THE MEANING OF OZ - All you need to know!

Is Olga having a little fun?

The oil spill was originally thought to have been about 20,000 litres, with one fuel tank damaged, but late yesterday the shipping company involved doubled that figure.

Queensland's Deputy Premier Paul Lucas has today confirmed the crisis is even worse.

"They originally told us 20 to 30 tonnes," he said.

"It is now apparent that it was about 230 tonnes."

Oil has caked about 60 kilometres of beaches along the coast.

Moreton Island - about 40 kilometres off Brisbane - is the worst affected.

About 350 workers are trying to remove the sludge but it is a slow process and most of it has to be done by hand to avoid further damage to the environment.

Moreton Island resident Amanda Graham says she does not understand how the container ship the Pacific Adventurer lost part of its load causing the disaster.

"The containers can't have been strapped down, they go through bigger seas than what we had," she said.

Most beaches on the Sunshine Coast are closed.

Authorities have warned the toxic sludge coming from the cargo ship Pacific Adventurer is carcinogenic and it is melting the soles off people's shoes.

The oil spill that started on Wednesday off Moreton Island now covers around 60 kilometres of south-east Queensland's coast......

The Real Reason For The Bikie Laws

By Arlie Loughnan



They're rushed, they might make things worse, and they could well be overturned. These laws are more about politics than fixing the problem, writes law academic Arlie Loughnan
They say a week is a long time in politics, but in NSW we've rarely seen one as busy as that leading up to the enacting of the new bikie laws.

In the wake of the recent high-profile incidents of bikie gang-related violence, including the fatal bashing of Anthony Zervas at Sydney airport, the NSW Government introduced new laws to expand police powers relating to "criminal organisations" and individual members of those organisations. Within seven days, the NSW Government had declared its intention to pass new laws to deal with the crime and violence linked to bikie gangs, drafted the legislation, passed it in both houses, and had the Bill enacted.

The unquestioned rush to criminalisation exposes the overly-enthusiastic and even cavalier attitude that successive state governments have adopted in their recourse to criminal law as a means of control.

Despite indicating initially that the new legislation would not be in place until June, the laws were drafted and passed within a matter of days. This has meant that there has been no reflective consideration of whether they are indeed necessary, no community consultation and no critical evaluation of the experience in other jurisdictions.

Even independent of a consideration of the content of the new legislation, its rapid passage, amid fever-pitch mass media attention, is a concerning yet familiar feature of state-level legislative activity in the area of criminal justice: knee-jerk reactions to high-profile and exceptional criminal offending.

It doesn't seem too fanciful to posit that the NSW Government was awaiting another chance to "get tough on crime", perhaps a welcome distraction from the more intractable problems of the economy.

Equally concerning is that aspect of the political rhetoric surrounding the introduction of the new legislation that reveals one-upmanship in the "law and order" stakes between Australian states. The Attorney-General, John Hatzistergos, championed the NSW legislation as tougher than that of South Australia (the South Australian Act served as a model for the NSW laws).

Now the Queensland Government has indicated that it will enact legislation along the lines of that existing in South Australia and NSW. The issue of parallel national legislation is reported to be on the agenda of the next meeting of all attorneys-general.

It's unfortunate that, in the current era of multifaceted cooperation between the Commonwealth and the states, with the Labor party in power in all jurisdictions except Western Australia, the Commonwealth shows signs of aping the States' populist approaches on criminal justice. If this happens it would be a missed opportunity to reverse this legislative trend, which runs counter to the tone of the inaugural Federal Criminal Justice Forum held in Canberra in 2008, where it seemed a new direction in criminal justice might emerge.

The new law makes it possible for the police to apply to proscribe organisations and to make association between members of those organisations an offence. An organisation can be made a "declared organisation" if the judge is satisfied that a significant subset (measured in terms of numbers or influence) of its associates plan or engage in serious criminal activity and the organisation represents a risk to public safety and order.

Once an organisation is proscribed, a control order can be issued preventing any association " by phone, email, or meeting in person " between a controlled member and another controlled member. A breach of a control order is a criminal offence punishable by imprisonment for up to two years or five years for the second offence. The control order also prevents the affected individual from working in any of the high-risk industries listed in the Act, including the security industry. There is no time limit on a control order " it remains in force until it is revoked...........