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Newspaper Article
Extract From The Courier-Mail, Wednesday July14, 1999 (by Michael Ware)
Many people in politics - primarily in the Labor Party - moan long and loud whenever the much-maligned Heiner inquiry is mentioned.
Indeed, they squirm at the very utterance of its name and make a face as if to say: how could you even bring it up?
Why they do this, I don't know.
But their problem is that it does keep coming up: again and again and again.
There are several reasons for this, but one of them is that it's hard to find anyone who can get the story straight. So many people make so many mistakes when talking about the Heiner inquiry that the mistakes inevitably lead to more confusion, more argument.
And I don't know why because, at its heart, it's a very simple affair...
... What essentially is at issue here is whether - the circumstances surrounding the shredding of the Heiner evidence in 1990 were legal.
If they were, then it's time to forget the whole sordid tale. If they're not, then it's time to start locking some people up - from the bureaucrats to the politicians.
The trouble is, we just don't know which way to go. No one's ever got to the bottom of it. No one has ever, really, investigated it.
Yet there's a proliferation of people who will, quite erroneously, tell you differently. People ranging from colleagues of the Labor ministers under the gun for having been party to the decision to shred, to supposedly savvy media-types who say the shredding's been investigated to death.
It's been done, time and again, by a host of agencies, they say. The only tricky part with those sentiments is that they're not true.
Actually a man whose life has been embroiled in the affair since 1990, former union representative Kevin Lindeberg, is currently trying to bring Premier Peter Beattie to task over this very issue.
And he's gone to the Speaker of Parliament to stake his claim.
This latest mini-battle stems from Beattie's statement to Parliament listing nine or 10 bodies whom he said had made 'inquiries" into the shredding.
But of all the agencies mentioned - from police to Criminal Justice Commission to Auditor-General, among others, none of them had, at any given moment, all of the necessary ingredients to seek the truth at the shredding: the free rein, the power and the jurisdiction.
They've all been hamstrung.
If, in fact, the shredding had been properly investigated by anyone, surely it would have been discovered that the witness testimony that was destroyed had revealed the illegal handcuffing and drugging of child inmates.
I repeat, the illegal handcuffing of children.
However, this didn't come to light until The Courier-Mail unearthed it last year, sparking immediate outcry and creating a special area of hearings for the recently completed Forde inquiry.
But, strangely enough, one of the agencies we've been told that had made "inquiries'' into the shred-ding, the 1995 Senate Select Committee on Unresolved Whistle-blower Cases, was discreetly given rock-solid proof of the abuse.
Proof produced, no less, by the Labor state government itself.
Why? Who knows. But a docuument detailing the handcuffing was buried amidst a mass of material sent to the committee. If the committee had actually been empowered to evince the truth of the shredding, and the government wanted it found, wouldn't the heinous abuse have come out?
Equally if any of the agencies had really been able to look at the shredding to see if it had been legal, wouldn't they have stumbled upon it themselves?
Of those agencies who made inquiries, how many spoke to the Cabinet ministers who made the fateful decision to shred? None.
How many tried to find out what all the fuss had been about, by speaking to the staff? None. How many had even been to the John Oxley Centre? None. (Just for the record, The Courier-Mail did all these things.)
So, if someone tries to tell you that the Heiner issue or the shredding of the Heiner documents has been investigated, you can laugh them away ...
(Since this article was written we have discovered not just handcuffing, but rape, pack rape and other forms of abuse and maltreatment which placed the well-being and indeed the very lives of John Oxley residents at risk. The rest of the article above remains valid today -- regardless of what the Premier and the media say. Bruce Grundy).
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