Police cases’ disparate pricetags

By JACK WATERFORD
FIFTEEN years ago, Australian Federal Police officers arrived at a Canberra home to what they say was a violent argument between a woman and a 22-year-old man with whom she had been living for about a year.
The woman had two children, one about 13, the other about 14.
While the police officers were deciding what to do, they noticed that the younger girl was becoming quite agitated about discussion of the man being required to leave the house. They asked the man whether there was any sexual relationship between the girl and himself, and the man denied it.
A few days later, the man, a now well-known artist, left Canberra and went north back to his home on Badu Island in the Torres Strait.
Not long after, the girl was examined at the Child at Risk health unit at Canberra Hospital and found to be between 20 and 23 weeks pregnant.
After DNA samples were taken of the foetus, and of the man, now in Badu Island in the Torres Strait, a police officer began drafting charges against the man – of having sexual intercourse with a child aged between 10 and 16, and of incest – and put a request up AFP channels for proceedings to have him extradited from Queensland to the ACT to face the charges.
Her request was refused by her superiors.
Special agent Michelle Taylor was told to proceed by a first instance warrant and “I was advised that the warrant would only be executed if the defendant was in a nearby jurisdiction”. Someone said if the man came as far south as Brisbane, police management would approve an application to have the man arrested and extradited.
She was not keen to let the matter drop.
A year later, she asked about his whereabouts – he was still at Badu – and six months later, did so again, discovering he had shifted to Moa Island, also in the Torres Strait.
She again asked upstairs for an extradition warrant, but does not know what happened because, soon after, she left the AFP. The records show only that the file was sent, 10 months later, to gather dust at the AFP central registry. There, it languished for the next seven years.
Over this period, the ACT AFP made no contact with mother or daughters. But the man was becoming established in indigenous art circles, building a national and international reputation, and, increasingly travelling here and abroad to art workshops, teaching programmes and award ceremonies, often at Australian government expense.
In 2008, he applied to the Queensland police for a “blue card”, certifying that he had not been convicted of child sex offences, so that he could participate in workshops involving children. Queensland police routinely checked with other forces; this brought a dusty ACT file back to notice.
An ACT police officer rang the girl, then 24 (she is now 28), and asked her if she wanted to “continue” with her complaint. (In fact, she had made no complaint, or even, as such, implicated him, and may not even have known that a case against him had lain in suspense for 10 years.) But she now made a statement implicating him.
A year later, her older sister told police the man had also had intercourse with her; new charges were added.
Recently, he has been in the ACT Supreme Court arguing that the charges should be dropped because of the unconscionable delays between the time of the alleged offences and the bringing of charges.
He had a point, as Justice John Burns agreed, but not one that was good enough and a trial is yet to proceed – a reason he is not being named.
It is not a case showing AFP decision-making, or sense of priorities, in a favourable light. But it is worse when one contrasts this with an amazing (if unavailing) AFP zeal, and willingness to spend any sum, on a child-sex case during just the same period.
Could it be that politics plays a role in the way that police do their jobs, and organise their priorities? And, if so, who benefits? Who loses?
Julian Moti, born in Fiji and educated in Australia, where he became a lawyer and legal academic, was charged by police in Vanuatu in 1997 with having a sexual relationship with a 13-year-old girl.
At committal proceedings in Port Vila, the presiding magistrate threw out the charges. Some now alleged that the magistrate had been bribed by Moti. No evidence had been delivered for this, but, assuming it exists, it must be said that in any event, the case against Moti was not straightforward, and that there were suggestions of blackmail and extortion by members of the girl’s family prior to charges being laid.
David Marr, of The Sydney Morning Herald, reviewed prosecution material and says that it was based on “six disturbing statements” made by the girl over six months.
“All are in English, though it appears she only spoke French.
“None was in her own writing. None was sworn. The underlying allegation does not vary from statement to statement, but details are contradictory. Others appear fanciful.”
In any event, nothing further happened until 2005, when Moti began to become a political nuisance to Australian authorities, including the AFP, managing the Ramsi (or Regional Assistance Mission) intervention into the almost collapsed Solomon Islands state.
Alas, the naughty islanders elected just the people that Ramsi regarded as the least suitable for them, and, soon after, Moti, who had been advising Manasseh Sogavare, the new prime minister, was named the nation’s attorney-general.
The AFP suddenly took a keen interest in the idea that the old charges against Moti might be revived, under new Australian sex-tourism laws, by which Australians could be charged with sexual misdeeds against juveniles abroad.
AFP officers went to Vanuatu to take fresh statements from witnesses.
The Commonwealth DPP’s office was galvanised.
In scenes of high farce, Moti was arrested, at AFP request by PNG police while in transit in Papua New Guinea. He skipped bail, and with the apparent connivance of then prime minister Sir Michael Somare, was secretly flown back to the Solomons by the PNG Defence Force.
Australia’s foreign minister Alexander Downer was soon in heated exchanges with Vanuatu, PNG and the Solomons. He, and Australians, looked silly.
A year later, the Sogavare government in the Solomons fell – with some covert Australian help – and the new government, eager to be friends again, deported Moti back to Australia at the end of 2007. He was then charged in Queensland; but soon the Supreme Court threw out the case.
Later, the Queensland Court of Appeal reinstated the charges. The case went to the high court, which, in December 2009, ended the affair. It agreed with the Court of Appeal that the police were not bribing witnesses, but found Australian diplomatic connivance at an unlawful deportation from the Solomons had quite compromised the prosecution.
Was this a case fought for the vindication of the law and the honour of a 13-year-old, or so as to further Australia’s sovereign interests and to get a player from the scene? Did this properly engage the supposed independence of police and prosecution authorities – or did it test any perceptions of it to the limit?
I asked the national AFP public relations machinery (late last month) to explain the disparate resources and energy put into the cases. The AFP ducked all the wider questions, a national AFP spokesperson saying simply that “as the matter is currently subject to a judicial process, ACT policing is unable to comment”.
If the Moti case cost the AFP budget less than A$2 million, and the Commonwealth, all up, less than A$5 million, I would be very surprised. Two-there, three-back from Canberra to Thursday Island costs about A$3,000 – a sum, on a contracted duty to citizens of the ACT, that senior AFP officers felt unable to pay. Thank God – some might think – the victim was not so important that anyone significant might complain. – The Canberra Times