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This is a complete waste of my time and I shouldn't do it, but:
(please note the 21 years jail that could have been imposed for being gay in Tasmania, the 1 year sentence given to a young aboriginal boy who took some biscuits, the death sentence and other long term incarceration that the Australian government hands out to refugees and particularly during election campaigns. Death sentence?? Letting a boat packed with refugees sink, is basically handing them a death sentence).
Aussie barmaid fined for crushing cans with bare breasts
An Australian barmaid who entertained patrons by crushing beer cans between her bare breasts and hanging spoons off her nipples has been fined, police said Wednesday.
Luana De Faveri, 31, was fined 1,000 dollars (900 US dollars) in the Mandurah Magistrates Court in Western Australia after pleading guilty to two breaches of the Liquor Control Act.
Another barmaid who helped hang spoons on De Faveri's nipples, Tracey Leslie, 43, was fined 500 dollars while the bar manager was fined 1,000 dollars for failing to stop the pair, police said in a statement.
"She was alleged to have also crushed beer cans between her breasts during one of the offences" at the Premier Hotel in Pinjarra, about 80 kilometres (50 miles) south of Perth in June, police said.
The fines "send a clear message to all licensees in Peel that we will not tolerate this type of behaviour in our licensed premises," said Superintendent David Parkinson of the Peel Police District.
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The Nicholas Toonen v. Australia case was the first of its kind for the UN that addressed the discrimination of gay sexuality. Until 1st May 1997 Tasmania was the only Australian state, and one of the few places in the Western World, that still criminalised all forms of sex between consenting adult males in private. The last time someone was convicted of private consenting gay sex was in 1981 and the penalty was a $50 fine.
The Tasmanian Criminal Code Act 1924 (as Amended 1987) was the law used to prohibit gay male sexuality. It provided in Section 122 that: Any person who - (a) has sexual intercourse with any person against the order of nature; © consents to a male person having sexual intercourse with him or her against the order of nature, is guilty of a crime. The charge for breaching this was “unnatural sexual intercourse”. Section 123 was more explicit in discriminating against gay men:
Any male person who, whether in public or private, commits any indecent assault upon, or other act of gross indecency with, another male person, or procures another male person to commit any act of gross indecency with himself or any other male person, is guilty of a crime.”
The charge for this was “Indecent practice between male persons”. The maximum penalty for breaking sections 122 or 123 was 21 years jail. It is notable that these discriminated against gay men only with no reference to lesbian sex. Lesbian sex has never been against the law in Australia.
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A 17-year-old Aboriginal boy was sentenced last month to one year's jail for stealing a $3.50 packet of biscuits in Australia's Northern Territory. He will be incarcerated under laws passed in 1998 stipulating mandatory prison sentences for all adult property offences, ranging from two weeks' jail for a first offence to one year for the third offence.
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The Howard Government has sent 43 West Papuan refugees, to a remote Immigration Detention Centre on Christmas Island, 2600km north-west of Perth
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From evidence presented to a Senate inquiry during the past four months, it appears that the Australian government may have been directly implicated in the deaths of 353 asylum seekers, including 150 children, as a result of its anti-refugee campaign aimed at winning last year’s November 10 general election.
On October 19, 2001 the Iraqi, Afghan, Palestinian and Algerian refugees drowned after their grossly over-crowded boat sank in the Indian Ocean, between Indonesia and Australia’s Christmas Island. Some died immediately. Others were unable to hold on for the 21 hours they were left in the ocean, without help. Of the more than 400 passengers who set out from southern Sumatra for Australia in a rickety Indonesian fishing vessel, equipped to carry less than half that number, only 44 survived, including an eight-year-old boy, who lost 21 members of his family.
Top figures in the Australian political and military establishment, including Prime Minister John Howard and senior naval commanders, repeatedly insisted after October 23, the day the shocking tragedy first came to light, that Australian authorities had no clear information as to the boat’s whereabouts, no ships or aircraft were therefore in a position to mount a rescue and, anyway, the victims drowned in Indonesian territorial waters.
Submissions and evidence presented to the inquiry directly contradict these claims. The drownings occurred in the midst of an unprecedented anti-refugee scare campaign, orchestrated by Howard to boost his chances of winning the upcoming federal election.
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A report by the federal Ombudsman into the unlawful deportation of an Australian citizen, Vivian Alvarez, has provided another revealing glimpse into the regime set up by the Howard government to detain refugees and “suspected” non-citizens.
Vivian Alvarez, a mother of two, had lived in Australia for 20 years before she was removed to the Philippines in July 2001. Five months earlier, she had disappeared from Brisbane, in the north-eastern state of Queensland, after receiving psychiatric care. Her five-year-old son had been placed in foster care and she had been placed on police missing persons lists. In May 2001 a social worker reported her to the immigration department. She was described as visibly distressed, mentally-ill and confined to a wheelchair after being physically injured in a road accident. Immigration officials immediately assumed she was an “unlawful non-citizen” and deported her as quickly as they could.
The Ombudsman’s report found that Alvarez was deported without any proper effort to identify her. In the lead-up to her removal, she was denied essential medical care despite being obviously unwell, and bundled onto a plane amid protests by health and welfare workers that she was having fits and could not walk.
On arrival in the Philippines, Alvarez was dumped at Manila airport without any help or follow-up. For the next four years, the immigration department blocked persistent demands by her former husband, Robert Young, for inquiries to be made into her case. From July 2003, high-ranking officials in two departments, immigration and foreign affairs, deliberately covered-up her illegal deportation, until it became publicly known in April this year.
The Ombudsman’s report stated: “It is difficult to form any conclusion other than that the culture of DIMIA [Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs] was so motivated by imperatives associated with the removal of unlawful non-citizens that officers failed to take into account the basic human rights obligations that characterise a democratic society.”............
Many people are still being unlawfully thrown into immigration detention. Last week, the Ombudsman, Professor John McMillan, told a Senate inquiry he was investigating 221 cases of possible wrongful detention. This indicates that 20 new unlawful detentions have been notified in the past several months. McMillan also revealed that one of the detainees had been held for 1,272 days, or almost three-and-a-half years.
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Jail sentances, punishments in Australia and other info
Jul 19 2008, 06:56 AM
