Mission & Justice

Paige Taylor; 9/5/08

The WA state Government’s three-year overhaul of child protectionservices yesterday topped $500million and will include $112million over four years for more case workers in needy areas such as Aboriginal communities in the remote Kimberley. Within 12 months, an additional 210 child protection workers, service delivery workers and support staff will be deployed to the areas of greatest need.  At a cost of $5 million, remote community workers will be sent to Warmun and Oombulgarri in the East Kimberley.  “Following last year’s review of the former Department for Community Development, we made structural changes and invested significant further funding into protecting our children,” Treasurer Eric Ripper said. The budget allocation comes three months after West Australian Coroner Alastair Hope described the plight of Aboriginal children as “especially pathetic”.

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Paul Toohey; 8/5/08

Ted Mullighan came up with 46 recommendations to tackle child sex abuse in South Australia’s Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara lands. He might have stretched himself and made it 47.  The former Supreme Court judge exposed some seriously disturbing matters in his report. But there was one thing too unpleasant to touch: ending the permit system in those lands.  Mullighan would have done well heeding the words of 19th century philosopher Jeremy Bentham - words the judge probably knows because they relate to making sure the courts operate in the full public gaze.

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Jamie Walker & John Wiseman; 7/5/08

Former Supreme Court judge Ted Mullighan yesterday slapped down the option of federal intervention in South Australia’s troubled Aboriginal homelands, despite finding that at least one in seven children had been sexually assaulted. Mr Mullighan reported that child sex abuse on the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara lands, adjoining the federal intervention zone in the Northern Territory, was “widespread, devastating and a national disgrace”. The inquiry found it likely that upwards of 14 per cent of the 1000 children living in the isolated communities had been raped or molested.

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6/5/08

Sunni extremists have killed three prostitutes and wounded two others in a brothel attack in the northern city of mosul, Iraqi police said on Tuesday. The insurgents knocked on the apartment’s door Monday and shouted at the women that they had been warned before not to carry out prostitution, said a police official, speaking on condition of anonymity. The militants then opened fire on the apartment, he said, citing testimony from one of the wounded women.

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Pia Akerman & John Wiseman; 6/5/08

Any move to extend the Mullighan Commission’s child sex abuse investigations into other Aboriginal communities in South Australia is set to face opposition from indigenous leaders. An indigenous community leader from the state’s southwest coast said it would be wrong to do so and would effectively brand all Aboriginal communities as “being sexual predators”. Kokatha Mula elder Bronwyn Coleman Sleep expressed her opposition to further investigations on the eve of commissioner Ted Mullighan’s report on child sex abuse on the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara lands being tabled in the South Australian parliament.

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Chris Merritt; 6/5/08

Victoria’s plan to establish a separate county court to deal with Aborigines accused of serious crime raises the prospect of an apartheid-style legal system. Leading criminal lawyer Peter Faris QC, a former chairman of the National Crime Authority, said: “I saw this and felt sick.”  If the plan went ahead, it would open the door to “separate but equal” justice for Aborigines, the catchcry of apartheid South Africa, Mr Faris said. The plan, which will be outlined in today’s Victorian budget, will establish the nation’s first racially based court to deal with serious criminal offences.

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David Eames; 2/5/08

Religious radicals who attacked the top-secret Waihopai spy base more likely hampered New Zealand’s ability to drive a hard bargain at the trade table than crippled the US ability to wage war, says one intelligence expert. Peter Cozens, head of Victoria University’s Centre for Strategic Studies, says the mysterious Marlborough base is used strictly to collect and analyse information - often of “a political, trade and diplomatic nature” - for the New Zealand Government. Members of the Anzac Ploughshares movement infiltrated the base in an early-morning raid on Wednesday.

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John Wiseman; 5/4/08

Aboriginal leaders have called for perpetrators of child sexual abuse in remote indigenous communities to be prosecuted through the criminal justice system, rather than be subject to traditional codes of punishment, while demanding police take action to stamp out the problem. Leaders from the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara lands, in northwest South Australia, have claimed that in the past, police have been “reluctant” to pursue offenders. Their position is outlined in a submission to the state’s Mullighan inquiry into child sexual abuse, whose report on abuse in the APY lands will be tabled in the South Australian parliament this week.

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Natasha Robinson; 1/5/08

The federal intervention in the Northern Territory has led to a decline in new notifications of sexually transmitted infections among children. The Northern Territory Government’s latest surveillance update on sexual health and blood-borne viruses revealed that 62 children aged under 14 were diagnosed with sexually transmitted infections in the Territory in the first six months of the intervention. Three of the children diagnosed with chlamydia between July and December last year were under the age of 10. The figures also showed that total diagnoses of chlamydia, gonorrhoea, syphilis and trichomoniasis declined in the second half of last year, compared with the first half, following the intervention. The Territory’s rates of sexual disease among both the Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal population still soar above the rest of the nation.

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Kathy Marks; 29/4/08

Nine women involved in the Pitcairn Island rape trials are considering a class action against the British Government to seek compensation for the abuse they suffered growing up in the remote South Pacific territory. At trials on the island in 2004 and in New Zealand in 2006, eight Pitcairn men were convicted of raping and sexually assaulting young girls, while a ninth man pleaded guilty. Six were given prison sentences, and three are still in jail on Pitcairn - which was settled by mutineers from the Bounty in 1790 and has a population of about 50. In Britain, victims of crime are compensated under a statutory scheme that sets amounts based on the severity of the suffering. But the scheme does not apply to residents of Britain’s overseas territories, although they hold British citizenship. The Pitcairn victims have instructed a New Zealand QC, Bruce Corkill. He wrote to representatives of the New Zealand-based British Governor of Pitcairn, George Fergusson, in September asking that a parallel scheme be set up for the island.

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