Men's Rights Agency ~ News & Views
"Sordid one day,
Scandalous the next"
Allegations involving prostitutes, politicians and pedophilia have given Queensland a new reputation as the State of Smut. But rational debate has been forgotten. Greg Roberts reports. From the Sydney Morning Herald 23/8/97
Tony Smith was in the wrong place at the wrong time. His political career was doomed........
Tony Smith was unlucky. As the Federal Liberal MP left the home of a prostitute in the inner Brisbane suburb of New Farm late last week he was stopped and questioned by police. they thought he had been visiting an illegal brothel that they were raiding in the neighbouring premises.
As it turned out, Smith's fling was perfectly legal. Prostitutes can work alone from their home under Queensland's peculiar laws. Smith was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. Yet his political career was doomed as soon as he was named by a Brisbane radio station on Monday. Smith pointed out that he stood condemned because of a moral rather than legal issue, but nobody believes he will be the MP for Dickson after the next election.
Smith's public humiliation was heightened on Wednesday when some newspapers published photographs of a dozen red roses left on the doorstep of his Brisbane girlfriend's home. The woman, and innocent party, was named in reports. To rub it in, a Labour MP, Jon Sullivan, told the Queensland Parliament that Smith had physically and mentally abused his former wife.
The timing of the MP's indiscretion was doubly unfortunate. He may indirectly have been a victim of a climate of hysteria surrounding matters sexual that has gripped the Sunshine State. With allegations of organised pedophilia networks and secret police "dirt files" mounting daily, the names of prominent Queenslanders - judges and senior politicians included - are being whispered in connection with all manner of smutty goings-on.
Rational debate and the requirement for hard evidence have been submerged by the impact of sensational allegations of pedophilia in particular in Queensland this week. community outrage is such that, as in NSW earlier this year when the Police Royal Commission was investigating pedophilia (its report with be released on Tuesday), authorities are under huge pressure to "nail people to the wall", as Queenslands' Police Minister, Russell Cooper, put it.
But unlike in NSW, no solid evidence has emerged of organised, protected pedophilia networks in Queensland, despite a plethora of claims.
Yet reputations are being smeared as the debate unfolds. During a Brisbane radio talk-back session on Wednesday, a woman claimed that a man now living in Sydney, whom she named, had abused her as a child. She remembered the abuse after a psychiatrist revived "repressed" memories. According to NSW police, the man has not at any stage been under investigation for sexual offences. He has, nonetheless been branded publicly as a pedophile.
Smith's predicament was leaked to the media by a staff member in Cooper's office. This was not lost on those who have watched recently as the reputation of Cooper's former senior adviser, Russell Grenning, has been dragged through the mud.
The Courier Mail in Brisbane reported that Grenning, a close confidante of the late Russ Hinze, a former police minister, was the subject of a "dirt file" held by the corrupt former police commissioner, Terry Lewis. It reportedly said Grenning was investigated in 1983 over his alleged receipt of pornographic photographs but no action was taken for "political reasons".
The file was investigated by the Fitzgerald corruption inquiry in 1988, but apparently no evidence of impropriety was found. Although there was nothing to indicate Grenning had done anything wrong, and the incident of ancient history, the newspaper has featured the story prominently. In the process Grenning has been "outed" a a homosexual.
The reports were published att the same time as the Courier Mail was running an ostensibly unrelated series "exposing" pedophilia networks, although any photographs that Grenning allegedly had were of adults and there is no suggestion that he had ever acted illegally. The main reason he has been targeted now is that he is the author of the controversial secret memorandum of understanding signed by Cooper and the Queensland Police Union las year. (The memorandum is central to an aborted inquiry that was the subject of an unsuccessful no-confidence motion brought against the Government in Parliament this week.
Once revelations of sexual peccadillos start doing the rounds, anything can happen. As Grenning warned in a letter this week to the Opposition Leader, Peter Beattie: "Should this matter degenerate into a slanging match about the private lives of politicians and their staff, there are more than a few on your side of the House - past and present - who would suffer unfairly as I have."
Beattie may have heeded the warning; the Opposition has been less hesitant about making mileage out of the pedophilia debate. Claims by a Labour MP, Lorraine Bird, on Monday that a pedophilia network is operating in Whitsunday island resorts have attracted national and international publicity, but in the final analysis she admitted she had no firm evidence.
Police say a localised problem existed in the early '80's, but no longer. A police statement on Wednesday that "there is absolutely no evidence of contemporary organised pedophile activity in the region" went largely unreported. Whitsunday tourist operators are livid, saying that the MP has done untold damage to their industry.
No sooner had Bird made her claims than the crime investigator Bob Bottom made a series of extraordinary allegations on ABC Radio. According to Bottom, an adviser to both Cooper and the Queensland Children's Commission, alleged activities that has come to the QCC's attention included the filming in Brisbane of a "snuff" film showing a boy being sodomised as he was disembowelled, and the importation of boys from the Phillipines by a pedophilia ring. In both cases, pedophiles were allegedly protected by police.
Bottom has refused to elaborate, so it has not been possible to establish further details. One police officer sail the film exists and was circulated several years ago, but he has seen no evidence that it was made in Brisbane. The QCC head, Norm Alford, has admitted he has no such evidence. Snuff films are produced, \but usually in Latin American slums.
A QCC report on pedophilia, compiled by Alford and Bottom and tabled in the Queensland Parliament on Tuesday, was expected to provide evidence of organised rackets, but did not. It consisted mostly of material from former investigations, the parliamentary Hansard and other records. It made the sweeping claims that a core of 300 active pedophiles operated in Queensland and that pedophiles have for many years been protected by police. Its recommendations, such as further action to reduce youth homelessness, are worthy, but vague and predictable. The report claimed that 570,000 Queenslanders - more than 20 per cent of the population - either have been or will be sexually abused as children. But at the same time it said one in four girls and one in 11 boys generally are abused. The figures don't add up.
Alford claims that pedophiles include, among others, "two or three judges, a former Cabinet minister, former MP's from both sides of politics, and senior police. His main sources, he says, are documents (so far unidentified) and intelligence from people with "first-hand" knowledge, including former police officers.
His report was criticised as inconsistent and partly "mere speculation" by the State's Criminal Justice Commission. The Council for Civil Liberties warned the debate was spinning out of control. The Police Commissioner, Jim O'Sullivan, dismissed the allegations as "scuttlebutt".
As happened in NSW, the publicity has prompted a procession of pedophilia victims to go public. While their sad and sometimes horrifying tales of abuse have inflamed passions they have not supported claims of organised, protected networks. They confirm only what is common knowledge - that pedophilia exists and that the majority of offences are perpetrated by close relatives or acquaintances of the victims.
Cooper, rejecting Opposition demands for a royal commission says police are doing all they can. He points out that 22 people have been charged with 700 offences since February as a result of a special police operation called Task Force Argus and maintains that existing policing structures are adequate.
Nonetheless, the posturing by politicians increases in response to growing community concern. A straight-faced Peter Beattie accused the Premier, Rob Borbidge, of "taking political advantage of this vile, evil crime". Borbidge, of course, accused the Opposition of doing the same. following an emotional debate in Parliament on Thursday night, Borbidge foreshadowed the establishment of a new crime commission to combat pedophilia.
Brisbane journalists have been contacted in recent days by anonymous sources
naming prominent public figures as pedophiles. Vile and evil pedophilia may
be, but many observers believe that in pursuit of it, personal and corporate
reputations are too easily besmirched. In the present climate, such sensitivities
are given little
consideration.
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MRA brings you this article to point out the methods used by certain sections of the media in "beating-up" a story to enhance their own "investigations", which to date have produced little hard evidence to substantiate their claims. We point out quite clearly this does not indicate support for suppressing inquiries into paedophilia, which is an abhorrent form of child abuse that must be investigated and exposed by the proper authorities.
It is reprehensible to run a story on Tony Smith amidst all the paedophilia claims, but then the same media outlet brought you the original domestic violence story under banner headlines "Liberals to investigate MP over domestic violence" in their issue on 12/5/97.
We always thought domestic violence issues were subject to a privacy clause under the Qld Domestic Violence legislation Section 82.(1) that states: A person who publishes in a newspaper or periodical publication or who, by radio broadcast or television or otherwise by any means, disseminates to the public or to a section of the public -
b) any account of proceedings under for for the purpose of this Act before a court or a Magistrate, or any part of those proceedings, that identifies or is likely to identify -
(i) the aggrieved spouse, an aggrieved person, the respondent spouse, or the applicant or appellant (in either case other than a police officer ); or..
commits an offence against this Act, unless the court before which the proceedings are, are to be, or were held, or the Magistrate before whom the proceedings are or were taken, expressly permits the publication or the publication is permitted under a regulation.
The police should take action in the case of an offence with the consent of the appropriate Minister first being obtained (Section 83).
Note: Not wishing to change the text we have left the spelling of "pedophilia" as used in the SMH
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