Derryn Hinch - inside my private jail time

HOW bad could it be merely being locked up for a few months in your own apartment? I suggest you try if for a week. Let alone 153 days.

Hinch

THE biggest slap in my five months of house arrest came not at the start when the magistrate said he wanted to make it "as much like jail" as he could.

It came only days from the end, at the hands of an elderly hospital volunteer, on one of my rare excursions into the real world.

As I walked into the foyer of the Austin Hospital for a check-up to see how my newly transplanted liver was behaving, the beaming, bespectacled old-timer asked how I was doing.

I said: "I feel great. Only 12 more days and I'm out of jail." His mocking, condescending reply:  "You weren't in jail." I felt like saying: "You try it, sunshine."

But I expect a lot of people shared his view. How bad could it be merely being locked up for a few months in your own apartment?

If you feel that way I suggest you try if for a week. Let alone 153 days. Which is more than 3500 hours. Nearly 250,000 minutes. More than 13 million seconds.

But who's counting?

As everybody who was not locked up told me: "Don't worry, it will go quickly."

It didn't. The waking hours in each day did, the months did not. They dragged. The only time I felt encouraged was when they put a countdown clock on my website and I could see the last weeks ticking away. But the cumbersome electronic ankle bracelet was a constant bedtime reminder when it bit into a scrawny ankle.

And if you still think it was a holiday at home, just consider not being able to earn a living for nearly half a year. Not being able to go to the supermarket or step on the street without permission for a medical appointment.

Not being allowed to use the internet, send emails, use Twitter or Facebook.

I wasn't even allowed to advertise my Human Headlines book on 3AW in the lead-up to Father's Day - even though it had been written and printed long before my sentencing.

Hinch

Hinch in his apartment after his gag order ended. Picture: 3aw.com.au

The magistrate, Charles Rozencwajg, cleverly ordered restrictions that turned me into a non-person. On my brief, sanctioned, morning walks around the apartment block courtyard I felt like Rudolf Hess, the last man in Spandau Prison.

There were many other reminders: like a surprise visit from Department of Corrections staff at 9.15 one night for an unscheduled breath test. Unless your name was George Best I'd be surprised if anybody would blow over 0.00 within weeks of having a liver transplant. I didn't.

Don't get me wrong when I point out these restrictions. It was meant to be like jail. I broke the law. I was guilty of breaching court suppression orders concerning two of this country's worst serial sex offenders against children at a Name Them and Shame Them public rally on the steps of Parliament House.

And I had "priors". I had been to jail in the 1980s for naming that notorious Melbourne paedophile priest Michael Glennon.

The fact that it was a bad law doesn't carry much weight in the confines of a courtroom.

What frustrated me most during my isolation - and that's why the magistrate made the punishment fit the crime - was being gagged. Especially when things were being said or written about me that were not true.

Hinch

Hinch prepares to return to the airwaves. Picture: 3aw.com.au

It started in the courtroom during Mr Rozencwajg's own judgment. He made me sound like a self-serving hypocrite. He said from the bench: "It was on the basis of your medical condition, that you asked I impose a form of a suspended sentence of imprisonment."

That wasn't true. I did not ask. I know exactly what I said because at a previous hearing I actually handed a copy of my pre-sentencing comments to the magistrate and the prosecutors. I was specific. I stressed: "Do the crime, do the time."

I could not accept a suspended sentence because I have said so many times that a suspended sentence is no sentence at all. All a person with a suspended sentence has to do is behave like every other law-abiding citizen for a certain length of time.

To have that public stance and then ask for a Get Out of Jail Free card for myself would shriek of hypocrisy.

Another time I would have liked to speak out was when Herald Sun columnist Steve Price suggested I didn't deserve a donated organ for liver cancer because of my past drinking. He conveniently omitted that cancerous tumours, rather than cirrhosis, had given me a death sentence.

I guess what niggled me most about the column was the last paragraph.

In a sanctimonious line, which he repeated on Channel 10's 7pm Project, Price said: "Good luck, Derryn, and for God's sake keep off the grog."

That, aimed at an atheist who had stopped drinking five years earlier and had never had a .05 conviction. Unlike Price.

And had I been allowed on Twitter during the gay marriage debate at the ALP conference, I would have taken aim at another News Limited columnist, Andrew Bolt, and his dire "where will this all lead to?" line of opposing argument. My tweet would have said something like: "Yep, Andrew. They let the blacks ride up the front of the bus and now one's in the White House."

One of the ironies of being gagged at this time was watching, mute, as the same Department of Justice that took me to court for breaching suppression orders over paedophiles was itself in court trying to get a notorious child abuser's suppression order lifted.

So how did a silenced man spend the five months?

Hinch

Hinch relaxes on the balcony of his Melbourne apartment. Picture: 3aw.com.au

I had heaps of books to read and DVDs to watch and didn't read or see hardly any of them. I did watch Killing Time, based on the rise and fall of coke-head lawyer Andrew Fraser.

It's one of the best local series for yonks. David Wenham is brilliant and a free-to-air network should run it next year. I watched a lot of TV news and discovered how much repetitive rubbish comes out of the mouths of the leaders of both parties.

I wrote about 100,000 words of a new book with the tentative sub-title A tale of life, death, hope and house arrest and I reverted to an old habit of cooking Chinese stir fries.

I had a daily love-hate relationship with the exercise treadmill. It got me out of the apartment for an hour and, after five months, I'm doing 2km in 20 minutes at 5.5km/h. A big improvement on the day I went to court to be sentenced and sat there with miracle medical man Bob Jones taking my pulse as I struggled to breathe.

I look at the front page pic from the Herald Sun from that time in which I look deader than Mao Tse Tung and think of how lucky I am.

So lucky that somebody's family, in their grief, agreed to let their loved one be an organ donor. And lucky we have men like Jones and his team at the Austin Liver Transplant Unit to give new life to hundreds like me. I also think of people who were not so lucky.

We're only a couple of days away from Christmas - a Christmas, that six months ago I didn't think I'd be alive to celebrate. I didn't fear death at all but am glad I am still here to cherish this Christmas and cherish Chanel, who was thrust into private and public roles she never expected.

It sounds trite to say it, but live every day as if it were your last because it could be. I know. I came close. I still have a lot to do in the bonus years I have left. Some causes to fight.

My dear old grandmother who lived to 96 once told me: "It's not what happens to you in life that matters. It's how you handle it."

Nanna, I hope, as you used to say, I'm doing you proud.

Derryn Hinch and wife Chanel

Derryn Hinch and his wife, Chanel, celebrate his release from home detention at Riva Restaurant.

READ THE FULL RADIO TRANSCRIPT BELOW, as posted Hinch's 3AW.com.au blog

"As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted...

It's great to be back here with a brand new website. Great to be back on 3AW. It is even better to be alive. Thanks to an organ donor and his family I have a new liver. And thanks to Bob Jones and his team I have a new life.

Five months under house arrest. That's 153 days. That's more than 3600 hours or actually more than 13 million seconds.

What was it like? I handled it. Didn't go stir crazy. Didn't get bored. Got used to the rules after being reprimanded in the first weeks for being 28 seconds late back from the exercise yard.

And for those of you who think: 'Well, it wasn't really jail, was it?' Just imagine having somebody knock on your door at 9.15pm for a random breath test. And having to seek permission to go to the doctor or dentist – the only excuses permitted for me to leave my home. And wearing a cumbersome ankle bracelet from July 21 until it was cut off my leg yesterday.

They call it home detention, which sounds like being kept in after school. But it was house arrest. I was banned from sending emails, from giving interviews, from broadcasting. Banned from earning a living. I was made a non-person.

Magistrate Charles Rozencwajg said he wanted to make it as much like jail as he could. And he did. I was even banned from using Facebook which I have since discovered has more than 100,000 names from people supporting my position over the suppression of the names of serial rapists and pedophiles.

And that's what this was all about. It is weird, even ironic, that while I was locked up, so much was happening on this issue.

I guess if my name were Senator Derryn Hinch I would not have been convicted, not have been jailed and not spent five months of my life locked up under house arrest. While I was gagged, Senator Nick Xenaphon named a Catholic priest who had allegedly raped another Catholic priest. But Xenaphon spoke under parliamentary privilege so he was protected from any legal action.

Xenaphon said he felt 'duty bound' to name the priest.  The people in that parish, he said 'had a right to know'. Sound familiar?

My wife Chanel, who has been amazing through all this ill-health and house arrest, echoed the Senator Hinch line and said 'it highlights the ludicrousness of the law currently in place in Victoria'. And she's right. It is ludicrous.

To make it crazier, as I reached the half-way mark of my incarceration, the same Justice Department which charged me and had me muzzled for so long, they went into court to try to have  a suppression order lifted on one of Australia's worst pedophiles. Go figure.

David Grace QC said the man had been allowed to make unsupervised visits in Ballarat and to Melbourne even though he was still regarded as an unacceptable risk to the community. The lawyer said people had a right to know this serial offender was quote 'in their midst'. Hello? What have I been on about all this time?

And, in West Australia, the Lower House has just passed a bill authorising the setting up of a public register for sex offenders. Something that we must have here. Something that is in operation, without fear of vigilante attacks, in the United States and Britain.

In my weekly sessions with case managers from the Department of Corrections  they did their job and tried to get me to pledge that I would never do such a thing again. I pointed out, with respect, if seven High Court Judges, and other judges from the Supreme Court and Magistrates' Court hadn't convinced me that what I did was wrong then they didn’t have much of a show.

The scandalous facts are these: Under the new law brought in in 2009, which is worse than the one under which I was convicted, more and more of the worst sex offenders in history are anonymously out in your communities. It is called the Serious Sex Offenders Monitoring Act. And even though it only applies to men who are likely to re-offend it is now hard for the media to even report such cases. Often, they are not even registered on the daily court lists. Shades of a dictatorship. The courts are saying that you, the mothers and fathers of young children, are not allowed to know why they are in court, who these men are or where they live or what they look like.

In the first 18 months after the new law came in, in late 2009, the County Court put 30 men under supervision orders. Do you know how many of them had their names suppressed? 28. They virtually rubber stamped them.

There are dozens of such men who have been released back into the Victorian community in recent years. Dozens more rapists and pedophiles in jail now and soon due for parole will benefit from such anonymity. I believe these men have no right to be able to go about their foul business under a cloak of court-sanctioned secrecy. They must be named. The campaign cannot end. Too many children are at risk. And, if I put myself at risk again, well, that's life.

These men all move anonymously amongst you. Their identities protected. By the courts. A protection not given to murderers or swindlers. Or me. And these cunning predators use their anonymity as a weapon.

One judge talked about the 'emotional and psychological effect on the respondent if material is published'. What about the victims – and future victims? What about the emotional and psychological effects on them?

I believe, that whenever released on parole they must be on such a short leash they have little opportunity to attack again. You not only deserve, you should demand, that such serial sex offenders be identified. The fight must go on.

As I walked, or shuffled, into court to be sentenced on July 21, only two weeks after having a liver transplant, I was fighting for breath and couldn't say much. [I correctly suspected I’d be banned from talking to the media on the courthouse steps after sentencing.]  I did manage to say: 'This is a bad law. It will change. May not be in my lifetime but it will happen'.

With my new liver I am now confident I will still be around when this mad, bad, dangerous law is dust binned.

And if by giving up five months of my new life, five months of my freedom, if that helps change a bad law and saves the innocence of even one child … then, has it been worth it?

My bloody oath it has. And if necessary, if an obscenely bad law does not change, I would do it again."