A POLLUTED BEACH

There is a photograph in the Sydney Morning Herald today that will send chills down the spine of every parent in Australia. It is a photo of child rapist and kidnapper Dennis Ferguson defiantly sitting on Coogee Beach in his budgie smugglers and posing for the camera with prisoner rehabilitation advocate Brett Collins. Collins is giving a smiling thumbs up for the camera.

Behind them playing on the beach and frolicking in the surf are half a dozen unwitting children – some about the same age as the little kids that Ferguson and an accomplice abducted and sexually assaulted in a motel room.

Collins says he had the photo taken and submitted it to the newspaper to show that the convicted paedophile isn't going anywhere and deserves his right to move around in the community and be left alone. In the past he has been run out of Queensland towns and the Sydney suburb of Ryde.

Collins says ‘The photo shows Mr. Ferguson in a natural setting. We intend to make sure that he's seen for what he is - a fragile human being who's the same as everybody else.’

No he is not the same as everybody else. He is an evil man. And since his release from jail after serving fourteen years, he used Centrelink to put him in touch with his former accomplice from the days when he abducted those little kids and sexually abused them.

What the photo proves to me –and they deliberately used a backdrop of kids in their bathers at play on Coogee Beach – is not that Ferguson is  the same as everybody else  but is disgustingly different. And it proves yet again that this country needs a national register of child sex offenders that is available to the public.

And proves yet again that Extended Supervision Orders should not protect paedophiles by suppressing their names and photos.

You have a right to know if a dangerous pervert is living next to your family, or your children’s school or visiting your neighbourhood beach.  And this repugnant stunt by Ferguson and Collins doesn’t change that.

A final quote from Collins?  He  says of Ferguson ‘… the fellow himself is a lovely guy.’

I doubt Ferguson’s victims or their parents or future victims would agree.

© Copyright Derryn Hinch 2009