Ready or not, it's time for answers

OVER the past two months, Opposition leader Kevin Rudd complained that the Coalition was afraid of calling an election.

Labor, he bragged, was ready to roll. On Sunday, Prime Minister John Howard called that election. On Monday, Rudd said he wasn't ready to discuss the ALP's tax policy. Now Rudd is dancing around the question of a debate. He's ready for three, he says, but not the one the Coalition wants this Sunday. How long does it take for Rudd to prepare for anything? It has now been revealed that Queensland trade union representatives discussed Rudd in connection with the long-running Heiner Affair child sex abuse cover-up and document shredding scandal in the early 90s. In an interview with The Australian, Peter Coyne, the former manager of the John Oxley Youth Centre being investigated by retired magistrate Noel Heiner, before the Goss government shut down the inquiry and ordered the obliteration of its materials, said "the question of who was behind the shredding was raised" during a meeting with his union representatives Kevin Lindeberg and Des O'Neill, and while Lindeberg named another highly political public servant, "Kevin Rudd's name was raised, but only in the sense that Des believed he was ruining the public service." Coyne's remarks were in an e-mail sent to whistleblower Kevin Lindeberg by one of the newspaper's reporters but the newspaper has yet to tell readers that concerns about Rudd, the former chief of staff to Queensland premier Wayne Goss, and this affair were linked over a decade ago. There is a growing list of people who believe that the Heiner Affair is crying out for a thorough investigation and if the man who insists he is ready to be the next prime minister had any association with this awful chapter in Australian legal history, he must reveal what he knew of the illegal document shredding and cover-up of abuses. When this column asked him about the matter, he replied through his spin doctor Walt Secord, there have already been many investigations. "In particular," he said, "there was a special commission of inquiry chaired by former Queensland governor Leneen Forde. If there is any new evidence arising in relation to these matters, then of course there may be grounds for further investigation and inquiry. This includes any further investigation into the initial allegations, which in all circumstances ought to be treated with the utmost seriousness and diligence." There have been inquiries but not one has ever been permitted to examine all the facts. That Queensland police are only now, after 19 years, investigating the rape of an Aboriginal girl who was 14 at the time she was assaulted, must destroy any claim of any prior complete investigation. Even the more comprehensive inquiries, the Bishop inquiry and the Morris inquiry, had their access to files restricted by Labor but on the narrow evidence they gleaned were able to determine that the matter needed a thorough investigation by an independent special prosecutor. Tony Fitzgerald, whose inquiry into corruption ended the Bejlke-Petersen era, said his task was initially triggered by a series of articles on vice and police inactivity published by The Courier Mail, followed by an ABC program which raised the possibility the police force was lying, incompetent or both. In his report, Morris said his limited inquiries found it was open to conclude that at least five breaches of the criminal code occurred in relation to the destruction of the Heiner documents, that official misconduct occurred on numerous occasions and that Peter Coyne, the former manager of the John Oxley Youth Centre, at the centre of Heiner inquiry, received an illegal payment of thousands of dollars from the Goss government. That payment was covered by a February, 1991, deed of settlement in which Coyne swore to keep silent about events at the youth centre. Because all material generated by Heiner was illegally shredded, every second of some 30 hours of taped evidence from a wide variety of witnesses on any matter that concerned them at the centre, every folio, every document, much has been irretrievably lost though it was known they were needed as evidence. But the departmental records are still there, many unexamined, including details of Coyne's payments, and union material relating to claims he and other workers had foreshadowed against the Goss government. The shredding denied them their rights, including, as it happens, Coyne's. The most rancorous opposition to a thorough inquiry has come from The Australian newspaper, which has published more than 17,000 words in the past six weeks to support its claim that this gross example of criminal maladministration and injustice is nothing more than a "cock-up". Whatever opposition has been voiced by Coyne and other workers who knew about the statutory rape at the time and dismally failed in their duty of care is inconsequential. Rudd has used his experience with the Goss government to bolster his credentials to govern the nation, but that government believed it was not subject to the same laws as everybody else. It was only interested in itself, and in the Graham Richardson "whatever-it-takes" school of politics which it embraced in this illegal cover up. One poignant reminder of the cold and callous culture protected by such that approach is reflected in a memo about the rape victim to the Director General of Family Services. It reads: "Mr Coyne also advised that there was very little chance of the girl becoming pregnant. The paediatrician had advised that she had started her period immediately after the incident and it was very unlikely that she would fall pregnant." Australia needs to know why the Goss government, incorporating the current Opposition leader, acted as it did, before it votes on November 24. And for the sake of justice, needs to know why this matter remains unresolved.