Dennis Jensen (Tangney, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

In speaking to this motion on the forgotten Australians and former child migrants, I will continue the speech I was making on Monday evening. In a written statement given to me, Mrs Pollard says ‘I needed to show the church and the government what a horrible mess they had made of providing protection to me and my siblings’. In 1994 Mrs Pollard reported the rape to the WA police and the following year she went to Rockhampton and went through a hearing against the priest. She says, ‘I faced up to my abuser and he was committed to trial.’ The trial was in 1999 and, despite one of the jurors knowing the priest’s brother, the trial went ahead, resulting in a hung jury. In 2000 there was a second trial, which resulted in a guilty verdict and a sentence of 7½ years for the priest. Mrs Pollard continues:

The judge also recommended that the Queensland government pay me the maximum ex gratia payment. There was an appeal and the priest’s lawyers took the case to the Mental Health Court. During this period all the court documents were sent to my husband. I was so angry that this was done as I saw it as a last ditch attempt to prevent the course of justice, because if I had all the transcripts of a closed court case it would be impossible for the case to go ahead. At no time did I ever request the Queensland government to release this information to my husband or to me.

Crown law placed a suppression order on Mrs Pollard and she could not even speak to her lawyer about them. She had to appear in court without legal representation. At this point, let us hear ex-Premier Beattie’s version, which he related in a ministerial statement to parliament on 27 February 2003. According to Mr Beattie, a policy officer in his department released transcripts of the closed proceedings out of some sympathy for Mrs Pollard. Mr Beattie refers to Mrs Pollard once as ‘one of the victims in this case’, but then quickly changed his terminology to a self-serving ‘that is, one of the witnesses who gave evidence at the hearing’. Mrs Pollard was, and still is, a victim, yet in his ministerial statement the former Queensland Premier, to his eternal shame, attempted to portray Mrs Pollard as somehow to blame for the error emanating from his office. He said:

I have taken this action because despite repeated requests, including requests in writing, the Perth couple have refused to return the transcripts or to cease contacting witnesses mentioned in the transcript.

Mrs Pollard has repeatedly denied having deliberately contacted other victims. So what does that say about Premier Beattie’s statement? Was it an unfortunate error or one of the most contemptible blame-shifting exercises I have ever come across? Premier Beattie apologised to other victims but Mrs Pollard said he never apologised to her. She said, ‘Yet I was the one who had been dragged through three trials in an effort to make the system accountable for something they already knew was happening.’ She continued, ‘The evidence I now hold from having all the records show to me the Queensland government always knew how bad this institution was and knew that no child should ever have been placed there.’ So why didn’t the Pollards return the documents to the Queensland government, even if they were not at fault? Perhaps they were concerned about Queensland’s questionable record for protecting government documents, especially when they relate to the government’s handling of child abuse cases.

There has been a deal of public debate about the so-called Heiner ‘shreddergate affair’. A document tabled in the Queensland parliament by Lawrence Springborg on 17 April 2002 entitled, The 1997 Lindeberg declaration revisited, said:

However, over and above those unresolved matters, Mr Grundy, in a six-month intensive investigative exposé in 2001, discovered that evidence of criminal paedophilia was gathered by Mr Heiner concerning the (hitherto publicly-unknown) pack-rape of a 14-year-old Aboriginal female inmate by four male inmates during a supervised educational bush outing in May 1988 which certain Centre staff claimed was covered up at the time by Centre and departmental management.

The document continued:

Against this background, on 5 March 1990, the Goss Government ordered the shredding so that the evidence gathered could not be used against the careers of JOYC Youth Workers, some of whom, on the face of available evidence, were engaging in prima facie criminal conduct against children held in the care and custody of the State in flagrant dereliction of their duty of care, and, perhaps, engaging in a criminal conspiracy to pervert the course of justice in covering up the crime of criminal paedophilia.

Reports such as these may explain why the Pollards felt a certain reluctance to hand back such valuable documents. The Pollards have told me that they have tried all sorts of avenues to get justice in this case. This is including the Crime and Misconduct Commission and the Ombudsman without any success. They have told me that the main thing they want is not just an acknowledgement that these terrible things occurred, but a full and proper inquiry to find out once and for all who was at fault. Most of the relevant documents are publicly available and Mr Pollard has repeatedly offered copies to anyone who is interested.

Who is responsible for the suffering of my constituent, Sandra Pollard, and so many other vulnerable young children at the hands of uncaring people? Who ultimately should bear the responsibility for all these well-documented cases of systemic and systematic abuse, which continued virtually unabated for years? Mrs Pollard has letters from politicians and judges saying how much she has helped other abuse victims, and, ‘how much this bravery on my part has cost me both emotionally and financially.’ Despite the appalling treatment she suffered for so many years and the perceived lack of justice for Mrs Pollard, she has managed to help her son go to university and to rebuild her life with a loving husband, and to help fellow abuse victims. The least we can do for people such as Sandra Pollard is give her procedural justice.

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