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A child sex offender was given a disability pride award after a Victorian government department administrative bungle.
Cameron Bloomfield was presented with the award in 2024 despite a past of repeat sexual offending.
The department rescinded the award a year later, after discovering they had missed details about his criminal history.
Source: Child sex offender Cameron Bloomfield given disability award after admin error – ABC News
Australian Greens co-founder Drew Hutton has quit the party in disgust, despite winning a costly legal battle to have his life membership reinstated.
Mr Hutton, 79, tendered his resignation late on Wednesday complaining that the “party left me” after he was raked over the coals for challenging its policies on transgender rights.
The Greens’ Queensland division fired a parting shot, saying it was saddened to see anyone giving voice to “billionaire-funded talking points that just seek to divide people”, further angering Mr Hutton.
He wrote in his letter of resignation: “As the party’s founder here in Queensland, it grieves me to have to do this but I feel I have no choice. I still believe in green politics but I feel the party has left me.”
Mr Hutton is now exploring how to set up a new “network” to endorse progressive independent candidates at the next federal election who would compete for the Greens’ vote.
After founding the Queensland Greens in 1991, Mr Hutton worked alongside his friend, Bob Brown, to set up the Australian Greens a year later. He remains an elder statesman of green politics in Australia, having also established the Lock the Gate movement to stop miners encroaching on productive farm lands.
He fell out bitterly with his home division in 2022 when he took to Facebook to decry “authoritarian and anti-democratic” disciplinary action that had been taken against feminist members of the Greens for questioning the party’s pro-trans positions.
Mr Hutton was cited for failing to expunge from the social media thread comments held to be offensive and in breach of party rules. The Queensland Greens’ constitution and arbitration committee found that while he had not personally denigrated transgender women, he did provide a platform for others to express transphobic views. Mr Hutton vehemently rejected this.
His membership of the party was suspended, triggering a stand-off as he appealed the finding against him. In July last year, the Greens’ state council upheld his expulsion, prompting him to speak out in The Australian against an “intolerant transgender and queer cult” that, he said, had hijacked the party.
Mr Hutton launched legal action in the Queensland Supreme Court and was vindicated when the Greens’ lawyers found he had been denied natural justice by the party’s internal processes. The Queensland Greens capitulated in March in an out-of-court settlement that restored his membership and paid $55,000 towards his legal costs.
Source: Subscribe to The Australian | Newspaper home delivery, website, iPad, iPhone & Android apps
Seeking volunteers for a confidential research study.
A University of Sydney research team invites adult victim-survivors of domestic and family violence (DFV) who have had any contact with the NSW criminal justice system since 1 July 2024 to share their experiences of the justice process.
Source: Justice system experiences – The University of Sydney
Nearly six months after resigning in disgrace, former Cuyahoga County Domestic Relations Court Judge Leslie Ann Celebrezze was sentenced to 60 days in jail and ordered to pay a $10,000 fine for falsifying records to steer work to a friend.
Celebrezze, who spent 16 years on the bench, stood motionless as Visiting Judge Mark Wiest from Wayne County handed down the punishment.
Celebrezze faced a potential prison sentence of up to three years for the third-degree felony charge of tampering with records for steering work to Mark Dottore, a longtime family friend whom she’d repeatedly appointed to oversee lucrative divorce cases.
Across multiple generations, the Celebrezze family built an enduring political dynasty that has wielded power and influence from Cleveland to Washington, D.C.
During disciplinary hearings before the Ohio Supreme Court, Celebrezze admitted to 15 violations of professional and judicial conduct rules. The court suspended her in January from the practice of law for two years, with one year stayed. She is now expected to lose her law license after being convicted.
Since the 1920s, Celebrezze family members have occupied an extraordinary sweep of public offices, from Cleveland mayor and state attorney general to the state Supreme Court, appellate courts and county benches.
Source: Former Judge Leslie Ann Celebrezze Sentenced to 60 Days in Jail | The Marshall Project
The 15-year fight to bring an accused childcare paedophile to justice has left Sydney parents Jacqui* and Rachel* bankrupt, their children retraumatised and the families distrustful of the judicial system.
The childcare centre hired its own investigator and child protection teams closed the reports, while criminal charges were dropped at the eleventh hour. Later, a successful civil lawsuit was overturned on appeal, leaving the women and their children still fighting for justice.
Now, with the support of Greens MP Sue Higginson, they’re seeking government recognition for systemic failures, as well as ex gratia payments from the government, which are made in special circumstances.
Jacqui and Rachel’s daughters Julia* and Rose* were allegedly sexually assaulted at Footprints childcare centre in Sydney’s south by volunteer Rodney Raymond Bird, who co-owned the facility with his daughter, who was the director. The centre has since been sold, and the families cannot be identified for legal reasons.
In 2015, the families lodged a civil claim, suing the centre for negligence and vicarious liability. They were awarded a total of $2 million in damages in 2020, with the court finding, on the balance of probabilities, the two girls were abused by Bird.
However, two years later, that ruling was overturned on appeal; Rachel was forced back into mediation, while Jacqui was advised to seek another trial and ordered to pay the centre’s legal costs.
“The perpetrator’s legal firm sent us a bill for almost a million dollars,” Jacqui said.
“How do you explain to your teenage daughter that she might lose her home to the man who sexually assaulted her?”
In yet another blow, the families learnt this year from questions lodged in parliament by Higginson that Bird’s electronic devices were never seized or investigated, video from the childcare centre was never obtained and that the only evidence police had relied upon was the children’s testimony.
Police declined to reopen the investigation due to the lack of new evidence, the passage of time and Bird’s death.
The mothers have never stopped fighting for change. They gave extensive evidence to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, which led to legislative reform.
On Wednesday, Higginson is expected to introduce a notice of motion calling on the government to acknowledge the failings of the institutions and systems that let them down; recognise the damage of denying justice to the children; and provide the families with ex gratia payments.
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Sexual violence survivors who served in the military and are bound by non-disclosure agreements will be able to give evidence at a landmark inquiry.
There had been calls for the government to ensure people bound by NDAs were able to share their stories.
The NDAs will only be waived for the purposes of the inquiry.
Source: Non-disclosure agreements to be waived for landmark military sexual violence inquiry – ABC News
Victims of domestic, family and sexual violence will be eligible for 100 per cent stamp duty relief and the First Home Owner Grant, even if they had purchased a home previously, under a new ex gratia scheme designed to help vulnerable women leave dangerous situations and re-establish themselves in secure, independent housing.
Military wives constitute less than 1 percent of the American population, and they make up between 15 and 20 percent of the women paid to gestate other people’s children. Surrogacy agencies have reported this figure consistently since at least 2010, when Glamour magazine published “The Most Wanted Surrogates in the World” and ABC News produced a parallel report on the same phenomenon. One informal survey of the largest online surrogacy support forum at the time found that more than 19 percent of respondents identified as military surrogates, and subsequent academic work confirms that the 15 to 20 percent range still describes the population. The disproportion demands explanation, and the explanation indicts the cultural and economic conditions driving it.
Source: How Commercial Surrogacy Targets Military Families – First Things
Rachel Kila has waived her right to anonymity to join dozens of others speaking out about the experiences of young girls in Byron Bay in the early 2000s, when they say it became normalised for older boys and men to groom and have sex with girls, then publicly humiliate them.
Fifteen women have alleged to the ABC they were raped or sexually assaulted by older boys or adult men when they were as young as 12, and seven said they were in “relationships” with older boys or adult men in their early teens.
Some of the women described being sprayed with urine, faeces and semen, and being spied on during sex, part of a culture of public degradation they said was pervasive in the popular tourist resort town.
At least three women said they left school early because of their experiences and many described issues with relationships, intimacy and drugs and alcohol because of the men’s behaviour.
“It was like Puberty Blues on steroids,” one woman said.
Source: Women reveal Byron Bay’s predatory 2000s culture of rape, humiliation and shame – ABC News
