Buried in the labyrinth - Page 4
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 16: Unintended Consequences
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Margaret Simons
THE NEXT DAY, I MET MY BARRISTER in time for a coffee before the start of the hearing. I told her about The Age and its unwillingness to check its facts. She smiled a half-smile of no surprise. The media, she told me were like a stampede. Sometimes they could clear the way for you, but once you set it off you never knew where it would end up.
That stampede was waiting for me on the steps of the court. My barrister was filmed walking in, then asked to go back and do it again. I was asked whether it was a cover-up. The producer of talkback host Neil Mitchell's program rang me and I was interviewed live on air. Mitchell had the Leader of the Opposition sitting in the studio. He got a free kick: he said he condemned the Government, and supported Ms Simons and the people of Flemington. Of course he did.
I told my barrister, who rolled her eyes. "That will help," she said. "Not."
We took our seats. The Department of Justice's Freedom of Information officer was there, smiling and bobbing at me. Two officers of the Department gave evidence. The first was a small, middle-aged woman with a husky voice and an air of great sincerity. She was like a school teacher – weathered by the realities of the job. I liked her immediately. She answered my barrister's questions frankly. She agreed that it would have been relevant to know that the walking bus met outside, and that children lived next door, but she also said that too much emphasis was placed, by the media, on where offenders were located, when there were other factors – the monitoring and other security systems – that should be taken into account.
Then her boss was on – the Deputy Commissioner of Corrections Victoria, Paul Delphine. This was the man who had overseen the "environmental scans". He was a thin, long-nosed man who gave the air of being affronted by the cross-examination process. Had he been aware, my barrister asked, that the walking bus met outside the subject house? He replied that he hadn't known this until he read my statement. Had he been aware that children lived next door? Not until he read my statement.
They hadn't known. Nor, it emerged, had they checked with police, or the council, or local schools, or neighbours.
I had part of the answer I was seeking, but then my barrister was stopped from asking more questions, since it was clear that the stuff the Department was trying to suppress was coming out in any case.
The Department's lawyer asked Delphine if he was confident that the environmental checks had been "rigorous and professional". "Yes," he said. "They had been."
"How do they square those statements?" I asked my lawyer. She shrugged and smiled her smile.
I gave evidence. A statement from another of the parents – the coordinator of the walking bus program – was accepted into evidence, and then it was over. Judge Davis, a small dark woman who never smiled and presided with perfect fairness, would deliver her decision in due course. I went home and got on with my work and my life, and waited some more.
THE JUDGMENT CAME DOWN ON OCTOBER 19, 2006. I had lost. Justice Davis said the public interest in the effective operation of the parole system, including public servants being willing to give full and frank reports to the Parole Board, outweighed my "private interest in examining the process by which the property at 137 Kent Street came to be selected in a particular instance".
Appeals could only be on legal grounds, and Justice Davis's judgment was watertight. It was also the case, I was told, that a different, less conservative judge might well have come to a different conclusion. It was time to give up.
The parents involved in the walking bus went online and read the judgment, and puzzled over the reasoning, but life was moving on. The house was occupied again – by a mother with children. Our children were getting older. I had moved house, and no longer passed by Kent Street every day. There was every reason to drop it.
But I was hearing things. I got an anonymous telephone call urging me to appeal. I heard through contacts of contacts that the Department had been traumatised by the case, and by the publicity.
Finally, wanting to write this piece, I decided to try once again for dialogue. On January 23 this year, I rang Ingrid Svendsen to find she had gone and I was dealing with a new public relations person, Kate McGrath. I told her I was writing about the case. Would it be possible, I asked, to talk? Would it be possible for them to tell their side of the story – the difficulties of the job. I was after understanding, I said. A reflective essay – not a hatchet job. Could we talk?
She said she would find out. Two days later, she got back. They would not meet me, but if I put in written questions they would try to answer them. I sent an email. I wrote that I hoped for dialogue, not confrontation. "I am hoping we can move past this and towards a position of mutual understanding, if not agreement. I hope this is not too ambitious," I wrote. I asked for information on the difficulties of the job – the thankless task of finding homes for parolees. I asked them to help me reconcile the fact that they had not known about the walking bus, and the claim that their checks had been rigorous and professional. I asked whether there had been any reviews of the methods and procedures as a result of the Jones case. Finally, I asked whether, during the processing of my Freedom of Information request, they had ever considered negotiating or trying to satisfy my concerns. I said: "My impression of the Department through this affair has been that it ‘bolted down the hatches' and adopted a combative and defensive posture. I may be wrong about this, but that is how it looked from the outside ... How did it look from the Department's point of view?"
I waited. The answers, I was told, were being drafted. On Wednesday, February 7, I was promised something that day. Thursday dawned with nothing. I was told the answers had to be "signed off" by the Minister, who was busy. Then I was told he had signed off, but they had to go to the media unit. In the meantime, one answer came back – concerning the handling of the Freedom of Information request. It was a bloodless bureaucratic recounting. It told me how many requests the department received and how many were satisfied. It reminded me, as if I didn't know, that I had lost the VCAT appeal. Finally, it said that Freedom of Information applicants were "encouraged to discuss" their requests with FoI officers, but that they could not negotiate. I fired back a question. At what stage would the Department say I had been encouraged to discuss my request? I never got a reply.
Finally, in the last minutes of the working day of Friday, February 9, I got a telephone call. There would be no response. A decision had been made to give me nothing.
"Why?" I wailed.
The spin doctor was apologetic. It wasn't her fault. "What is going on?" I asked. "I can't say anything," she said.
BY THE TIME THIS IS PUBLISHED, IT WILL BE ABOUT TWO YEARS since the Victorian Government sent Brian Keith Jones to live on our street.
What do I know now about how this happened? Perhaps somewhere there is a public servant in trouble because they didn't do the checks adequately, or maybe it is their boss who is in trouble because the procedures for the checks were poor. Or maybe nobody is in trouble because, despite everything, the Department insists that the environmental checks were thorough and rigorous. Perhaps that means the same thing could happen again.
Brian Keith Jones is back in jail. One night at Ararat, he broke the conditions of his supervision order by going for a walk by himself. That gave them the reason they needed to put him back behind bars. That unsupervised walk could have been in our street, among children he might have groomed from his front porch. The media prevented this, yet who can deny that the media – including me – are also part of the problem?
What are we left with? A stack of legal papers, a tribunal judgment, a small pile of newspaper clippings, a hole in the bank account and two children who are still growing and, so far as any parent can ever know, relatively safe.
I think of Jones sometimes and wonder if he thinks of me. He will probably know my name. Even if they didn't let him read the papers, I know he was consulted about my Freedom of Information request, and opposed me being given any information. This was one of the things weighed in the balance.
The media is like a stampede, and I suppose to him and to the Government I must seem like just one more out-of-control, rampaging heifer, trampling down careful constructions. I must have made their job so much more difficult.
I find Brian Keith Jones' mind impenetrable to my imaginings. This is also true of the collective mind of government.
Two years on, with the rhythms of suburban life all around me, I don't know how to feel.
The children still talk sometimes about the bad man who came to live in that house. They ask us where he is now, and we tell them he is in jail and can't hurt them. Sometimes they ask why he was sent to live amongst us, and these days I say that a dreadful mistake was made, but it has been put right. I cannot tell them that anyone is sorry. ♦