Migrant’s visa cancelled after sexual crimes against 12-year-old Hobart girl

A migrant living in Hobart will be forced to return home after sex crimes against a 12-year-old girl, who he claimed he believed was a married, adult sex worker.

A man will be forced to return home overseas after committing sex crimes against a 12-year-old girl he collected from Kmart New Town. Picture: Nikki Davis-Jones

A migrant living in Hobart will be forced to return home to India after committing sex crimes against a 12-year-old girl, who he claimed he believed was a married, 18-year-old sex worker.

In February last year, the now 33-year-old was sentenced in the Supreme Court of Tasmania to 10 months’ jail – with a non-parole period of six months.

He had pleaded guilty to six charges relating to sexual acts that he performed with the child on one night in April 2021, after meeting her on the dating app Grindr and picking her up at Kmart in New Town.

The man, whose name has been suppressed from publication, had his visa cancelled in August last year by a delegate for the federal Immigration Minister on the basis he did not meet the “character test” given his sexual offending.

During an Administrative Appeals Tribunal hearing held last week, the man said he first arrived in Hobart during 2014 to attend the University of Tasmania and had worked in Hobart in his uncle’s restaurant, as a milk truck driver, a taxi and Uber driver, a cleaner, and had voluntarily been helping in the community kitchens of Tasmania’s Sikh temples.

He said while working six days a week, he had occasionally been using Grindr for “hook-ups” and had never met anyone on it who was not at least 18 years old.

He said when he arrived about 2am to pick up the girl, she was talking to a man who she said was her husband, and told the man she worked as a “prostitute and I have another job”.

“That gave me confidence that she’s a prostitute and has a husband. I knew to be married you had to be 18,” the man told the tribunal.

“Unfortunately, this happened … I had no intention of harming a child. I was purely looking for an adult. There was no criminal intent.”

The man pleaded guilty to five counts of penetrative sexual abuse of a child or young person and one count of indecent assault, with the Supreme Court finding he had been reckless as to ascertaining the girl’s age.

Before the tribunal, a psychologist said he had assessed him as at low risk of reoffending.

The tribunal said it found it “very difficult to accept” the man didn’t apprehend the girl was not 18 when confronted with her naked in a lit bedroom, and found the seriousness of his offending to be “at the highest level” given the child’s age.

It said protection of the Australian community weighed heavily against the man, and that even though he had been assessed as low risk of reoffending, it was an unacceptable risk because of the nature of the crimes and his reckless conduct.

The tribunal affirmed the Minister’s decision to not revoke the man’s visa cancellation.

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