分类： society

More than 25 years after the alleged crimes took place, a former New South Wales police officer has gone on trial, charged with multiple counts of sexual assault and official misconduct against a 17-year-old girl at a rural border police station, a popular tourist region straddling the NSW-Victoria line.

Fifty-six-year-old David Robert Blackbourne, who was 28 and an on-duty serving NSW Police constable at the time of the alleged offenses, has entered not guilty pleas to all five charges against him: two counts of indecent assault, two counts of non-consensual sexual intercourse, and one count of misconduct while holding public office.

Prosecutors laid out their opening case to the jury at Sydney’s Downing Centre District Court this week, laying out a timeline of alleged interactions that stretch back to late 1998. The court was told the accused and the teen complainant—who cannot be named publicly due to legal protections for sexual assault survivors—first crossed paths on multiple occasions when Blackbourne was working on an unrelated case, with the teen only knowing him by the first name “Dave”.

Per the Crown’s account, the first recorded contact between the pair came when Blackbourne and an unidentified second officer offered the teenager and her friend a ride home as the pair walked through the town. The officers told the girls they would need to detour to the local police station first before dropping them off. Once at the station, prosecutors say Blackbourne and his colleague gave the teens drinks from a stash of alcohol police had previously seized from another incident, before giving them a tour of the station’s holding cells and eventually driving them to their destination.

A few months after that interaction, the Crown alleges Blackbourne picked the recently 17-year-old complainant up from a local public house in his marked police patrol vehicle. Prosecutors say he then handcuffed both of her wrists and forced non-consensual kissing on her. A separate alleged incident that same October saw the teen attend the police station to borrow a police hat for a costume event, in a pre-arranged meeting with Blackbourne. It was here that the most severe allegations arose: while in uniform, Blackbourne allegedly told the teen she could not leave yet, again forced non-consensual kissing, before committing non-consensual sexual intercourse.

The case remained unreported to NSW Police for nearly two decades: the alleged survivor first brought forward her account to Victoria Police in 2016, and NSW Police only launched a formal investigation into the claims in November 2021. Blackbourne was arrested and formally charged in 2023, with his trial scheduled to run for five court days.

In the defense’s opening address to the jury, senior barrister Matthew Johnston forcefully rejected all allegations against his client. Johnston confirmed the defense does not dispute that Blackbourne was a serving officer at the time of the alleged events, but denies every claim of sexual misconduct, non-consensual contact, and abuse of office. The defense has highlighted the significant passage of time since the alleged events as a core challenge to the prosecution’s case, arguing that the reliability and accuracy of the complainant’s memory must be scrutinized closely by the jury. Johnston questioned whether the complainant’s current account reflects genuine independent recollections of the 1998 events, or whether the narrative has been shaped by conversations with law enforcement in the years after the incident, including a 2020 phone call with investigating officers.

Presiding Judge Huw Baker SC reminded the jury of their legal obligations at the opening of the trial, noting that the burden of proof rests entirely with the Crown, which must prove every allegation beyond a reasonable doubt. The trial is ongoing as of Monday’s opening.

A tragic residential blaze on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast has claimed the life of a 21-year-old woman and a pet dog, leaving local emergency responders and community members shaken in the aftermath of the incident.

Queensland emergency services were dispatched to a multi-unit property on King Street in the coastal suburb of Buderim at approximately 7:30 p.m. Sunday, after reports of a structure fire. When crews arrived, they found one residential unit fully engulfed in intense flames, prompting an immediate coordinated response to contain the blaze and evacuate nearby residents to prevent further harm.

The 21-year-old victim, a resident of Kallangur who was inside the burning unit when the fire broke out, managed to escape the inferno before emergency crews arrived. She was rushed by ambulance to Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital with life-threatening severe burn injuries, but police confirmed Monday that she succumbed to her wounds in hospital care.

In addition to the fatalities, a second woman in her 30s was evaluated on-site by paramedics for minor impacts related to the blaze, and multiple neighboring residents were temporarily evacuated from their homes as a safety precaution while firefighters worked to extinguish the fire.

As of Monday, investigations into the exact cause of the fire remain ongoing, with authorities confirming the probe is still in its very early stages. Queensland Police Senior Sergeant Robert Lowry told media outlets that investigators have locked down the site as a formal crime scene while they interview witnesses and collect evidence.

“We have declared a crime scene. We’re speaking to people,” Lowry told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. “They are assisting us with our inquiries and we will continue that process and we’ll probably know more at the end of the day.”

Lowry added that the intensity of the scene was particularly distressing for all first responders who attended the call-out, and that formal support services have been made available to emergency staff, as well as to the family of the deceased woman.

“The scene was quite confronting for all emergency services that attended and support is being provided,” he said. “I also feel for the family of the deceased lady and I understand the family is also receiving support.”

Police have issued a public appeal for any witnesses or members of the public who were in the King Street area of Buderim around the time of the fire on Sunday evening to come forward with any information that could assist the ongoing investigation.

Against staggering 1-in-15-million odds, a Brisbane mother has welcomed four naturally conceived identical quadruplet girls, expanding her family from six members to 10 in a single moment that has stunned medical teams.

Thirty-four-year-old Jenitar Na-amoana and her husband Jortham are now the parents of newborns Emily, Harriet, Alexa, and Catherine, who were delivered via C-section on July 14 at the Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital. Prior to the quadruplets’ arrival, the couple already had four children ranging in age from 1 to 10 years old.

Medical professionals overseeing the high-risk pregnancy say this birth is an extremely rare event. Unlike many multiple births that rely on fertility assistance, the Na-amoana quadruplets are monozygotic: they developed from a single fertilized egg that split into four identical embryos during early embryonic development. Even more unusually, all four fetuses shared the same placenta — a combination that leading obstetric staff describe as unheard of in clinical practice.

Dr. Alexa Bendall, the lead specialist caring for Jenitar throughout her pregnancy and the namesake for quadruplet Alexa, called the outcome a remarkable miracle. “Jenitar has taken everything in her stride from day one – we have never seen a spontaneously conceived pregnancy of this type with quads, and she has somehow dodged every complication and risk for both herself and her babies to be here today, with four gorgeous newborn girls,” Bendall shared. The pregnancy reached 28 weeks and four days, a milestone the medical team had viewed as a major success. “We always said that if we could get her to 28 weeks, we would be doing well, so we are happy she could make it to this gestation,” Bendall added.

All four newborns are currently receiving specialist care in the hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), where they will remain to grow and develop to full-term size. Medical updates confirm the quadruplets are currently in stable condition as they continue to gain strength.

As the family adjusts to their sudden expansion from six to 10 members, they have launched a public GoFundMe campaign to cover the unexpected costs of caring for four newborns at once. In a statement shared on the fundraising page, Jenitar noted that while the couple is overflowing with gratitude for their four miracles, the practical challenges of their new life are overwhelming. “Our precious miracles have arrived safely, and while our hearts are overflowing with gratitude, the reality of caring for four newborn babies at once has brought challenges we never could have imagined,” she wrote. The family is seeking support to purchase a larger 10- to 12-seat van, acquire essential baby gear, and cover ongoing medical costs, travel expenses, and daily living needs that come with raising four additional children.

A serious crash that triggered major traffic chaos on one of South Australia’s busiest arterial routes has left a 38-year-old truck driver facing criminal charges and an immediate year-long driving suspension, South Australian Police have confirmed. The dangerous incident unfolded on the North-South Motorway at Bolivar on the morning of Friday, July 10, as the truck driver was merging between lanes.

Two 15-tonne concrete panels secured to the back of the truck slipped their restraints and crashed onto the road surface, before careening into the hard shoulder where three parked cars had stopped for an earlier vehicle breakdown. Two pedestrians who had exited the broken-down vehicles were caught in the path of the sliding heavy cargo.

Authorities have described the outcome as nothing short of miraculous: no one was killed in the incident. One pedestrian suffered a suspected broken arm, while the other two people involved escaped with only minor injuries. “It is a miracle that we are not talking about multiple fatalities here,” a police spokesperson noted in the immediate aftermath of the crash.

Following their investigation, police confirmed the driver, a resident of Para Hills West, faces four distinct allegations: causing harm by dangerous driving, operating a mobile phone while behind the wheel, failing to wear a seatbelt, and committing a serious breach of load restraint regulations that created extreme public risk. Officers have issued an immediate 12-month driving disqualification notice, and the driver is scheduled to appear at a local court at a later date to answer the charges.

The crash brought southbound traffic on the major motorway to a complete standstill for hours while emergency crews responded, damaged vehicles were towed from the scene, and tonnes of concrete debris were cleared away. Commuters faced lengthy delays as authorities worked to reopen the roadway, leaving widespread disruption across Adelaide’s northern transport network.

As Australia’s Royal Commission into Anti-Semitism and Social Cohesion continues its public hearings, disturbing new testimony has laid bare the extraordinary burden placed on Jewish communities across the country to defend themselves from rising hate violence and harassment. Central to the hearing’s latest session is the revelation that unpaid community volunteers have contributed hundreds of thousands of hours of uncompensated work over the past four years to shore up security at Jewish spaces, with the 2025 contribution already topping 113,700 hours.

A witness identified only by the pseudonym ACO, who represents community security organizations, told the commission that this year’s volunteer hour total marks a jump of more than 25,000 from 2024’s already record high. ACO emphasized that the 113,700 figure is almost certainly a substantial undercount, as it does not account for the many volunteers who remain on call around the clock to respond to emergency threats at short notice. The witness explained that as anti-Semitic rhetoric and attacks have intensified across Australia in recent years, community groups have ramped up their security posture to match the evolving threat landscape, putting immense strain on volunteer teams and organizational leaders.

“ We saw the rhetoric ratcheting up. We were highly concerned by that, and we all shared the same concerns,” ACO told the commission. “We ensured that our operational standing was relevant to the threat environment.” The witness added that the unrelenting demand for security coverage has created immense pressure for all participating volunteers and paid staff.

Beyond the massive volunteer labor contribution, counsel assisting the commission Richard Lancaster outlined the extreme financial and operational disruptions rising anti-Semitism has imposed on Jewish religious institutions. Many synagogues across the country have been forced to redirect funding from core community programs to cover security costs, and some have even cancelled weekly religious services when they cannot afford to hire additional paid security personnel. Lancaster noted that submissions received from dozens of synagogues nationwide uniformly cite security as the single largest drain on organizational time, budget, and energy that did not exist at the same scale just a few years ago.

Commission attendees also heard of the daily harassment facing Jewish community members outside their own institutions: groups of agitators regularly gather outside synagogue gates to shout abuse at congregants entering for services. Lancaster explained that this creates an impossible Catch-22 for community leaders: if they implement strict security barriers and limit public access to protect members, they are unfairly criticized for choosing to be deliberately insular, but without those protections, congregants are left unnecessarily vulnerable to harm. This tension comes after a series of high-profile anti-Semitic attacks in 2024, including a violent assault on Melbourne’s Adass Israel Synagogue and vandalism of the Melbourne electorate office of federal Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus.

Dreyfus, who is Jewish and whose great-grandparents were murdered in the Holocaust, testified before the commission about his own direct experiences of anti-Semitic abuse while serving in public office. He detailed two separate 2024 incidents that highlight the normalization of hate targeting Jewish public officials in Australia. In the first, Dreyfus said he offered a polite good morning to a stranger approaching him on Melbourne’s Latrobe Street, only to be called a “genocidal Zionist” and told he should be ashamed of himself. “It was so shocking and so striking to me that this should occur,” Dreyfus told the commission.

Weeks later, Dreyfus’s office in the Melbourne suburb of Mordialloc was vandalized: perpetrators smeared red paint across the building’s front facade and scrawled the phrase “who does A-G Dreyfus serve” alongside the damage. Dreyfus told the commission that this phrase deliberately invokes centuries-old anti-Semitic tropes about dual loyalty, a false conspiracy that claims Jewish public servants answer to a foreign power rather than the Australian public. “That invokes old anti-Semitic tropes about dual loyalty, about not serving Australia, about serving some other country, all of them grossly false,” he said. “No one ever should make that suggestion about a member of the Australian parliament, let alone someone who had been sworn to administer a portfolio as the Attorney-General of the Commonwealth.”

In his testimony, Dreyfus called for urgent legislative reform to better protect Jewish communal spaces, proposing new protest restrictions that mirror the existing buffer zone laws in place for abortion clinics across Victoria. Dreyfus clarified that the proposal does not seek to ban all political protest outside Jewish spaces, but rather to establish exclusion zones that protect congregants, students and other visitors from targeted harassment and intimidation. He argued that persistent protests outside synagogues, schools and other Jewish gathering places not only cause widespread anxiety among community members, but also create opportunities for more serious violence to occur under cover of public demonstration.

“It’s time to consider whether we need some similar restriction on protest activity outside synagogues, on protest activity outside schools, and Jewish places of gathering,” Dreyfus said. “Not to ban political protest, not to say that people cannot express their views in our community, but rather to protect Jews … which should be free of protests occurring.” He added, “(Protests) might be cover for some worse activity, for violence, for some actual physical threat to those places or people.”

The Royal Commission into Anti-Semitism and Social Cohesion is scheduled to continue examining a range of high-profile incidents in the coming weeks, including a controversial anti-Israel protest held on the steps of the Sydney Opera House that drew widespread condemnation for anti-Semitic rhetoric. Hearings have also been told of routine hate harassment targeting Jewish students and tutors at Australian universities, including common verbal abuse labeling Jewish people as “baby killers.”

A major payroll error at one of Australia’s biggest public utility providers has thrown hundreds of workers into financial uncertainty, triggering widespread anxiety and prompting the Australian Services Union (ASU) to take legal action before the Fair Work Commission.

In early July, Sydney Water, a state-owned utility serving millions of residents in New South Wales, completed a long-planned transition of its employee payroll services to a new cloud-based platform called Dayforce. Even before the full rollout, union representatives had raised red flags about the platform’s ability to accommodate the complex scheduling needs of Sydney Water’s 24/7 operational workforce, warnings that company leadership reportedly ignored during the testing phase.

The first pay cycle under the new system was scheduled for the previous Tuesday, when the utility’s fortnightly-paid staff were set to receive their wages. But almost immediately after processing, problems emerged: hundreds of workers found they had been underpaid, overpaid, paid days behind schedule, or received no wages at all. Additional issues quickly came to light, including incorrect superannuation contribution calculations and systemic glitches that prevented staff from logging approved rostered days off correctly.

For workers already navigating the sky-high cost of living in Sydney, consistently ranked one of the most expensive cities in the world, the pay disruption has been devastating. One anonymous Sydney Water production worker described overwhelming collective anxiety across the workforce in an interview, noting that many employees live paycheck to paycheck and depend on timely, full pay to cover essential living costs. “We’re all freaking out with worry, there is mass-level anxiety,” the worker said, sharing that he had spoken to colleagues in tears at 2 a.m., terrified they would miss alimony payments, rent or mortgage deadlines, and even struggle to put food on the table for their children.

Workers also reported that the company provided little to no training on how to navigate the new Dayforce app before launch, and that communication from senior leadership about the error was extremely limited, with no formal, full acknowledgment of the scope of the problem until the following Friday. The worker added that many staff feel no company leader has taken responsibility for the botched rollout.

Angus McFarland, ASU’s New South Wales branch secretary, reiterated that the union had explicitly warned Sydney Water that the untested software could not handle the complexities of its shift-based, round-the-clock workforce. “Hundreds of workers at Sydney Water have been short-changed or received their pay late, because (Sydney Water) refused to acknowledge problems flagged during the testing of the new payroll system,” McFarland said. “After this payroll disaster, no one is confident the problems are resolved.”

In response to the crisis, the ASU filed an official application with the Fair Work Commission, calling on the industrial relations body to order Sydney Water to either fully fix the flawed system immediately or revert to its legacy payroll platform until the transition can be completed without further disruption to workers’ pay.

In a formal internal email to staff, a copy of which was obtained by NewsWire, Sydney Water publicly acknowledged that the transition “had not gone as we planned” and issued a direct apology for the added stress the error has caused. “This has created uncertainty about pay outcomes, and additional stress at a time when you rightly expect confidence and clarity,” the email read. While the company noted that it had already dedicated significant resources to addressing emerging issues, it also warned staff that fully resolving all problems would “take some time” as the team works to stabilize and optimize the Dayforce platform.

In a subsequent statement to media, a Sydney Water spokesperson explained the company moved to replace its old payroll system because the legacy infrastructure no longer met its operational requirements. The spokesperson reaffirmed the company’s apology to affected workers, noting that “being paid correctly and on time is a fundamental expectation” and that the company’s top priority is resolving the issues as quickly as possible and supporting impacted employees. “As with many large-scale technology transitions, issues have emerged as the system has been embedded,” the spokesperson said. “We are aware of payroll processing issues affecting some employees and are working directly with those impacted to rectify them as a matter of urgency. We acknowledge the concerns raised by the ASU and are committed to working constructively with employees and unions.”