YOUR LAWS. YOUR FAULT
 
Just imagine you are the Premier of Victoria, John Brumby. Or the Attorney-General, Rob Hulls. And you get up every morning and you open the morning papers. And there it is again. Another headline screaming at you about some other scandalous screw up in our legal system. And you’ve got an election coming up. And Law and Order is going to be a big issue. Wouldn’t you be scared? And you can’t blame anybody else –although you’ll try – because you’ve been in office for more than ten years.
 
They are your laws that are being mocked and abused by criminals. A litany of abuses. Suppression orders. Suspended sentences. And the latest ones all documented in the Herald Sun, the biggest selling newspaper in the land.
 
Do the words of Hawthorn coach John Kennedy ever reverberate in the minds of Hulls and Brumby?  ‘Do Something!’ I doubt Bob Cameron the fumbling Police Minister does, or even can, read the newspaper.
 
The latest scandal involves the same man who was the centre of last week’s scandal. The child rapist, supposedly under an Extended Supervision Order, whom I cannot name. The man whose name was suppressed, then released when he scarpered for the second time while supposedly being monitored by an electronic ankle bracelet, then suppressed again.
 
Now it turns out when he’s supposedly under supervision he has been making hundreds of phone calls to sex lines from his taxpayer-funded cottage outside Ararat Jail.  More than fifty calls in four hours late one night at a cost of more than $500.
 
And the Department of Justice must pay the bill. That means you. It’s crazy. It’s their phone. It’s like a parent being billed for calls made by a teenage son or daughter.
 
What would you do as a parent? You’d block access to the phone. Or you’d block 1 800 or 1 900 numbers. But that’s too simple.
 
And how much supervision is going on if this man can make 52 uncensored calls in one night? What if he were calling victims? Or potential victims? Or harassing their families?
 
I tell you, we are banging our heads against a brick wall. And those bricks were piled higher and higher over a decade by Bracks, Brumby and Hulls and their blinkered ‘touchy feely government’ more interested in the rights of serial rapists and paedophiles  than in the rights and safety of your children.
 
Thursday, February 4, 2010

© Copyright Derryn Hinch 2010