Weekend Gold Coast Bulletin

DECENT MEN DON’T NEED TO BE TOLD HOW TO BEHAVE

- PAUL MURRAY

LIKE everyone I was shocked by the murder of three children and their mother in the most violent of ways in Brisbane this week.

The fear and pain those children would have felt is unimaginab­le as is the evil that has taken them and their mother from this world.

The man responsibl­e is the lowest form of life and it is yet again a reminder of the surge of family violence that plagues our country.

As a nation we must do everything we can to provide genuine safety for the victims of this terror at home and we need laws that allow authoritie­s to capture and track known offenders.

Like sex abusers, anyone guilty of these crimes must be tracked for the rest of their lives and we must do all we can to get people off public housing waiting lists and upgrade systems where abusers’ pasts aren’t left behind when they cross state borders.

It is shocking to know that the various state child protection agencies don’t share a collective database and we don’t jail enough people for breaching court-imposed orders, keeping them well away from the very people they abuse.

We must also resist the demands to “re-educate” all men.

In the wake of these tragedies there are always demands for new national campaigns to tell men how they should behave and what behaviours they must not tolerate in their friends.

The truth is, decent people don’t need to be told.

In truth 95 per cent of men would die to protect their families. We must not think that there is a demon laying inside all men that left unchecked would lash out at the people we love.

I CALL Australian Labor Party leader Anthony Albanese “each-way Albo”, because he so often has it both ways on most issues.

This week he said the Adani mining project was good for jobs in Queensland, then went to Melbourne to promise that he would tie Australia to a zero carbon future by 2050.

Lofty goals to deal with climate change are good, but ones that can’t be measured for 10 federal elections are empty promises at best.

As I wrote in the column last week, any attempt to change our energy system comes at a real cost of tens of billions of dollars.

It will be paid for by us as taxpayers or customers.

Despite Albanese’s big promise and big media splash, there are no numbers about cost behind his pledge that is 30 years into the future.

But already Labor are using the failed lines of the 2019 election saying the cost of not making these promises is 20 times worse than the cost of achieving them.

How does that work? The promise comes with a question mark. But their attack comes with a price tag 20 times higher.

That’s budget denialism at it’s very worse.

I suspect it will be just as unconvinci­ng to Australian­s as Shorten’s weasel words were last year.

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