Your Grounded!

So I opened the Morning Bulletin today and what do I see? Another drunken, abusive, aggressive man being granted immediate probation and a suspended sentence. Why am I starting to get the feeling that the justice system is really beginning to fail at his job? It seems every day there is another story of another wife beater, robber and drug dealer being given a slap on the wrists and released back into society. I’m pretty sure we are taught as children that if we do something wrong, then we deserves to be punished, something gets taken away from us for a period of time or we are sent to our room for a period of time. The worst thing we heard as kids and teenagers was “Your Grounded!”

So you would thing, as we got older, that the fear of incarceration would get stronger, especially seeing all the movies and documentaries about prison life. The word ‘Guilty’ replaces your grounded and sends you to a place that I know I would never want to go too! If Australia had a legal system like some other countries, maybe bad things wouldn’t continue to happen and remain unpunished. Like in Africa, if you steal something and the community finds out about it, instead of calling the police (who do nothing) they hunt the culprit down, stone them to death, and then set them on fire and cover the scene with dirt. It happens. Community justice because the legal system in their country is failing them.

But what makes a person want to do these things, the stealing and the fighting, what makes them go against everything they are taught as children? Well, I’m pretty sure they were never taught any of it at a young age. Bad family life, abusive parents, isn’t that what they say. You want to know who I blame, the government. Yep, if they didn’t make it so easy for 15-16 year old kids to have babies for money, then there would be less people struggling on welfare, less kids suffering because of their parents using welfare for drugs and alcohol, less of ALL of that.

For my parents to get me they had to get police checks, home checks, income checks, psyche checks, all to make sure they were sane, financially secure, had good values and could ACTUALLY look after me in a full capacity. This was a 5-6 year long process, it was exhausting, it was expensive but if they wanted a baby they had to do it! They had to go through all of that because they physically couldn’t have kids for themselves and had to adopt. I have always been of the strong belief that just because you can push a baby out of your lady bits, or have them cut out of your stomach, that doesn’t make you a parent. The unconditional love, the caring, the nurturing, ensuring that you are doing everything physically possible to make sure that your child has the best start in life. I can promise you that this doesn’t involve fending for itself at the age of 3 and making it watch mummy snort cocaine. In a perfect world you would EARN your ability to have kids, you would receive your ovaries and sperm makers after an extensive evaluation of your home life, stability, personality and financial capacity. It would get rid of a lot of the problems that society faces today. But, we aren’t robots and our organs aren’t easily removed…

That’s the problem with things at the moment though, there are all these kids…yes...KIDS…that are having babies when they are kids themselves either because they aren’t educated in safe sex, or just don’t care, or because it means they can drop out of school and be payed to stay at home. That’s how I see it, and I will never apologies for that.

We live with this “don’t worry about it, we all make mistakes” mindset. I mean how often have you been told that or heard that. Would you argue the truth of it? It seems that our judges may have forgotten it and that might be a little part of what is wrong with the current public liability insurance system. Should we as a society allow our judges to hand out enormous amounts of compensation to people because a mistake as been made? Yes, they should, keeping in mind that the result of the error would have to be extreme. We still make mistakes though, we make errors, I’m pretty glad that no one has ever taken me to court for my mistakes. An error is very different to gross negligence however. But what about judges? They make mistakes as well; legal appeals are the proof of that. But no one ever takes them to court to account for their errors.

I guess to put it into perspective, think about doctors. Do they have any right to make mistakes? If not then we aren’t really being fair are we. Maybe when judging the liability relating to the mistake of others we should consider how many times that we have been in that same error.

There was a case in Western Australia where several US Soldiers were held in remand for over 18 months over an alleged rape. On trial it was found that they were innocent of the rape but guilty of having sex with an underage girl. That represented 18 months taken from those men’s lives for a crime that they weren’t guilty of. The Australian Justice System fails again.

Locally if feels like people are never put away. I mean let’s face it, with the shooting last week Rocky is REALLY turning into the ghetto. I was driving down

Musgrave Street

last week and there was a kid on a pushbike playing with a handgun. Mr Man made me slow down so that he could have a better look and the kid was loading the cartridge. Then I heard that there was a gun case broken into and around 150 fire arms were stolen. That is 150 guns, on our streets, around our children, distributed amongst the criminally minded. That is scary!!!

But let’s let you be the judge! There is a guy and within a month he was caught driving over the limit, he smashed the windows of a local hotel and was tazered by police twice for not following direction. Police were notified to the latest incident by one of his children who said that their father had been drinking and was getting aggressive and violent to his grandparents. He ran at police a few times and was arrested and locked up. He was just seen by a judge who decided that he didn’t need to be put in jail, despite his history of alcoholism and mental illness, because his 10 year old daughter has been diagnosed with leukemia and being in prison meant he might miss the last of his daughters life. His current offences put him in breach of a previous suspended sentence he was issued for a previous offence and he will have to reappear. So this incident CLEARLY isn’t a one off and he has a history of breaking the law…but it’s okay because his daughter is sick! Now…I’m pretty sure, the normal reaction to news like leukemia is to cry or get sad or angry or be determined to do anything to save her. Not go one a month long bender, break windows, abuse your family, scare your kids and run at police! 6 months immediate suspended sentence and alcohol poisoning. What’s the bet this joker is in the paper again next week.

The system that is meant to be protecting us from violent weirdoes is just putting them straight back on the street. We have them walking down the front of our place all the time, swearing and screaming and telling us to come on the road to fight them…we were washing the car…are you serious?

It just seems like society is out of control and as upstanding citizens we are being punished for being good and well behaved. I know it sounds like I’m crrrraaaazy one sided but there are many circumstances surrounding an incident and there are two sides to every story but, I am calling it as I see it, and I can’t say that I like it!

Lock up your kids, your dogs and yourselves! YOU’RE GROUNDED!