Codey Herrmann was a neglected child who should have been removed, but nobody acted

The signs were there for years that Codey Herrmann was a broken child long before he killed Aiia Maarsawe but nobody wanted to take an Aboriginal child from his mother, writes Andrew Bolt.

Codey Herrmann’s lawyer still can’t figure out why he bashed, raped and murdered student Aiia Maasarwe.

“There is no explanation I can give you,” he told a Supreme Court judge in Melbourne this week.

No? Can’t explain why Herrmann told police he’d been angry “at life in general” and about how “everyone looked at me and treated me”?

Yet when we hear of his childhood, which of us doesn’t say ‘well, that figures’?

And for me, there’s this further question to the ideologues who rage about the wickedness of removing Aboriginal children from toxic homes, or the nastiness of introducing cashless welfare cards.

When will you drop your abstruse theories of “social justice” and look at the brutal reality of a Codey Herrmann?

Herrmann has pleaded guilty to murdering Maarsarwe last January and it was in his plea hearing about his punishment that we heard of his childhood.

Codey Herrmann arrives at the Supreme Court of Victoria. Picture: AAP

When Herrmann was only six months old, child protection authorities were warned that a drunk at his home had dropped a bottle of wine and baby Codey had drunk from it.

A baby helped himself to that wine? As if. Why wasn’t that baby removed?

When Herrmann was 12 months old, he’d been — say news reports — “effectively abandoned by his mother”, who’d had “substance abuse problems”.

So why wasn’t that baby adopted out to a loving family?

But the brutalisation of Codey Herrmann continued. By age three, child protection authorities had received “multiple notifications of drug and alcohol abuse, family violence and neglect” in his home. His teeth were rotten and his skin was bad.

Got any clues as to why he’d grown up angry at his treatment? Angry particularly with women?

I’m close to professionals who deal with parents who seem from another moral universe — a depraved one where children are treated with unbelievable cruelty and neglect.

Those professionals know it takes only a couple of years before a child is maimed forever.

Only rarely do the rest of us glimpse this subculture, usually when some horror, like the Daniel Valerio killing, briefly lifts a rock to show what slithers beneath.

So it appalls me to hear journalists and activists from nice homes and insulated universities push faddish campaigns to stop us from saving other children just like baby Codey.

Aiia Maasarwe was raped and murdered after getting of a tram in Bundoora.

It frightens me to hear some bright-voiced ABC reporter, for instance, back the Grandmothers Against Removals campaign to stop so many Aboriginal children being taken from dangerous parents.

It shocks me to hear a (now ex) Greens MP like Lidia Thorpe complain that “we still continue to see our children being ripped out their mothers’ arms”, as an ABC presenter clucks sympathetically.

Are these people mad or blind? Look at a Codey Herrmann.

Or check the two-year-old who was left in her Tennant Creek home, even after 52 child protection notifications about her and her siblings and was last year raped so badly that she was taken to hospital.

Could these “social justice” warriors at least listen to Western Australia’s Chief Justice, Wayne Martin: “There has been an over-reaction to the stolen generation, which has resulted in people being too willing to allow Aboriginal kids to remain in environments that they would not allow non-Aboriginal kids to remain in.”

But Codey Herrmann is also a warning to activists arguing another dangerously abstract cause.

I’m talking about the people kicking the Morrison government for expanding a trial of a debit welfare card which quarantines 80 per cent of the dole in a fund that can’t be used to withdraw cash, buy alcohol or gamble.

There’s even more push-back to a government plan to drug-test recipients.

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This was just a distraction by a government with a sinister agenda, raged one Sydney Morning Herald columnist: “Once you’ve made the drugs-n-dole bludgers link, you can go on to make all sorts of cuts to the welfare budget.”

But, again, just stare at the reality of Codey Hermann’s life.

We’re told he used to go on a spending spree every fortnight when his dole lobbed, buying cannabis and methamphetamine, which makes users aggressive.

For food, he got by on croissants and chocolate milk and whatever he could shoplift.

Let’s not be naive. Herrmann might have been picked up by drug tests, but it’s unlikely that a compulsory drug course would then have turned his life around.

But wouldn’t you rather that we’d given him that last chance before he raised his arm and broke Aiia Maasarwe’s skull?