Employers are becoming increasingly dictatorial and inflexible due to the recession, according to experts.

Federal Sex Discrimination Commissioner Elizabeth Broderick said employers were determined to bring back a working model where preference went to those staff who were available at all times and had no visible caring responsibilities.

Ms Broderick said that "people with non-standard working arrangements, like working mothers, will be under increased scrutiny."

Dr Suzanne Jamieson, former NSW Anti-Discrimination Board member and University of Sydney workplace lecturer, says the credit crunch has exacerbated a "top-down approach to decision-making", with staff no longer being consulted.

"People previously had expected to have some say in what was happening and it's just not happening now" she said.

Dr Jamieson said with more workers facing the sack, many were reluctant to ask for a pay rise, promotion or flexible hours.

(Source: Sunday Telegraph)

 

A British artist has been given over AU$60,000 for a supermarket receipt.

Ceal Floyer's Monochrome Till Receipt (White) is a receipt for 36 items, all of which are white.

The publicly-funded Tate Britain gallery is believed to have paid about AU$62,000.

In 2002 Ms Floyer won an award, and over AU$60,000, for another work, a bin bag filled with air.

(Source: MX, Wikipedia)

 

The former president of Carlton football club says that the club paid money to several women to keep quiet about alleged sexual assaults.

John Elliot, who was the AFL club's president in the 1970s and '80s, said four or five women were paid about $5000 each to keep quiet.

Mr Elliot said that "of the four or five, there was one that we were worried about - the others we knew were not true, or were told by the players that they were not true,"

(Source: The Age)

 

A public hospital advised a man to take Panadol for what turned out to be a broken neck.

Paul Curtis was told to go home and take Panadol when he went to Ryde Hospital in Sydney on May 29, after accidentally knocking heads with a friend.

He spent two days in agony before returning to hospital with continued head pain.

Mr Curtis said he was told he could not have an X-ray because the hospital's radiology unit was shut for the night.

(Source: The Age)

 

A Liberal advisor has been sacked after groping women's breasts, and questioning guests about their sexual behaviour, at a charity function.

Numerous guests at the parliamentary press gallery's Mid-Winter Ball reported that Anthony Scrinis fondled women's breasts, and questioned guests about their sexuality and extramarital relationships.

Mr Scrinis burst in on a private conversation between Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull and ball guests to boast in a loud voice about "hot babes" in the Liberal Party, and make 'exaggerated gestures'.

Mr Scrinis was an advisor to Sophie Mirabella, the Opposition spokeswoman on women's issues.

(Source: The Age)

 

A woman has been ordered to pay $US1.92 million ($A2.4 million) in damages for illegally downloading 24 songs.

Jammie Thomas-Rasset, a single mother of four from the US state of Minnesota, was found liable for using the Kazaa peer-to-peer file-sharing network to download the songs over the internet.

A jury ordered Ms Thomas-Rasset to pay a total of $US1.92 million dollars - or $US80,000 ($A100,000) per song - to six record companies.

(Source: The Age)

 

Quotes of the Moment:

"Racism was rampant. All of command, everywhere, it was completely ingrained in the consciousness of every soldier. I've heard top generals refer to the Iraq people as 'hajjis.' The anti-Arab racism came from the brass. It came from the top. And everything was justified because they weren't considered people."

Michael Prysner, who served in Iraq in 2003 and 2004 as part of the United States 173rd Airborne Brigade.


"These stupid fucking hajjis couldn't figure shit out."

General George Casey, who served as the commander in Iraq from 2004 to 2007, at a briefing in 2005, as reported by Geoffrey Millard, formerly of the 42nd Infantry Division, and now an anti-war activist.

 

Children with drug and alcohol addictions will "slip through the net" when Victoria's only residential rehabilitation program for young teenagers closes this month because of a lack of funds.

The state-appointed child safety commissioner has called on the Government to help save the program, in Melbourne's east, after donations dried up due to the global financial crisis and aid to bushfire victims.

Commissioner Bernie Geary, who advises the government on the safety and wellbeing of children, said that unless the Government responded to the need of the Tandana Place program for 12 to 20-year-olds, vulnerable young people would "slip through the net". "They are the young people we find in prisons and abject and long-term homelessness" he said.

"It has a ripple effect, it affects broader families. The community needs places like Tandana and it's in all our interests that it continues."

"The Government needs to be responding. It needs to have a look at what they are doing and understand they fill a niche that would otherwise not be filled."

Children as young as 13, many of them in state care, have sought help for addiction and mental health issues through the eight-to-16-week program, run by Waverley Emergency Adolescent Care.

The program has been a place of refuge for more than 220 young Victorians over the past decade, about half of whom first tasted alcohol or drugs at 12 or 13.

Program chief executive Maureen Buck said the post-detox residential facility, at Mount Waverley, would be forced to close on June 30, after the Government declined to fill a $100,000 shortfall in donations.

"Donations from January to now are something like $23,000, whereas this time last year we were close to our budget of $200,000," she said.

"The State Government has to be really mindful of the duty of care, of what they're doing to the younger-age kids who for whatever reason are substance abusing - whether it's family breakdown, physical abuse or sexual abuse."

Ms Buck said 28 teens aged between 13 and 15 were among those who had received family therapy and meditation, job education and training, and harm minimisation strategies.

"What's going to happen to these kids? We've got about seven referrals sitting there waiting to come into the program and we've had to tell them we're shutting the doors. Some of these kids have started using alcohol when they're five or six. It's pretty devastating."

(Source: The Age)

 

An internationally-known 'psychic' has been defrauded of hundreds of thousands of dollars by her bookkeeper.

Denise Hall, of East Arlington, carried out the scheme against Rosemary Altea over the past seven years. Hall used credit cards, forged checks and gave herself unauthorized electronic paychecks in Ms Altea's name.

Ms Altea, who teaches clients to "tune into our sixth sense", lost a total of about US$200,000.

(Source: WCAX website [US], Rosemary Altea website)

 

A 46-year old man died in the back of a prison van that was so hot he suffered third-degree burns, according to a coroner's report.

Last January an Aboriginal man known as Mr Ward was being driven in the back of the van through the searing temperatures of The Goldfields.

The air-conditioning unit was not working and the temperature inside reached 50 degrees Celsius.

Before he died he suffered third-degree burns where his body touched the hot metal floor.

Coroner Alistair Hope said that Mr Ward suffered a "terrible death" that was "wholly unnecessary and avoidable."

He accused the people driving the prison van of collusion and giving false evidence.

He also said the fact the prison van did not have a spare tyre was an indication of the transport company's "reckless" approach to prisoner safety.

The Coroner expressed his disgust at the state of the compartment, saying it had all-metal surfaces, very little light, and no restraints to protect the person inside if the vehicle had come to grief in some way.

There was a lack of air flow and there was no proper method of communication between the pod and the drivers.

He said there was a panic button in the back but it was not prominent and only set off a light in the driver's compartment which could not be seen in daytime.

The fan did not work when it was tested, the air-conditioning was not working, and in any case the air-conditioning was not appropriate to be driving people such long distances in remote areas.

He said it was difficult to imagine a more uncomfortable environment.

In their evidence, the officers driving the van had said that they thought the air-conditioning was working.

No action was taken against the officers by their company GSL.

A GSL representative said they had not broken any of the procedures or rules.

The officers said they did not know why they did not check on Mr Ward during the four-hour journey.

Some GSL staff had been complaining for some time that the vehicles were not roadworthy for such long distances.

(Source: ABC News website)

 

'Branch-stacking' is still routine in the Labor Party, and rules designed to prevent it are widely ignored, according to an investigation by a Labor member.

Branch-stacking is the practice whereby a faction signs up members to a political party who have no intention of participating. These paper members frequently don't even pay their own membership fees. They are used to vote for their faction's members for party offices and for parliamentary candidates.

Labor member Eric Dearcott attended Victorian ALP headquarters on "renewal deadline day" - the last day for party members to pay their membership fees.

In his report, he wrote that "on May 29 there were far more dubious renewals than straightforward ones. Hundreds of payments were made contrary to the letter and/or intent of Victorian ALP rules."

(Source: The Age)

 

A man has been sentenced to 12 months jail for killing his wife on their honeymoon.

David Watson was charged with murder of his wife Tina, but cut a deal with prosecutors and pleaded guilty instead to the manslaughter of his wife six years ago.

An autopsy showed Tina Watson suffered oxygen deprivation before she drowned on October 23, 2003, while scuba diving off Townsville. Watson was charged with her murder after the coroner concluded he had deliberately shut off her oxygen supply.

Justice Peter Lyons said he accepted that Watson loved his wife and was devastated by her death, and sentenced him to a year in jail.

Mr Watson went to considerable effort to claim a travel insurance payout after his wife's death, taking the insurer to court and citing the mental anguish of watching her die.

(Source: The Age)

 

Children at risk of abuse and neglect are being left to fend for themselves in dysfunctional and sometimes violent households due to a chronic shortage of child welfare workers, according to family crisis specialists.

The Victorian Department of Human Services has confirmed that 23 per cent of front-line child protection workers have resigned in the past year.

Exacerbating the problem, almost one-third of child welfare specialists employed by charitable agencies to help struggling families have also quit or sought less confronting roles in that time.

Departmental protection workers, who declined to be named for fear of reprisals, have told of safety and welfare checks being conducted over the phone, of children waiting up to a year to be given a case worker and of case managers taking on double workloads to ease the backlog.

Child protection unit workers in Footscray, Dandenong and Cheltenham last year lodged complaints with WorkSafe Victoria citing stress due to the hazard of unreasonable workloads, chronic low morale, growing waiting lists, fatigue, poor pay and the increasingly complex needs of families they are allocated.

Workers say "core tasks" are being neglected including "supervision of high-risk infants". The complaints show some employees have clocked up 200 hours of time off in lieu of overtime.

One case manager said she was planning to quit because the department was more concerned with risk management than child welfare.

She had been forced to do safety and welfare checks on children over the phone because there was not enough time to see them face-to-face. "We don't really know what's going on in the house and only find out about it when the police get involved," she said. "If you had time to be in that house and really know those people, you'd be able to put things in place and have a conversation with people before it reaches that point of crisis.

"Originally the system was set up to protect kids, but now I think that it's more arse-covering than actually doing something."

(Source: The Age)

 

A senior Victorian government minister has been accused of colluding with police over the drink-driving case involving the son of ex-premier Steve Bracks.

A member of Police Minister Bob Cameron's staff phoned former police assistant commissioner Noel Ashby after the arrest of Nick Bracks to discuss the case.

Martin Foley, then chief of staff to Mr Cameron and now a state Labor MP, was recorded on Office of Police Integrity phone taps calling Ashby on July 13, 2007, the day that Nick Bracks was caught drink-driving.

An OPI diary note about the conversation said: "Bracks' son speeding through Williamstown at 0800. Wants to speak to ensure Ashby and Cameron's stories are straight."

(Source: The Age)

 

Unwed pregnant teenagers and women in their 20s who attend or have graduated from private religious schools are more likely to have abortions than young women who go to public schools, according to new research.

Researchers studied some 1,504 unmarried and never-divorced American women ages 26 and younger from 125 schools. The women were as young as 14 and as old as 26 at the time they discovered they were pregnant. Some one quarter admitted having abortions, which researchers say is probably an underreported percentage.

(Source: CBS News website)

 

One in four children from Year 4 to Year 9 say they're bullied regularly, and many have lost faith in the ability of teachers to protect them, according to new research.

Research by the University of South Australia and WA's Edith Cowan University found that two out of five students feel things stay the same or get worse after telling an adult they have been bullied.

In May a Queensland woman was awarded $150,000 after her child suffered a brain injury affecting his left upper limb function, speech and co-ordination, as well as cuts, bruising and scarring to the head, lost hair, a chipped tooth, cuts to his mouth and knee, and bruising while in preschool and Year 1.

(Source: news.com.au)