A Western Sydney Gang Got Hold of Military-Grade Rocket Launchers
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This is story I actually know something about. I knew Shane personally and attended many BBQ's with him and the various other people that made up the explosives team.
I have for obvious reasons not had any contact with him since the incident.
I can even provide what I am very confident the reason for why he did it. He fully knew what he was doing, and indeed the reason was for money. However not for selfish reasons. A captain salary is not that fantastic in the army and his wife at the time, whom I suspect he is separated from now liked to live fancy. In fact I am 100% confident it is because of her that he did it. Probably without her being involved, but I cannot be sure of that. I do know she overextended their finances which would have been a good motivator.
Any claims he made to forget destroying them are a horrible attempt at deception to reduce his sentence.
For what its worth he was ostracised from the explosives community over this. It was a very small group of people, and Shane's appeals to have them speak on his behalf were ignored by them all. The group is very tight and for one of their own to betray was seen as a massive abuse of trust.
Honestly I was very sad to hear it. Selling out your country for the low amounts he did is such a sad thing. I don't think he needed to be in the super max prisons he spent his time in as I don't believe him to be a dangerous person. Certainly a very stupid mistake, but not a dangerous person. I suspect most of his being incarcerated in such was as a message. Personally I remember him as a fun person at a party enjoying a few beers and telling amusing stories of which there were many.
As for if other weapons are missing. That is possible. Shane was tasked with destroying them. Its much harder to steal from stores due to them being tracked quite well but those to be destroyed are much harder to keep track of. Usually there would be several people involved to help avoid this sort of incident.
yeah he def should have sold his country out for a lot more.. 0.o
And he should have found a legal way to make more money, and he also should have been in control of his wife's spending (easier said than done in the modern age though...).
Selling the weapons was dumb because there was almost no way they wouldn't be tracked back to him.
https://www.defence.gov.au/payandconditions/ADF/Resources/WR...
In Australia, only reservists get tax-free pay, and only when they're not on full-time duty. I think some of the additional military allowances are tax free for full-timers, but not base salary.
Or, you know, divorced her.
But seriously though, this isn't about pay. The guy was a fucking idiot.
Our politicians have sold out to Chinese influence for sub-100k bribes. It's par for course. I understand that most people have a price, but taking a year or two worth of salaried income for a move that risks ending your career just doesn't make sense no matter how I spin it.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/dec/12/sam-d...
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-06-12/alp-invoice-reveals-e...
I'm not at all surprised that he has been shunned. What he did was treacherous and could have caused terribly casualties.
This apparently refers to the Central Business District of Sydney [1]. I was trying to sort out what this had to do with Cannabidiol but it just didn't fit.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sydney_central_business_distri...
(Seattle is sort of similar in that there isn’t really an old town center, or rather it’s directly adjacent to the downtown highrises (Pioneer Square).)
> Shane personally and attended many BBQ's
Checks out.
As a weapon it's the typical shaped charge warhead. It would be really dangerous against any normal non tank vehicle in short ranges. Against a tank it's useless nowadays. But the semi militarized armored cars used by some police forces would be disabled rather easily with one. Not blown up to smithereens, but a hit to the engine space would wreck that or a hit to the passenger compartment would kill some if not all inside.
Not that good against a building. A hand-grenade would do way more harm inside. So it's more of a trophy thing, or a really nasty surprise against SWAT truck assuming the culprit manages to hit with it.
The lax security Australia has towards these is rather hilarious.
In a country like Australia, what do they think it will happen once they blow a police car with one?
These would be great to kill people, criminal heads, politicians etc. That's all. Do it, collect the money and hope to stay out and alive.
Otherwise quite useless.
But thinking about it it could be quite useful as an intimidation tactic.
If your rival biker clubhouse got hit by an RPG followed by the message 'we have a few more', it could really make people think about committing acts of attack on a group when another RPG is their likely reply.
That said, using against a police station like these guys considered seems stupid. Something like that would never make the police back off, and only throw ever more resource against these people.
The other use would be straight terrorism. One of those into a crowd or building would be horrific. And could be amplified if the group did one then said more are coming type thing.
Anyway, amazing the army didn't have greater control on these. At least fire them at their end of their shelf life for practice as these things cant be cheap. I imagine controls are significantly increased today.
If you already are relatively close to a crowd you’re better off using some fully automatic weapons like actual assault rifles. Or grenade launchers.
Also not condoning violence. Just looking at the threat these things pose in hands of criminals/terrorists.
Bombs were used and police found some really unusual weapons, including an anti aircraft gun at one club that they raided.
Seems like he might get away without a charge since he delivered them during an amnesty which - as far as I understand - means he legally cannot be punished for possession prior to handing them in.
Straya!
I don't exactly get it. He was tasked with destroying 10 rocket launchers, and claimed he forgot to destroy all 10 of them? Does he think this is believable at all?
It may even be considered in closer relation to a mortar than rocket launcher.
No, the QC stage is at design/purchase level. Different armies, different needs, different rockets. Some like the Palestinians are happy with utter crap, as long as it gets the job done (it's a common guerilla tactic, minimal expense to oneself, but great expense to the other side). Some only need to defend against car bombs meaning a "cheap" version is sufficient, some need to defend against old Russian made tanks and some need to defend against tanks with active armor. Some armies need, for different scenarios, all the variants - and cost-effective, which means it doesn't make economic sense to deploy ultra-modern tankbusters against terrorists in Toyota Hiluxes, just as it doesn't make sense to target US tanks with a WW2 panzerfaust.
But we do a lot of interesting things, often without the fanfare you see in the SV bubble that's worth talking about.
Hervey Bay is about the same latitude as Miami with the Great Barrier Reef aligning with the Caribbean. Sydney is pretty close to Los Angeles latitude wise, while the most southerly major city, Hobart is about the same as Boston (or somewhere in-between SF and Portland).
EDIT: http://www.bytemuse.com/post/interactive-equivalent-latitude...
Also, I'd guess Melbourne and Sydney are probably trending upwards in both startups and VC available, which would result in more visitors here from these parts.
Not just the tech space.
Australia has enjoyed a practically hardship-free society since it's inception, and as such people are increasingly and shockingly blasé about the dangerous potential of governments encroaching on various freedoms. I feel the government knows they can do whatever they want to follow the international community, because the general voter here either doesn't care, or doesn't know enough to form an educated opinion on [insert topical subject].
(The aboriginal didn't exactly have it hardship-free.)
No, I think it's your regular Western right-wing conservatism, perhaps with the Overton window shifted a bit thanks to people like Trump making it easier for Australian hard conservatives.
The main cause, as far as I’m concerned, is the overwhelming apathy of the common voter. People simply don’t care. We’ve had it way too good for way too long, so as long as it isn’t an immediate threat to Barry’s ability to buy a case of booze and watch Friday night footy with the boys then he doesn’t care.
We avoided the GFC largely with minimal pain. Housing has been a sustained boom that has made generations really wealthy. Our economy has basically not undergone recession in 13 years, and has only twice in the last two decades. The social security nets we have in place, whilst being eroded, have yet to really show obvious signs of strain unless you actively look for them. It’s really hard to adequately describe just how easy Australia has had it in general for the last several decades.
As a result of all of this, both major parties have had to do little to continue these good times, so politics becomes very samey to most people. For the large majority of the population, it doesn’t really matter which party is in with respect to their day-to-day lives.
All this means that Joe Average voter has it really easy. They become apathetic as fuck, and unless an issue directly impacts them they basically do not even register it. Creeping erosion of free speech/privacy either slides under the table or becomes a “well I’ve got nothing to hide” argument.
I mean for god’s sake, our current government proposed the idea of using Webcams to facially recognise porn viewers to confirm their age. It sounds so ridiculous that most people just scoff at the idea rather than consider the attitude of ‘fuck your privacy’ behind it.
It’s really frustrating because it’s so wide-spread. The depressing part is that I don’t see that apathy changing before many of our hard-fought freedoms, or carefully-built systems that give us such high quality-of-life get destroyed. There will be a substantial lag time between them being ruined and it finally impacting the voting public enough that they actually stop, consider it, and maybe do something about it.
When abbott and turnbull came to a political fight old-gold liberal voters turned against the party in a way that basically never happens. The voting population cares, blaming it on apathy is to interpret silence as a negative outcome when it is not.
The left/right split will become less relevant in a few decades as we lean into an up/down perspective, where a top down authority will maintain our values better than a liberal perspective.
What does this even mean?
Not very effective, but it really sends a message.