Hansard 14 Oct 2014 - Newman Vs Wellington

3300 Questions Without Notice 14 Oct 2014

Overseas Visitors, Law and Order

Mr WELLINGTON: My question is to the Premier. When overseas visitors commit offences in Queensland what strategies does the government have in place to bring these people to justice before they leave our country?

Mr NEWMAN: I am quite happy to answer the honourable member’s question. We apply the law of course. I point out that early in our term there was an incident that was brought to my attention where an overseas national committed an offence here in Queensland, was apprehended and then was before the magistrate. A condition of their release on bail was that they surrendered their passport and, sadly, the individual then absconded. I simply say that since that time we have been working to try to bring that person back to justice. Even if something like that happens, we will still go after the individual concerned if it is believed to be in the public interest. I also say that, as I recall, we have since changed the law to ensure that if a magistrate gives such a direction to surrender a passport, the processes around the surrender of that passport are much, much tighter. If the honourable member has a specific question that he wants to put on the table, I would be happy to answer it.

Before I conclude, I should continue to urge the honourable member to stop showing such active support for members of criminal motorcycle gangs. I would say to the honourable member that it is time—

Mr WELLINGTON: I rise to a point of order. I find those comments offensive. They are untrue and I ask that they be withdrawn. There is no basis to them whatsoever.

Madam SPEAKER: Please take a seat. Premier, under the standing orders you have been asked to withdraw.

Mr NEWMAN: Madam Speaker, I withdraw, but I say it is time for the honourable member for Nicklin—

Mr WELLINGTON: I rise to a point of order. That was not an unconditional withdrawal. The Premier is provocative.

Madam SPEAKER: Please take your seat, member for Nicklin. Member for Nicklin, we will apply the standing orders, but I will hear the Premier.

Mr WELLINGTON: Madam Speaker, the Premier did not withdraw unconditionally. That was the point of order I raised.

Madam SPEAKER: Please take your seat. I will listen to the Premier’s reply. I did not hear him make a subsequent condition upon it. If he does, I will then apply the standing order. I call the Premier.

Mr NEWMAN: We all know that the member for Nicklin has clearly, by his words and deeds, indicated that he has supported members of criminal motorcycle gangs.

Mr WELLINGTON: Madam Speaker, I find those comments offensive. They are untrue and I ask that they be withdrawn.

Madam SPEAKER: Premier, under the standing orders I ask that you withdraw.

Mr NEWMAN: I certainly withdraw, but again I urge—

Madam SPEAKER: Premier, I just give you some guidance in this matter. I do not know if you are going to make a condition upon your withdrawal, but using the word ‘but’ sometimes could be seen to lead into a conditional withdrawal. I give the Premier the call.

Mr NEWMAN: I have said I withdraw, but I again say that—

Mr WELLINGTON: I rise to a point of order. Madam Speaker, with respect, the Premier is not

listening.

Madam SPEAKER: My guidance, Premier, would be if you add the term ‘but’ it could be seen to be a conditional withdrawal. I give the Premier the call and ask him to pay attention to the standing orders.

Mr NEWMAN: Thank you, Madam Speaker. I am simply saying today that all of us in this place have an obligation to work hard to protect our community. I would expect that the member for Nicklin will do that. I know that the candidate for the LNP, Mr Matt Trace, is out there every day of the week and people in the community say how bitterly disappointed they are that the member for Nicklin

14 Oct 2014 Questions Without Notice 3301

continues to not stand up for the community in that way. They see it time and time again by his utterances in the local media—

Mr WELLINGTON: I rise to a point of order. Madam Speaker, with respect, this has no relevance to the question whatsoever.

Madam SPEAKER: I do not hear you making a point of order under the standing orders. I give the Premier the call.

Mr NEWMAN: We have now moved into the realm of the honourable member not liking debate to occur in this place.

Mr Wellington interjected.

Madam SPEAKER: Just pause the clock.

Mr Wellington interjected.

Madam SPEAKER: Order!

Mr Wellington interjected.

Madam SPEAKER: Member for Nicklin, I will warn you if you continue to make interjections outside of the standing orders. I have the call.

An honourable member interjected.

Madam SPEAKER: Order, members. I will have order before I give the call. Thank you.

Premier, I would ask you to address the question.

Mr NEWMAN: I took the question to be a very vague question about law and order and the way we protect Queenslanders. I am answering the question. I am disappointed that the member for Nicklin does not want to engage in full and open debate in this place and seeks some sort of spurious protection under the standing orders. I have answered the question. If he has a specific I will answer it.

Mr WELLINGTON: I rise to a point of order. Madam Speaker, with respect, those comments are offensive. They are untrue and I ask them to be withdrawn. I would have expected better from the Premier of this state. If you want to have a debate in this chamber—

Madam SPEAKER: Order, member for Nicklin.

Mr WELLINGTON:—I will take you on any day. Any day—you name the date, the place and

the time.

Madam SPEAKER: Member for Nicklin, when you are shouting into the microphone I cannot even understand you.

Mr WELLINGTON: I rise to a point of order. I am saying that if the Premier wants a debate, I will take him on anywhere any place. You name the time and the place and I will be there.

Madam SPEAKER: Member for Nicklin, you are outside of the standing orders and I would ask you to refrain from shouting into the microphone. It is difficult to understand you.

Mr PITT: I rise to a point of order.

Madam SPEAKER: Order! Would the member please take his seat? Premier, you were asked

earlier to withdraw. I would ask that under the standing orders you withdraw.

Mr NEWMAN: I withdraw.

Mr PITT: I rise to a point of order. Madam Speaker, I ask for your guidance insofar as the Premier’s comments relating to ‘spurious protection’ may indeed be a reflection on the chair.

Madam SPEAKER: Thank you for your concern, Leader of Opposition Business. I did not take it that way, but as I indicated some very loud comments were being made and I have found that sometimes it is better to just let the House settle. We have dealt with the matters that were being considered, so I now call the member for Logan.

Birmo Awakens

The phone repeatedly murmured in alert, desperate for some attention. Birmo opened an eye and peered out from beneath the warm comfort of his doona. 

It was situated well beyond arms reach on the inconvenient side of the bedside table. It meant he'd have to move and destroy the bubble of warmth he'd craftily shaped for himself throughout the night.

As he lay there motionless trying to ignore it, he tossed up writing about the X-Files or killer space robots for his regular Brisbane Times column. 

The phone's vibrations became increasingly incessant. Reality finally clutched at his brain like a cold taloned hand. 

It was Monday and this was Queensland. Something was up.

Instinct told him that something monumentally stupid had happened.The type of stupid that could only have been orchestrated by one man. The type of stupid that would allow his column to write itself. 

Campbell Newman.

He opened his other eye.

Here Be Thingies

Here be thingies,
basking and pulsating they flop.
Here be thingies,
watch as they roll to your stop.
In red rimed 'glistens,
(handle only with mittens)
Hurl them and watch them go plop.

Ranted by Doomboy

Those LNP 'G-Men'

Boarding the flight from Newmania to Bofland, I was conscious of the LNP operatives on my tail. Their hats were pulled low on their brows to meet with dark rimmed sunglasses. They wrestled broadsheet newspapers; a dead giveaway to these LNP 'G-men' in the digital age of handhelds.

In the 21st century, a radical like me doesn't need weapons to bring down a regime. Our colt 45's now replaced with iPhone 4's. We can quick-draw down on an adversary and fire short bursts of prose.

Words are our bullets now. A seemingly never ending supply of ammunition, taking down corrupt politicians and dodgy governments a tweet at a time.

The flight is uneventful, nothing more than you'd expect traversing major cities in Australia. Those 'G-Men' sit idly to the front and right of me, inconspicuous only to themselves.

I reach the port of destination, do the usual and check in for a drink at the nearest.

A tumbler of golden whiskey in front of me, alone, at the bar, she comes up behind me.

"Is that a policy in your pocket or are you smuggling budgies?"

I wheel around in alarm, the operatives pictured above her right shoulder, she looks...  beautiful beyond anything I could ever have imagined.

Wait.

No, I was never trained to be distracted this way.

Ranted by Doomboy

Saucy Onion: Lemon Delicious

"Saucy Onion: Lemon Delicious: People are always surprised to discover that I've managed to keep a lemon tree alive on my 20 metre square balcony. And it hasn't always ..." By Indira Naidoo

Ranted by Doomboy

The Beginning Of Automation

Been reading a series of SF books by Vernor Vinge, called the Zones of Thought.

Vinge is a computer scientist with emphasis on automation.

The premise of the universe is that the closer you get to the galactic core, the less advanced tech will work
to the point where even biological systems are affected. The further away, the more advanced systems will operate... blue sky things like anti-grav and nanotech.

The series hints that this system was set up in bygone times by advanced races who saw that supreme intelligences were dominating everything, allowing no new intelligences to emerge. At the galactic fringes, or "Slow Zones", a kind of creche for intelligence to evolve was created, with no FTL or AI.

Yep, we're deep in the "Slow zone". All the advanced things we speculate about become the "failed dreams".
His depiction of human life under these conditions is pretty grim; like here and now, and often worse.

Interesting concepts, but his writing can suffer from filler and pointless sub-plots.

A Fire Upon The Deep is the first one, quite good.

A Deepness In The Sky is a sort of prequel, very good.

The third one, I'm reading now, not much happening in it so far, Children Of The Sky.

Ranted by Doomboy

A Scotsman In Space

After the alien attack: I punched the heading into my touchpad.

"Being a Scotsman in Space in't really all its cracked up te be, Pal," said Dave Fraser, puffing on a cigarette.

"It's no like Mr Scott on the Enterprise, God naw. It were more like being a stableboy, really. Muckin' out cages and hosin' down wee beasties. Och, it were a shite job."

Dave Fraser is the only surviving crew member of a deep space transport vessel known to frontier authorities as K147729. Prior to its wreckage being discovered by a naval patrol, it had been observed and scrutinized intermittently by customs. However, despite suspicions of smuggling, there were never any obvious transgressions of the law that could be proved against her.

Dave is a short, wiry man with cropped hair and a straggly growth of beard. His eyes are darting and haunted, and he drags heavily on the cigarette he wields in a shaking hand. This is a hardened space veteran who has seen much, but now perhaps, has seen too much. He has walked on the surface of strange, lawless worlds where humans have been abandoned and left to themselves for centuries. He has witnessed wonders and events that belong in some old-fashioned sword and sorcery fantasy rather than in an ordered, sane universe.

I'm told the authorities don't seem to know quite what to do with him. Until they rule out the possibility that he murdered his crew-mates himself, he'll stay right here on the interrogation block.

"I didn'y murder anyone! If ye're lookin' fer someone to put in the picture for murder, it'd be that wee Zarrian bastard, Seamas. Aye, Zarrian! Don't look so skeptical, Pal. It's a real place."

Dave states that on board they had a number of non-coalition citizens working, with fake papers and passports. One of these was a native of the planet Zarr yet no record of any such world exists. He was taken aboard as a boy, to provide help with menial tasks and to facilitate transfers between ships and various on world traders.

"The wee scrote was voracious! He was like a fucken termite! He burrowed through our entire library in under two years, but when he came aboard he was a dirty barefoot farm lad who could'ny read. At the end he knew more about the ship's systems than anyone except the skipper, and mebbe one or two others. And then there were the disappearances. The mutilations. The bizarre occurrences that just happened to benefit one person. Aye, him. I'm tellin' ye, the lad was evil like. Son of the devil or something."

Dave paused for a moment and drew longingly on the cigarette until it was exhausted. He looked up and began to recount the final hours of the doomed ship.

I hammered the information into the system as he spoke:

The cage was broken, its seams had been burst by its introduction to a bulkhead. The alien creatures that had been in the cage were now long gone. Not that Dave was sad to see them go. They were repulsive, pale things that looked for all the world like todgers with legs.

"Who stowed the cage?" the Skipper demanded, upon being notified of the escapees. Today he was wearing his long mustaches plaited, and had on his sparkling South Seas pirate suit. Old Wang had turned a bit eccentric in his long years in space.

"I stowed the cage, Skipper," Dave said to him. "But I stowed it correctly. All proper. There must've been a weak link in the chain or something. A fault in the tie-down!"

The Skipper looked him in the eyes; they'd shipped together for a lot of years, and Dave could tell he was believed. He knew Dave did his job well; it wasn't the best job in the world but it was important and rated a high cut of the loot.

"Find out what these creatures can do and if we can catch them easily. If there's no way to catch them, we exterminate them!"

Captain Wang had spoken. Dave sought out the resident expert on the native life of the planet Zarr, himself a native. Young Seamas was an unremarkable looking fellow. Brown hair, blue eyes and about 6 foot of lanky frame. His manner was quiet and brooding, and often he would break into fits of rage and yelling over seemingly inconsequential things. Once he had had to be stopped from clubbing another crewman to death with a support strut pulled from a table. He was always watching, always sneaking up on the crew when they least expected to find him there. Out of all the things Dave had seen, it was this simple looking boy that made his hair tingle, ready to stand on end.

Dave found Seamas working on some electrical equipment in the loft.

"Hi there, Seamas. Hows it going?" Dave greeted him in a friendly fashion.

"Dave," he nodded in reply.

"Just a quick question, mate. Do you know anything about the wee creatures we're carrying, the ones that look like todgers?"

"They're called 'Knobuloc's Folly' or Knobmice. They'll eat anything. They'll chew through copper and insulation. They don't die easily, 'cos they eat poisons and don't breathe."

As he spoke, Seamus kept working on the complex electronics with a deft touch. Dave could see why he wasn't cleaning out muck for him down in the cargo spaces. Skilled technicians were a rare and valuable breed out here.

"Dammit. So how do I get rid of them?"

"You hit them. With one of these," he replied, handing Dave a 12 pound lump hammer. "Hard."

So off he went around the ship tracking the little bastards down. They were hard to find, and they did indeed eat anything and everything. The first one he smashed with the hammer was surprisingly hard to kill....it was like hitting a rubber tyre. The hammer bounced back, braining Dave in his thick forehead. It occasioned much amusement from the crew, watching old Dave crawl around the deck after these things. 
Especially Seamas.

The mirth died off quickly enough when serious things started to get eaten. Valuable mementos, cargo, the captain's furry rug and the ships store of flour. The captain assigned helpers, and Dave coordinated the search for the remaining beasts. Finally the body count against the cargo log showed they were down to a single fiend. Somewhere.

Panic erupted at the loss of sensors. All the techies were clustered around the stations in the control centre scratching their heads and talking hysterically. It appears the final beastie had been found. It was fried and blackened inside the racking for the sensor control equipment.

There wasn't much Dave could do at this point. The ship was drifting sightless through dangerous unpatrolled space, crippled by small penis-like creatures. Dave reflected on the insanity of it all, but insanity is commonplace when you deal with the company he keept.

Cargo was now running smoothly, so he wandered away to let the boys do their jobs and headed for the mess. Passing the junior quarters, something strange happened. The air became warm, tinged with a metallic smell he couldn't identify. Colour began to leach out of everything as if the very reality of timespace was being disturbed and strange blaafing noises echoed around the walls like the mating call of some deranged walrus.

Dave staggered, rubbed his eyes, thinking he'd overdone it crawling around after the beasties. When he opened them, that strange bastard Seamas was standing barely a foot away looking at him as if he was going to cave his head in.

"You right, Dave?" he asked innocently.

"Yeah thanks mate," he replied, pushing past him quickly. He'd had all he could take of Seamas's company for one day.

With the techies working non stop to rectify problems, the skipper paced around the place in a barely concealed rage, kicking people and smashing breakables. Not happy.

When it happened, it happened fast. The crew had barely enough time to arm and prepare before the boom. 

Abominable aliens swooped down on Dave and the crew, seemingly out of the walls of the bulkhead.  In the confusion, Dave thought he saw a strange figure standing unscathed out in the midst of it, laughing with one of the crew in pieces at his feet.

Shots went in all directions; a giant morass of confusion, screaming and blood.

"Fuck you beasties!!" yelled Dave at their chaotic heads as they came for him.

They were doomed. They couldn't win against sheer numbers. At the last it was some freak of the cosmos that saved Dave. Just as the last of his comrades fell dead from being gouged by some enormous spiked beast apparatus, strange scythe-blades started flying out of nowhere. They had knobby weights on their ends that sliced and diced in some impossible, yet clever articulated fashion.

"One minute: extremely humongous army of bad tempered big fanged beasty fuckers, next minute swiss dicer and chip maker has visited and it's bony beastie salad all around," Dave concluded, breathlessly.

"I tell ye, I haven't seen a retreat that quick ever. As those alien bastards fucked off they left the big hole in tha side of our ship, rendering it fucked. Everyone was dead. I lived for three days in that fucken' suit before the navy boys showed up and dragged my arse here. And that's where we're at, Pal."

He finished recounting the story like he'd just relived it. I couldn't help thinking there was something nasty out there, beyond the rim, that we'd had no prior knowledge of.

Ranted by Doomboy