Sex offender Nicolaas Ockert Bester loses appeal against sentence

AN unrepentant sex offender who bragged about his crime on Facebook has lost his appeal against a jail sentence for his comments.

Supreme Court building, Hobart.

AN unrepentant sex offender who bragged about his crime on Facebook has lost his appeal against a jail sentence for his comments.

Nicolaas Ockert Bester, 63, appeared in the Supreme Court in Hobart to appeal against a four-month jail sentence for producing child exploitation material.

In the first case of its type in Tasmania, Bester was charged after the Mercury revealed he had boasted in a Facebook thread in March last year that his crimes were “awesome” and went into detail about his offending.

Among his comments were boasts and taunts against a Facebook user who recognised him as a sex offender.

“Zip up your testicles in the feminist handbag,” he wrote. “Judging from the emails and tweets I’ve received, the majority of men in Australia envy me. I was 59. She was 15.”

The former head of science at a Hobart girls school was jailed in 2011 for maintaining a sexual relationship with a person under the age of 17 and possessing child exploitation material over multiple offences he committed on a student in his care.

Chief Justice Blow said the current case was unusual and noted the comments had caused additional trauma to Bester’s victim.

“This is a particularly bad example of the crime because the offensive material was created by means of the applicant writing on another person’s Facebook page; the material concerned a real person; that individual was vulnerable as a result of sexual abuse as a 15-year-old and pre-existing mental health problems; and the offensive material came to her attention, exacerbated her mental health problems, and hindered her recovery,” he said in his decision.

“A number of common mitigating factors were absent in this case. The applicant was not a youthful offender. He was not a person of low intelligence. He was not a first offender.”

He dismissed the appeal, saying the sentence was not excessive and ordered Bester to serve the four-month jail term.