Derryn Hinch is unlikely to remember this, but way back in the 1980s I had a long, long lunch with him and several other journalists. I was editor of a television guide in Melbourne and he was the “King” of talkback radio station 3AW.
My memory of the lunch was that good wine flowed for hours, and so did the opinions of Hinch. He talked, a lot. He argued and held forth. He had a journalist’s love of anecdote to prove a point and a radio presenter’s self regard. I don’t say that nastily. He was smart company, a big personality intensely interested in current events, who could puff himself up, but just as easily make a joke at his own expense.
Watching Hinch’s maiden speech to the Australian Senate this week, you couldn’t help but witness his irrepressible personality, and wonder whether the 72-year-old Bearded One might turn out to be a good representative after all, in the sense of being candid, principled, sceptical of spin and tremendously energetic (when not nodding off).
The crossbenchers who hold the balance of power in the Senate have their quixotic obsessions. Some like Pauline Hanson have ugly views on race and religion. Libertarian David Leyonhjelm is driven by ideology. Hinch says he’s apolitical – a conservative on law and order but all-but a socialist on hospitals and medicine. He says he’s going to listen and learn before making up his mind on legislation. Who knows? He just might end up an improbable voice of reason.
Except for one thing: his sex offender crusade, and his determination to yell “shame! shame!’ as he names offenders in parliament. All perfect for a tabloid tub thumper, but not for a politician who aims to be more than a headline grabber.
Hinch has been a big figure in Melbourne my whole life, his career a roller coaster of highs and lows, loves and dramas, all revolving around Hinch. All have been played out in public to the point where many people, many times, have rolled their eyes and wondered when he’ll disappear at last.
That he has turned up as a senator five years after a donated liver saved his life is astonishing. He says he is “gob smacked” to be a senator after more than half a century working as a journalist, a job where you can criticise politicians as much as you like without having the responsibility of making decisions yourself.
By his own admission, he’s been sacked 16 times. He’s been married five times, twice to Oscar-nominated actor Jacki Weaver. He’s been rich and he’s been poor. He’s been convicted of contempt of court and related offences multiples times over his “naming and shaming” sex offenders, and he’s been jailed twice, the last time for 50 days in 2014. The Human Headline is, let’s say, a character, and there’s room for characters in politics.
Listening to Hinch’s debut was like tuning in to one of his radio editorials, but instead of lasting for a few minutes it went on for 47, surely heaven for Hinch. His speech skidded from topic to topic, from having met every prime minister since Robert Menzies, to covering the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, to opposing compulsory voting, to free speech, to dying with dignity, to paedophiles travelling to Asia, to ridiculing calls to ban Muslim immigration, to supporting same sex marriage.
It was dizzying and entertaining, with Hinch full of confidence, his voice booming, his enthusiasm palpable. “I will try to be an unpolitical politician, a commonsense politician,” he said. “I will not be politically correct. That is why I say from the outset that I have hopes, high hopes, of achieving good things.”
And yet Hinch couldn’t help himself. His speech exposed the difference between a larger-than-life media commentator paid a lot of money to have provocative opinions, and a credible politician who does boring things like setting emotion aside to weigh up evidence and competing values. If he’s going to be more than another Senate oddball known for grabbing media attention but little else, he’ll get the difference.
Hinch has been snubbing his nose at court-ordered suppression orders on identifying sex offenders for decades and he is a campaigner for a public national register for offenders. There is no doubt he feels passionately about this issue and no doubt he has considerable public support. And he has courage, preferring to go to jail in 2014 for breaching a suppression order rather than pay a large fine. Now that he has parliamentary privilege, there’s no stopping him, and he named several convicted paedophiles, and vowed to name more.
At least three of the people he named are subject to suppression orders in Victoria. Two of them he named at a rally in 2008, leading to five months’ home detention for contempt of court (he would have gone to jail had he not been very ill at the time). How arrogant of him to name these men again just to make a point, knowing that if he did so outside parliament, he would have again broken the law.
“It has been speculated that I will use parliamentary privilege to name names under the protection of what is derided as ‘coward’s castle’, and I will,” he said in his speech. “But it will be a court of last resort. I will not be a ‘cowboy’. But, if it is necessary to protect a child’s wellbeing, then, damn right, I will name the human vermin.”
There was nothing “last resort” about his parliamentary stunt. It was a stunt. Even his arguments begin to wobble under scrutiny. His idea for a register is based on a US scheme that would allow the public access to a site that would include an offender’s name, photograph, current address and criminal history. Hinch says the public has a “right to know” such information.
Victoria’s police commissioner Graham Ashton told 3AW this week that he understood the sentiment around such calls but the expert advice he had received was that there was no evidence that it improved public safety. He’s right. Study after study has shown that public registers have no impact on recidivism and do little to prevent sexual violence. The risk of vigilantes harassing offenders who have served their sentences is obvious. The prospects for offenders to get a job and rehabilitate would plummet.
We already have sex offender registers in Australia, mostly for child abusers, but they can be accessed only by the police, not the public. Hinch says they are a PR joke, but the problems with them are not the ones he identifies. Ashton said that, in Victoria, there were now 6,000 people on the register, which requires a person to report to police and to provide up-to date-information including address, phone number, email, employment, social media use, interstate travel and even tattoos.
The intent of the register was worthwhile – to protect the public and to help police investigate heinous crimes against children. Ashton said the problem was that there were so many people on it, it was impossible for the police to monitor it properly. That’s the issue. There are far too many people on the register who pose little or no risk to the public and for whom constant monitoring is a waste of time and money.
A Victorian Law Reform Commission report a few years ago said that if we keep going the way we are, there will be 10,000 people on the register by 2020, and that’s just in Victoria (other states have similar schemes).
These are the unintended consequences of politicians being pressured by people like Hinch and the law and order crowd who lazily demonise judges and magistrates for being “soft” on crime. Criminal barrister and vice president of Liberty Victoria Michael Stanton supports the register, but says it has become unwieldy and unworkable.
Hinch’s insistence that judges have far too much discretion about who they put on the register is wrong – there is no discretion in the vast majority of cases, one exception being where it is a child who has committed the offence. The commission recommended that to make the system work to actually protect the public, the government needed to “strengthen the scheme by sharpening its focus”. In other words, give the judiciary some discretion and limit it to those who pose a continuing risk to children.
One example the commission gave of someone who should not be on the register was a 19-year-old soldier who had consensual sex with two teenage girls which would not have been illegal but for their age. The judge had no alternative but to put the man on the register for life, even though she said he posed “no risk to the sexual safety of the community”. One consequence of being on the register is that a working-with-children check would mean he could never hold down a job that involves children. He could never even volunteer to coach a children’s sporting team – for the rest of his life.
The register is far from the only check on sex offenders. Victoria, like other states, has laws under which offenders who have finished their sentence but who pose a serious risk to the community can be subject to significant supervision, including restricting where they can live, continuing detention if necessary, preventing them from going anywhere near schools and other places where children gather, and wearing ankle bracelets to keep track of their whereabouts.
As a journalist, I am sceptical of the large number of suppression orders issued in Australia, and will always argue that they should be kept to a minimum, with an open court system essential in a democracy. No doubt there are cases where suppression orders have been wrongly issued, yet in most cases they are put in place to protect the victim’s identity.
Hinch likes to portray a sex offender as a monster living across the road, but it’s not true. Most children are molested by family members or someone known to them. In some cases, a suppression order is issued before an offender is released to give them a chance at rehabilitation, to get a job, find somewhere to live, and get on with a lawful life. In many cases, they are issued temporarily so an accused person can get a fair trial, a fundamental tenet of our justice system.
In 2013, Hinch was found to have breached suppression orders by alluding to Bayley’s extensive criminal record before he had pleaded guilty to the murder of ABC employee Jill Meagher. He revealed on his website that Bayley was on parole and on bail for other matters. It was messy – other journalists breached the order inadvertently, too – and there is a real question about the usefulness of suppression orders in an internet age when Bayley’s crimes were all over the web.
And yet, as horrific as Bayley’s crime were, he was entitled to a fair trial without a jury being prejudiced by knowing his previous crimes. As it happened he pleaded guilty and the suppression orders were later lifted. Hinch was charged with breaching a suppression order regarding Bayley’s record, refused to pay a fine and went to jail for 50 days, declaring himself a scapegoat and a whipping boy.
Why? Bayley posed no threat to anyone at this point – he was in custody. Hinch wasn’t protecting anyone by outlining Bayley’s previous offences. In our system, even the worst criminals are entitled to a fair trial – without that, none of us are. These are principles Hinch dismisses as somehow tiresome and irrelevant.
Let’s take one more example. In his 2004 memoir, The Fall and Rise of Derryn Hinch: How I Hit the Wall and Didn’t Bleed, Hinch recounted that he had sex with a “stupendously beautiful” model he met at a boozy party in 1979. Hinch was then in his 30s and says he thought the woman was in her mid 20s. But she told him over dinner that she was a girl of 15. Hinch called it a “dreadful mistake” and said he never saw her again.
A few years ago, he claimed the woman had contacted him and told him she was actually 17 at the time, so above the age of consent. But let’s say she was 15 as Hinch believed for many years. Under current law, Hinch could have been charged with a serious crime. It would be up to him to prove that he had reasonable grounds to believe she was older. If he failed to do so, he could have gone to jail, and would certainly have been put on the sex offenders register.
If Hinch had his public register, his photograph, address and crime – with no mention of the circumstances – would have been available for any member of the public to see. His marvellous career would have been over. Trying to find another job would have been hard – he could never work around children. He couldn’t be a teacher, a tram driver, or even volunteer to coach a kids’ footy team.
Would that have been fair? Should we have labelled Hinch “vermin” and exposed his address so that parents could keep their children away from him? As simply as Hinch would like to portray these issues, they are not always easy. There are competing interests and principles. There are complexities and different paths to achieve what we want – a safer community.
Hinch will get away with shaming sex offenders in parliament because he can’t be held in contempt of court if he does so. But it would still be contemptible. For a person of considerable integrity, who could do good in his twilight career, it would be beneath him.
This article was amended on 16 September 2016 to reflect the fact that Derryn Hinch did not reveal the nature of Adrian Bayley’s previous crimes, but rather revealed that he had a criminal history
