Buried in the labyrinth
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 16: Unintended Consequences
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Margaret Simons
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Margaret Simons' biography and other articles by this writer
This is a story about the habits of mistrust that grow between citizens and government in a media-lubricated democracy.
It is also a story about failure. Whether it is my failure or the failure of others, I am not so sure. Perhaps it is broader – about a system failing as it trips over its own checks and balances, in a headlong rush to protect its own and create cardboard cut-out heroes and victims.
For most of the last two years I have been confused, angry and frustrated about this. For much of the time I wondered what this story was really all about and today, writing this, I am none the wiser. I have learned nothing, but my faith in progress, in the sweet and efficacious nature of attempts at understanding, has been thwarted. Somewhere, behind the impenetrable wall of government caution, I sense a human story. Someone who might want to explain, or say sorry, or who may hate me. Someone who may be suffering because of me. We will never meet. They know I exist, but I will never know their names. It seems, after all, that the Victorian Government has nothing to say to me. The spin doctors drafted answers to my questions. Those answers went to the Minister. They were signed off by him, I was told, but who knows with what deletions. Whatever remained went to the State Government Media Unit, and the result of that has been a decision to give me no answers – to release nothing. The Government has nothing to say for itself. Or is that they don't trust me to hear their story, let alone tell it fairly?
"Do you think it is a cover up?" the Channel Nine journalist asked me last July at the door to the tribunal.
"Who knows?" was the only accurate answer, which not surprisingly did not make it to air. I should have been angrier, more hysterical, to make the six o'clock news. Perhaps it has been a cover up, or perhaps the whole thing had got bogged down in habits of defensiveness. But I am leaping ahead. It is best, as in all emotional cases, to start plainly and with the facts.
ON JULY 13, 2005, THE VICTORIAN GOVERNMENT sent one of Australia's worst paedophiles to live in a house at 137 Kent Street Flemington – just a few hundred metres from the home I shared with my husband and two children. Ever since, I have been trying to find out why.
I am not a vigilante. I am not obsessed with this case. When it was at its height, when the journalists were massing around me on the steps of the court, I felt the pressure to assume a role. They needed me to be "Outraged of Flemington", but I felt not so much outraged as questing.
The reporters asked me why I hadn't bought a crowd, with placards. The answer was because I didn't want to be like that.
If someone from government had said at the outset: Let's sit down and talk about this. Let us explain. I would have gladly dropped the legal battle. Now I feel naïve for thinking that was ever likely to happen.
Instead, I have been knocking up against the courts, against my own profession of journalism, and against the bureaucracy. Now, nearly two years later, there must surely be some lesson to draw from all this.
Brian Keith Jones, formerly known as Brendon John Megson, was first jailed in 1981 for abducting and sexually abusing six boys. He shaved their heads and dressed them in women's clothing, which is why the media began to call him Mr Baldy – a name that has stuck. More recently he has tried to change his name to Shaun Paddick, but the Victorian Government (in a blaze of publicity) announced that this would be prevented. The name was obviously a nasty joke, a reference to his crimes. Perhaps from this we should understand that Jones is not repentant. There are, in fact, several reasons to think that this is the case.
Before he was paroled in 1989, Jones made some tapes for paedophile friends outside, who were awaiting his release. They were seized by the authorities. In them, Jones was planning his next offences: "I know what my idea would be, is getting a young ... woman who may have two little children or something like that, only real bubbies or something, and put her into slavery and make her watch as the children are brought up as our own."
He even wanted to use his accomplice's children: "I hope you don't mind, when I come home, and if Andrew wants me to, you'll let me play around with him and love him too." Sure enough, when he was released, Jones carried out his plans. This time his victims were two brothers, aged six and nine. He went back to jail in 1993, sentenced to fourteen years. With no parole, he was due for release in August 2005.
Aware of his impending release, the State Government had drafted a law specifically designed to allow serious sexual offenders to be monitored following their release. The Serious Sex Offenders Monitoring Act was known in government as the Mr Baldy Bill, but although it seemed to be part of the solution, as 2005 rolled around it presented the bureaucrats with a problem. If Jones was to be monitored long term, then this would have be included in his parole conditions – and the date for his release, unmonitored and without parole – was in early August. By mid-2005, there was a race on to get Jones paroled subject to supervision, and to find him somewhere to live – before his sentence expired.
In March, it was reported that a house identified for Jones by Corrections Victoria had been rejected after an "environmental scan" detected two young boys living next door. A spokeswoman for the Corrections Commissioner said this proved the system was working. "We don't see it as a stuff up at all, we see it as the opposite – the system working."
The next thing anyone heard was in early July, when it was reported that Jones had been paroled and was about to be released.
WE DIDN'T KNOW IT, BUT THE HOUSE they had chosen was just around the corner from us.
The house is one of those semi-detached pokey 1920s numbers so common in the inner suburbs – brown feature brick and creamy render. I used to walk past it every day. I even know its internal layout because once its neighbouring twin was available for rent and we checked it out. There is a pocket handkerchief front yard, a porch, a front door that opens directly on to a living room large enough for two lounge chairs and no more, then a corridor with a bedroom off to one side, the kitchen and bathroom at the back.
Nobody wants a paedophile for a neighbour. Who knows how many of us have just that, without knowing and without any media fuss? How many other threats are there to our children, undetected and unreported, in the average street? I don't like moral panic, and I don't like hysteria, but there was a particular reason why this house, so close to my dear children, was spectacularly unsuitable.
Every weekday morning, the walking bus for the primary school meets directly outside.
The walking bus is in itself a scheme born out of moral panic. Children are no longer allowed to walk to school by themselves because of all the fearsome things in the street – and yet they must walk, for fear that they will grow obese through too little exercise. Therefore, councils and schools set up walking buses, and parents like me volunteer to "drive" them on a roster system. Each morning at 8.30, the children gather outside the house that was chosen for the paedophile. My son, who is in the paedophile's target demographic, used to climb on the low brick fence in front of the house if I didn't stop him. So tiny is the distance from fence to house that he could almost knock on the door without leaving the sidewalk.
The children and the rostered parents gather, wait for about ten minutes, then set off for school. In the afternoon, the process is reversed and once again groups of up to a dozen primary school children linger for about a quarter of an hour within arm's reach of the door of that house.
Psychologists have told the Victorian Country Court that, when in jail, Jones refused to cooperate with counselling, or to discuss his childhood. Who knows what there was to be uncovered? Who knows what is in this man's mind? Is it even right to wonder? Certainly I do not pretend to understand. All the professionals who have assessed him have said that, given a chance, he will most probably reoffend. Nobody who knows him regards him as safe. The only clues to his mental state are claims by the court-appointed psychiatrists that media publicity causes him stress. He loses sleep, is frightened and angry, and has "diminished mood". Such feelings are likely to increase the chances of him reoffending, and so publicity is held to be against the public interest. It is said to be in the public interest to keep Mr Baldy's doings and whereabouts quiet.
Assuming the psychiatrists are right, I may well be part of the problem – and you too, for reading this.
But I keep going. Did the Government know about the walking bus? Did it try to find out? Did it knowingly place a paedophile in this house despite the fact that it was a meeting place for our children? These are the things I have been trying to find out.
I was working in Adelaide for the first two weeks of July 2005. The kids were at home with my husband, who was juggling madly to keep the household running. I arrived home, travel weary, on the evening of the fifteenth. My husband picked me up from the airport and, as he shouldered my bag, asked me if I remembered that Mr Baldy was to be released.
"Yeah. So?"
"What's the worst place they could put him if they were going to put him in our suburb?"
I looked at him with screwed-up face. Then he told me. Kid central, as we call it. The corner where the walking bus meets.
I didn't believe him. Then I felt sick.