A Human Deadline by Derryn Hinch

Author:Derryn Hinch [Hinch,Derryn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Autobiography
ISBN: 9781742982519
Publisher: Cocoon Lodge
Published: 2012-10-30T16:00:00+00:00

Xenophon also criticised my sentence and called for the Victorian law to be changed. (On the day in question news.com.au sought permission from the Attorney-General to interview me but a spokesperson for the Victorian Attorney-General said I could not be spoken to and another for the Melbourne Magistrates’ Court said this would not change unless a legal challenge was mounted to the existing court order banning me from speaking publicly.)

The irony was not lost on this incarcerated campaigner when, as I reached the halfway mark of home detention, the same Justice Department that prosecuted me for revealing suppressed names went to the Supreme Court to try to get a suppression order lifted on one of Australia’s worst paedophiles. The Department’s QC, David Grace, could have been singing from my songbook as he urged County Court Judge Wendy Wilmoth to lift a ban on the identity of the serial child rapist being revealed. He said the prisoner had been making regular sanctioned outings to Ballarat for socialising and shopping—and unaccompanied visits to friends in Melbourne—even though he was still regarded as an unacceptable risk to the community and had recently had his supervision order extended by fifteen years because the court deemed he was still a risk to children. Grace rightly argued that the communities the man visited should know he was ‘in their midst’. Hello? What have I been on about all this time? The application was denied.

I am proud to have been involved in the scrapping or changing of some other laws … even though it took a long time.

In 1979 I started campaigning against a law which, incongruously in a democracy, banned political comment on radio and television during the final 48 hours before state and federal elections: the so-called ‘election blackout’ law. I defied that law for four years and it was scrapped by the new Hawke government in 1983.

In 1982 I presented the federal government in Canberra with a petition signed by 30,000 people protesting against the export of live sheep to the Middle East and horses to Japan for slaughter overseas. That issue was back on the national agenda in 2011 and 2012.

In 1986 I campaigned against a Victorian law that was based on a more than 300-year-old English law that found a man could not be charged with rape if the victim was his wife. In the case that sparked my protest, the man wasn’t even charged with assaulting his estranged wife. I didn’t name the victim nor her attacker (because identifying him would identify her) even though she had phoned me asking for help. I didn’t even name the court. But I did name the judge, partly because I thought his own wife should know about his medieval thinking. The judge had suppressed all details of ‘matters before the court’. I argued (unsuccessfully) that his name was not ‘before the court’. He was the court. I was fined $15,000 and sentenced to 250 hours of community service. That disgraceful archaic law has now gone.

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