of the headline:

I want to name my abuser, but the Victorian courts are preventing me

Tracey May wants her abuser identified, but the legal system is stopping her.
Photo: Simon Schluter

Tracey May was one of more than a dozen victims of a serial sex abuser – a former policeman. She fell pregnant to him when she was 11 and miscarried. Now she wants to let the world know who he is.

The trouble is, she can’t expose him, because it's prohibited by the Victorian legal system.


Five years ago, the state of Victoria passed an Open Courts Act to improve transparency of the legal process.

Despite it, restrictions on what the public can and can’t know about ongoing cases appears to be getting worse. One analysis found Victoria was responsible for more than half of the country’s suppression orders, more than every other state and territory combined.

Former Court of Appeal judge Frank Vincent wrote in his review last year that of the 1594 orders made between 2014 and 2016, 22 per cent were blanket bans that failed to say what was being suppressed or simply stated the “whole or any part of the proceeding” couldn’t be reported. Another 12 per cent didn’t give any grounds at all.

I faced him in court and I wasn’t afraid for the first time in my life. And then to be told I couldn’t speak his name ...
Child sexual abuse victim Tracey May

The review also found adult victims of sexual assault and family violence should, on conviction of the offender, be able to disclose their identity - a recommendation supported in principle by the Andrews government.

Yet to this day, a Magistrates Court suppression order forbids the publication of the man who abused Tracey May.  It also prevents the publication of his image and the police station where he worked, even though he was convicted and sentenced in 2016 to at least 15 years in jail.

His offending was horrendous. He brutalised nine children between 1967 and 1983. The youngest was five years old.

He molested one child in the police station, he attacked another in the back of a divisional van.

One parent reported him to police in 1979, but he wasn't charged. Instead, he resigned from the force and moved to New South Wales, where he offended against another seven children.

“I faced him in court and I wasn’t afraid for the first time in my life. And then to be told I couldn’t speak his name,” Ms May said.

“He can’t be protected and he is."

Victims of Crime Commissioner Greg Davies said while orders are often made to protect the identity of victims, victims are not being asked what they want.

“It’s been deemed by everyone to be irrelevant,” Mr Davies said.

“If a victim wants to go and make mention of what happened to them, usually because they want to prevent what happened to them from happening to someone else, and they can’t, then the victim is being further victimised by the court process.”

The order that prevents Ms May from naming her attacker was made in 2012, when the court proceedings just began, and it has no end date.

In September last year, crossbench senator Derryn Hinch used his parliamentary privilege to name the man he described as "a monster", but media were still unable to identify him.


When the case progressed to the County Court, the higher court did not issue a new suppression order, but the paedophile remained protected because he was given a pseudonym; Lewis Goddard.
Chief Magistrate Peter Lauritsen said the order was made under the Magistrates Court Act, and not the Open Courts Act, which was adopted in 2013. The new act introduced a five-year lifespan for orders.

He said all parties, including media, have the opportunity to argue against an application.
"Non-publication orders serve an important role in our justice system," he said.

"They are designed to protect the safety of any person involved in the court process, to ensure the proper administration of justice, to avoid further distress to a complainant or witness, or to protect national security."

Ms May, however, refuses to give up. As a child, she was made to feel ashamed. Now, she says, “I’ll keep fighting to name him.”

“Everyone said I should keep my mouth closed and don’t say a word. But as I got older, I decided that no, I am not going to keep my mouth closed. I’ve had my voice taken away from me for so long, it’s time I speak up.”

Australian politicians secretly working for a foreign government

 

In the last few years, we’ve discovered just how much trust — whether we like it or not — we have all been obliged to place in modern technology. Third-party software, of unknown composition and security, runs on everything around us: from the phones we carry around, to the smart devices with microphones and cameras in our homes and offices, to voting machines, to critical infrastructure. The insecurity of much of that technology, and increasingly discomforting motives of the tech giants that control it from afar, has rightly shaken many of us.

 

But latest challenge to our collective security comes not from Facebook or Google or Russian hackers or Cambridge Analytica: it comes from the Australian government. Their new proposed “Access and Assistance” bill would require the operators of all of that technology to comply with broad and secret government orders, free from liability, and hidden from independent oversight. Software could be rewritten to spy on end-users; websites re-engineered to deliver spyware. Our technology would have to serve two masters: their customers, and what a broad array of Australian government departments decides are the “interests of Australia’s national security.” Australia would not be the last to demand these powers: a long line of countries are waiting to demand the same kind of “assistance.”

In fact, Australia is not the first nation to think of granting itself such powers, even in the West. In 2016, the British government took advantage of the country’s political chaos at the time to push through, largely untouched, the first post-Snowden law that expanded not contracted Western domestic spying powers. At the time, EFF warned of its dangers —- particularly orders called “technical capability notices”, which could allow the UK to demand modifications to tech companies’ hardware, software, and services to deliver spyware or place backdoors in secure communications systems. These notices would remain secret from the public.

Last year we predicted that the other members of Five Eyes (the intelligence-sharing coalition of Canada, New Zealand, Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States) might take the UK law as a template for their own proposals, and that Britain “… will certainly be joined by Australia” in proposing IPA-like powers.

That’s now happened. This month, in the midst of a similar period of domestic political chaos, the Australian government introduced their proposal for the “Telecommunications and Other Legislation Amendment (Assistance and Access) Bill 2018.” The bill unashamedly lifts its terminology and intent from the British law.

But if the Australian law has taken elements of the British bill, it has also whittled them into a far sharper tool. The UK bill created a hodge-podge of new powers; Australia’s bill recognizes the key new powers in the IPA and has zeroed in on their key abilities: those of assistance and access.

If this bill passes, Australia will — like the UK — be able to demand complete assistance in conducting surveillance and planting spyware, from a vast slice of the Internet tech sector and beyond. Rather than having to come up with ways to undermine the increasing security of the Net, Australia can now simply demand that the creators or maintainers of that technology re-engineer it as they ask.

It’s worth underlining here just how sweeping such a power is. To give one example: our smartphones are a mass of sensors. They have microphones and cameras, GPS locators, fingerprint and facial scanners. The behavior of those sensors is only loosely tied to what their user interfaces tell us.

Australia seeks to give its law enforcement, border and intelligence services, the power to order the creators and maintainers of those tools to do “acts and things” to protect “the interests of Australia’s national security, the interests of Australia’s foreign relations or the interests of Australia’s national economic well-being”.

The “acts and things” are largely unspecified — but they include enabling surveillance, hacking into computers, and remotely pulling data from private computers and public networks.

The range of people who would have to secretly comply with these orders is vast. The orders can be served on any “designated communications provider”, which includes telcos and ISPs, but is also defined to include a “person [who] develops, supplies or updates software used, for use, or likely to be used, in connection with: (a) a listed carriage service; or (b) an electronic service that has one or more end users in Australia”; or a “person [who] manufactures or supplies customer equipment for use, or likely to be used, in Australia”.

Examples of electronic services may “include websites and chat fora, secure messaging applications, hosting services including cloud and web hosting, peer-to-peer sharing platforms and email distribution lists, and others.”

You can see the full list in the draft bill in section 317C, page 16.

As Mark Nottingham, co-chair of the IETF’s HTTP group and member of the Internet Architecture Board, notes, this seems to include “Everyone who’s ever written an app or hosted a Web site — worldwide, since one Australian user is the trigger — is a potential recipient, whether they’re a multimillion dollar company or a hobbyist.” It includes Debian ftpmasters, and Linux developers; Mozilla or Microsoft; certificate authorities like Let’s Encrypt, or DNS providers.

This is not an error: when we were critiquing a similarly broad definition in the UK’s IPA, we pointed out that the wording would allow the authorities to target a particular developer at a company (while requiring them to not inform their boss), or non-technical bystander who would not know the impact of what they were being asked to do. Commentators from close to GCHQ denied this would be the case and said that this would be clarified in later documents — but subsequent draft codes of practice actually doubled down on the breadth of the orders, saying that it was deliberately broad, and that even café owners who operated a wifi hotspot could be served with an order.

There are some signs that the companies affected by these orders have learned the lesson of the IPA, and pushed back during the Assistance and Access’s preliminary stages. Unlike the UK bill, there are clauses forbidding Australia from being required to “implement or build [a] systemic weakness or systemic vulnerability into a form of electronic protection” (S.317ZG); and preventing actions in some cases that would cause material loss to others lawfully using a targeted computer (e.g. S.199 (3), pg 163. Companies have an opportunity to be paid for their troubles, and billing departments can’t be targeted. There is some attempt to prevent government agencies forcing providers to “make false or misleading statements or engage in dishonest conduct”(S.317E).

But these are tiny exceptions in a sea of permissions, and easily circumvented. You may not have to make false statements, but if you “disclose information”, the penalty is five years’ imprisonment (S.317ZF). What is a “systemic weakness” is determined entirely by the government. There is no independent judicial oversight. Even counselling an ISP or telco to not comply with an assistance or capability order is a civil offence.

If the passage of the UK surveillance law is any guide, Australian officials will insist that while the language is broad, no harm is intended, and the more reasonable, narrower interpretations were meant. But none of those protestations will result in amendments to the law: because Australia, like Britain, wants the luxury of broad, and secret powers. There will be — and can be no true oversight — and the kind of malpractice we have seen in the surveillance programs of the U.S. and U.K. intelligence services will spread to Australia’s law enforcement. Trust and security in the Australian corner of the Internet will diminish — and other countries will follow the lead of the anglophone nations in demanding full and secret control over the technology, the personal data, and the individual innovators of the Internet.

“The government,” says Australia’s Department of Home Affairs web site, “welcomes your feedback” on the bill. Comments are due by September 10th. If you are affected by this law — and you almost certainly are — you should read the bill, and write to the Australian government to rethink this disastrous proposal. We need more trust and security in the future of the Internet, not less. This is a bill that will breed digital distrust, and undermine the security of us all.

 

Source: 27 Aug 2018, Electronic Frontier Foundation (eff.org)

Victorian police 'kept weapons to plant on suspects, kidnapped officer': ex-cop's affidavit

Police in Victoria's armed robbery squad kept a stash of weapons to plant on suspects, and "kidnapped and threatened" a fellow officer who refused to take a weapon to a crime scene, according to an affidavit from a retired fraud squad detective.

Key points:

• Police said Graeme Jensen pointed a gun at them before they fatally shot him in his car
• Ex-detective Bill Nash says another detective told him he was asked to take a gun to the scene after the shooting
• Affidavits from Mr Nash and another former detective support Mr Jensen's family's suspicions a gun was planted at the scene

In a stunning statement, Bill Nash also says that police presented false evidence to the inquest into the death of Graeme Jensen, a convicted bank robber who was fatally shot by police in October 1988 in Melbourne's outer south-east.

The Narre Warren shooting sparked a revenge attack on police the following day — the execution of constables Steven Tynan and Damian Eyre on Walsh Street, South Yarra.

Mr Nash was part of a police unit that investigated the Jensen case for Victoria's Office of Public Prosecutions in the mid-1990s.


His sworn affidavit, obtained by the ABC, raises a raft of potential corruption questions about Victoria Police's former armed robbery squad.

They include the claim by one of its former detectives that the squad kept a "stash of guns … to plant on suspects" — a claim that was investigated and dismissed by an ombudsman more than 10 years ago.

In the affidavit, Mr Nash also says a former armed robbery squad detective told him he was asked to bring a gun to the Jensen crime scene on the day of the shooting.

Mr Nash said the former detective told him he refused to carry out the instruction, and squad members later "kidnapped and threatened" him to keep quiet about what he knew.

 Photo: Fay Spear, pictured with her brother Graeme Jensen, wants a royal commission into his death. (Supplied)
 

Officers charged over Jensen's death claimed they shot him in self-defence, after he pointed a gun at officers while trying to escape in his car.

Then-detective Robert Hill, who fired the fatal shot, was acquitted of murder in the Supreme Court in 1995, and is now an assistant commissioner.

Family suspects gun was planted

Jensen's family has always claimed he was unarmed, and that the weapon — which didn't work and had none of Jensen's fingerprints on it — was planted by police.

Two former detectives have now come forward to support that claim — Mr Nash, and former detective Malcolm Rosenes, who signed an affidavit that said he saw a detective place a sawn-off rifle in Jensen's car after the shooting.

In his affidavit, Mr Rosenes says:

"[The police officer] came to the driver's side window and I saw him unfurl the towel and a dark object came out of it. I was of the strong impression at the time that it was a firearm.
"I saw the gun in photographs afterwards.
"Its appearance was consistent with the object I saw tipped from the towel into the car of the deceased."

Jensen's sister, Fay Spear, had applied for a fresh coronial inquest into her brother's death, but has now told the ABC she is abandoning that application, because she is distrustful of the system and is tired of waiting for justice.

 Photo: The gun allegedly wielded by Graeme Jensen, which his family suspects was planted. (Supplied)


In his affidavit, Mr Nash said when the weapon found in Jensen's car was tested by police forensics, no fragments of glass were found on it.

At the time, police charged over the shooting death said Jensen pointed a gun at police through the car window as Mr Hill fired his first shot.

"The gun would have been showered with glass as a consequence," Mr Nash's affidavit said.

"Fragments of that glass would have remained."

After forensic testing, the weapon was handed to homicide detective John Hill, who returned the gun to the lab five months later, requesting that it again be examined for glass particles, Mr Nash's affidavit says.

"Officers of the Forensic Science Laboratory expressed their disquiet as continuity had not been maintained, and any such test would not produce credible results," it says.

"John Hill insisted. The examination subsequently carried out … revealed glass fragments between the stock and the barrel and some fragments fell out of the barrel."
John Hill died by suicide in 1993.

Photo: Fay Spear had lobbied for a new inquest, but says she has lost faith in that process. (ABC News: Daniel Fermer)


The affidavit says that in 2004, Mr Nash was approached by a former detective from the armed robbery squad, and another ex-police officer, who wanted to talk to him about the "murder of Graeme Jensen".

Mr Nash said he was told by the former detective that on the day of the Jensen shooting, the detective was asked to bring a working firearm to the crime scene because of "the firearm allegedly found in Jensen's possession not being in proper working order".

The detective refused the request but one of his colleagues agreed to take the gun, only to be told to turn back "due to the number of media already present" at the scene.

In the affidavit, Mr Nash said the officer who refused to take the weapon told him he was later "abducted from his house by several members of the armed robbery squad [and] taken to a location near a Ford dealership in the western suburbs in an unmarked police vehicle and threatened not to reveal his knowledge of the Jensen shooting".

Family calls for royal commission

Jensen's family said Mr Nash's affidavit confirmed their suspicions that police planted the gun, and later tampered with it.

"I'm really overwhelmed and so happy they [Mr Nash and Mr Rosenes] have come forward," Ms Spear said.

"If they hadn't, nothing would have changed."

But Ms Spear no longer holds any hope in her brother's shooting being investigated fairly.

In 1991, coroner Hal Hallenstein found there was no evidence the sawn-off rifle was planted in the car after Jensen was killed.

Ms Spear said the coroner was misled by police.

"We never heard the truth — it is blatantly obvious that police had all the power and we had none at that time," she said.

Photo: Assistant Commissioner Robert Hill was acquitted of the murder of Graeme Jensen. (AAP: Tracey Nearmy, file photo)


Victoria Police provided a statement to the ABC, which said:

"This matter has been the subject of extensive investigations, examinations and court hearings over many years through numerous forums.
"Allegations previously raised have all been investigated. Recently an application by parties to have the inquest re-opened was rejected by the Supreme Court.
"The coroner has also previously made a finding in respect of the matter.
"There is nothing to warrant a re-opening of the investigation."

Ms Spear said the only way to discover the truth was through a royal commission.

Source: abc.net.au

Commonwealth Bank 'recommended' to face over 13,000 criminal offences

(Australia's No1 corporate criminal(?), Mr. Ian Mark Narev, CEO of Commonwealth Bank 2011-2018)


In the world pertaining to criminals in politics and corporations, it seems that it's a different legal reality to what the plebs face.

Under criminal law, the plebs of Australia are under strict and absolute liability, where first and foremost the person is guilty until proven otherwise, where also in the case of  alleged (criminal) driving offences owner onus unlawfully applies.

The pleb is not 'recommended' for criminal charges but rather criminal charges are bought against the person, where one must prove otherwise.

In the case of the royal commission, apparently lawyers 'recommend' the banks, in this case the CBA and NAB, face criminal charges with regards to superannuation law.

Could it be that the royal commission is a farce?

On the 3rd of June 2018, the mainstream media reported that the royal commission handed out a $700 million fine to the Commonwealth Bank for anti money laundering, which the bank gracefully 'agreed' to pay.

On the 8th of August 2018, the mainstream media announced that the Australian Government is giving the Australian tax payer's cash to the Commonwealth Bank in the form of a $12 billion business tax package.

As a result of the Australian tax payers funds supporting a criminal organisation, the tax office (ATO) is on the hunt to make up the difference, where it is on an assault on vulnerable Australians in order to make up the difference.



From the attention drawn to the criminal offences the banking industry has committed, we have obtained other information that indicates banks act unlawfully.

See article from 25 Aug 2018 by abc.net.au of the headline:

Lawyers recommend NAB and CBA face criminal charges over treatment of super customers

Photo: Senior counsel assisting the commission Michael Hodge QC claimed NAB and CBA misled super customers. (Supplied: Banking Royal Commission)

Lawyers for the banking royal commission have recommended the Commonwealth Bank and the National Australia Bank face criminal charges over their treatment of superannuation customers.

Key points:

• CBA admitted to more than 13,000 breaches of superannuation law
• Michael Hodge QC also recommended that NAB face criminal charges for misleading and deceptive conduct
• ASIC highly likely to take banks to court over fees-for-no-service scandal

In his closing submission on misconduct in the superannuation industry, senior counsel assisting the commission, Michael Hodge QC, said the Commonwealth Bank (CBA) had admitted to more than 13,000 criminal breaches of the superannuation law.

That is because the CBA-owned Colonial First State failed to move 13,000 superannuation members into low fee, no commission accounts known as My Super by the legal deadline of January 1, 2014.

Mr Hodge also recommended to Commissioner Kenneth Hayne QC that NAB face criminal charges for misleading and deceptive conduct because it wrongly charged fees to superannuation customers.

Mr Hodge alleged that NAB's superannuation form, MLC, and its superannuation trustee, Nulis, may have mislead customers under the ASIC Act by failing to tell them they did not need to pay a plan service fee.

He also said that NAB admitted breaking the law 84 times between 2014 and 2017 because it failed to tell the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) about the fees-for-no-service scandal within the legal deadline.

NAB is also accused of breaking superannuation laws by failing to promote the financial interests of customers in My Super products.

The bank is paying back $90 million to more than 300,000 superannuation members who were charged fees but received no financial advice.

Mr Hodge slammed the bank's behaviour and said the NAB executives who appeared before the commission appeared to lack insight into the misconduct.

"It is submitted that this behaviour indicates a disregard on behalf of the NAB Group for members of the relevant superannuation funds, for regulators and for the law," he said.

IOOF and AMP were also accused of breaking superannuation laws and Mr Hodge said IOOF may have engaged in misleading or deceptive conduct.

Mr Hodge also criticised ASIC and the banking regulator, APRA, for not being tough enough on financial institutions who broke the law because they emphasised negotiations over going to court.

"The approach of neither APRA nor ASIC to regulation of superannuation entities is sufficient to achieve specific or general deterrence," he said in the submission.

Mr Hodge pointed out ASIC has yet to start legal action over the fees-for-no-service scandal.

However the corporate regulator told the commission last week that it was highly likely to go to court over the scandal.

A secret report on NAB by ASIC accused the bank of criminal and civil offences over charging fees but not providing financial advice.

ASIC deputy chairman, Peter Kell, told the commission that $260 million had been refunded by the big four banks and AMP so far but the total cost of compensation could be more than $1 billion.

Facebook tags Australian media as fake news for exposing corrupt cops?

Let's just put aside the technicalities that the news article in this post is owned by an organisation called the Nine Entertainment Co Holdings Limited, where the focus is on the word entertainment.

What would be of significance is that the article is from an apparently trusted and verified source.

What would also be of significance is that the article is about police corruption where in this case Victoria Police committed the crime of assault and tampered with evidence.

See post from social media:

The person who brought attention to this action by Facebook also writes:

"So . . . Facebook flagged this post as "spam". Could it be that the "police officers" who monitor my facebook posts and who track my mobile phone as well as stalk and harrass me, have nominated this as spam because they don't like truth and NEWS stories which were published on Nine.com.au and in the Herald Sun about a "thug police" [direct quote from the Herald Sun] officer who assaulted a teenager, deleted evidence and laid false charges against the teen, being spoken about online.

THE INDISPUTABLE FACTS: When I was detained while not under arrest in 2012 by a Mill Park Constable I was charged with assault despite not assaulting anyone. My video recording was deleted by police however my audio recording caused the magistrate to dismiss the assault charges. I beat hinder and language charges in the county court. Since then I have been kidnapped by police on at least four occasions, assaulted, falsely imprisoned and falsely charged several times. I wish that none of this were true however all of it is 100% factual.

The article which facebook removed while saying it appears to be spam is attached, below. George Koromilas, it appears that this police officer got off very lightly for the crime of attempting to pervert the course of justice a crime that carries a maximum 25 year term."

It seems that there are many more issues within Victoria Police that the mainstream media and therefore the 'public' are not aware of.

Are the actions of Victoria Police within the Code of Conduct?

Read the article from 23 Aug 2018 by 9news.com.au of the headline:

Cop jailed for punching teen and deleting evidence

A Melbourne police officer has been jailed for punching a teenager in the face and trying to cover it up by charging the boy with assault.

The victim wiped away tears as he left the County Court after now suspended senior constable Simon Mareangareu was sentenced to 12 months' prison.

The then 17-year-old and his 16-year-old friend were headed home in the early hours of Christmas morning 2014 when Mareangareu stopped and told them they were suspected of committing burglaries and graffiti.

senior constable Simon Mareangareu was sentenced to 12 months' prison. (Nine)

At trial, Mareangareu admitted he had no such suspicion but was just "poking the bear".

The younger boy pulled out his phone and started recording while the officers took their details, capturing the moment when Mareangareu grabbed the older boy by the ear or the shoulder strap of his backpack.

When the teen swatted the officer's hand away, Mareangareu punched him in the jaw, declaring "you f***ing assaulted me ... don't f***ing hit police".

Judge Jeanette Morrish said there was no lawful excuse for now 54-year-old Mareangareu's actions and that he was the initial aggressor.

The teens were arrested and it was only hours later when the younger boy was reunited with his phone that he realised his video of the incident had been deleted.

Ffter the younger boy's father hired an expert to recover the video the real story was revealed. (Nine)

Mareangareu put together a brief and statements against the boys, which didn't mention his initial grabbing of the boy or the existence of the video.

While there was no evidence he had deleted the footage, she accepted he knew about it and by not presenting it, was covering up his own crimes, risking wrongful convictions for the teenagers and possible grievous consequences for them.

The court also heard Mareangareu blamed the boy when discussing the case with the teen's mother, telling her her son was "fired up and wanted to have a crack at the coppers and lost".

It was only after the younger boy's father hired an expert to recover the video that the real story was revealed and charges against the teens were dropped.

Judge Morrish said she agonised over a sentence for Mageangareu, a decorated police officer who risked his own life twice on duty to prevent suicides and a third time off duty to save a man from drowning.

When the teen swatted the officer's hand away, Mareangareu punched him in the jaw, declaring "you f***ing assaulted me ... don't f***ing hit police". (Nine)

But his failure to apologise or show appreciation of the harm he caused were aggravating features of his crimes.

Mageangareu was convicted of common assault and perverting the course of justice.

"Your conduct was disgraceful and utterly abhorrent," she told him.

He was also fined $5000.

Source: https://www.9news.com.au/national/2018/08/23/14/59/police-officer-punched-teen-sentenced-to-jail-time

Isn't the weather independent of technology?

Chemtrails is a 'conspiracy theory', right?

After all, only 'activists' (you know those pesky people) produce films based on conspiracy theory, right?

(illustration source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTjD_6NsoUg)

An article from 2012 on the website australianscience.com.au states:

"Cloud engineering research is underway at the University of Washington as a potential tool to ease climate change, but at this point is only at the initial stages."


See article at: http://www.australianscience.com.au/chemistry-2/chemtrails-conspiracy-theory/


So, apparently in the United States of America, 'chemtrails' is only at the "initial stages".

The US government had satellites in orbit for 10 years before they debated to tell the general population.

Chemtrails cloud engineering was used by the U.S. in Vietnam.

In Australia or rather to be more specific, in Victoria, cloud engineering was enshrined in a law called Rain-making Control Act 1967, or commonly known by its longer name of:
"An Act to regulate certain Rain-making and other Cloud-modification Processes, to make Provision with respect to Claims for Damages against Persons lawfully engaged therein and for other purposes"

as seen in document below:


See current Austlii reference at:

http://classic.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/vic/consol_act/rca1967198/

People in government committing the Commonwealth offence of tampering with mail

With the help of this invention called social media on the government carriageway called the internet, the general population have been able to share information at blistering speeds, something the colonialists would never have dreamed of during the early days of this penal colony.

While during the early days of the internet, people may have written to various government departments for example, inquiring as to whether the Bill of Rights is valid in whichever state they live in, this information remained with the authors and maybe few others. 

Today this information can be shared all around the world instantaneously. 

As a result of this quick information sharing, this has led to other people asking questions that people in government do not want to answer, keeping in mind that the people in government are there to represent their constituents.

We have obtained documentation that the people within the doors of the business we call the Parliament of Victoria (ABN: 57 505 521 939) are tampering with Australia Post with regards to receiving letters that contain questions that they do not wish to answer.

Keep in mind that some of the better government information is the documentation that they do no want the general population to see. 

Aren't they supposed to be governing with 'hounour' ?

Officially, in Australia, tampering with mail is a Commonwealth offence irrespective whether  it's from Australia Post or another mail carrier or delivery service which as a result of conviction includes a prison sentence.

It is truly pointless exposing names of those involved, as at the end of the day there is no real remedy in action that will see prosecution of the alleged criminal actions by the persons from within government, literally as always.

What we will say is that the good people of Victoria  are being conned on a scale that may not be comprehensible to the average commoner.

Let's just say for starters that not one person within the judicature is in 'honour'.

See: TELECOMMUNICATIONS AND POSTALSERVICES (TRANSITIONAL PROVISIONS AND CONSEQUENTIAL AMENDMENTS) ACT 1989

London’s Met Police facial recognition trial proves to be a farce

THE METROPOLITAN POLICE’S controversial facial recognition trial has proved fruitless, with the force revealing it has resulted in no arrests.

The equipment was positioned on a prominent pedestrian bridge in a bid to identify criminals using autonomous technology.

Critics asked the Met not to use it and cited human rights laws, believing the use of facial recognition systems constituted an invasion of privacy. But the police went on using the system regardless.

However, it didn’t prove to be a particularly useful crime-fighting tool, as Scotland Yard noted the system didn’t contribute to a single arrest, although it remained tight-lipped on how many people were flagged for questioning.

“This deployment formed an important part of ongoing trials and a full review of its use will take place once they have been completed,” explained Detective Superintendent Bernie Galopin.

“It is important to note all the faces on the watch list used during the deployment were of people wanted by the Met and the courts for violence-related offences."

“If the technology generated an alert to signal a match, police officers on the ground reviewed the alert and carried out further checks to confirm the identity of the individual. All alerts against the watchlist will be deleted after 30 days and faces in the database that did not generate an alert were deleted immediately.”

Scotland Yard said the Stratford operation would be ‘overt’, with police informing passers-by of the  cameras’ presence, both audibly and with leaflets. But that would require busy Londoners to actually notice the signs.

Meanwhile privacy activists, including the advocacy group Liberty, have denounced the scheme, with some dubbing it “staggeringly inaccurate”.

It’s not hard to see why activists are so vehemently opposed. In May, it was found that a shocking 98% of the Met’s facial recognition technology was inaccurate. Not only would this serve to embroil innocent people in criminal cases, but it could lead police to prematurely relinquish dangerous suspects.

Even when the false positives are omitted from the system, the ethical dilemma endures.

Source: Computer Shopper, Issue 368.