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House of Assembly - Fifty-Second Parliament, First Session (52-1)
2011-05-18 Daily Xml
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EASLING, MR T.

The Hon. M.J. ATKINSON (Croydon) (15:22): Yesterday, during my contribution to the debate that grievances be noted, I was referring to a parliamentary paper of November 2009, the Review of the Easling Trial. The author was Simon Stretton SC. Mr Stretton was then the crown solicitor and is now a judge of the District Court.

This is the report that the Easling partisans want to cover up; the report they dare not mention. This is the report that advertisement supplementary entrepreneur Graham Archer, former newspaper reporter and now Liberal Party staffer Hendrik Gout and the member for Davenport do not even attempt to refute.

I think many members of the parliamentary Liberal Party are puzzled and cautious about the member for Davenport's campaign on behalf of his constituent Tom Easling. I know they worry about its tone, its lack of balance and its lack of proportion. In 2009, the member for Davenport told parliament, apropos the Department for Families and Communities:

It is obvious to me that this department is lying. It is obvious to me that this department is involved in a cover-up, and I say this to the government: if you are too gutless now to implement an independent inquiry into this agency, which is lying to the members of parliament and lying to the public, then it is on your head...

Later on, he tells the house, 'They did Tom Easling over.' I think the public servants over in the Riverside Building, who make child protection their vocation and serve the public of South Australia with integrity and according to law, should fear the advent of a government in 2014 in which the member for Davenport is treasurer, or indeed has any role, and the advent of a premier who is a political debtor of the Evans clan and has given the member for Davenport leave to run the vindictive, untruthful and menacing campaign he has on the Easling matter. I returned to Stretton SC's report. At page 112 he writes:

In light of the strength of the evidence discussed in detail above, in my view it was entirely appropriate and the DPP was entirely correct to commence and pursue a prosecution in this matter.

A failure to prosecute in the face of eight separate complainants on the basis of the matters raised concerning the credibility of these 'street kids' would set a very dangerous precedent. The matters raised concerning credibility were legitimate but standard issues with a potential to affect the credit of any witness, however, were exactly the type of issue you might...expect to see with honest witnesses of the 'street kid' type that were genuine victims.

The credibility matters were for the most part legitimately relevant to credit, but did not necessarily mean that the allegations were not genuine. They were classically issues for a jury...To fail to prosecute because of these standard and expected 'street kid' credit issues would have been tantamount to a charter to abuse street kids in the future. The decision to prosecute was correct.

On the question of a boy being in Tom Easling's bed, I referred yesterday to documents that evidence that Tom Easling broke the fostering rule not to have foster children in his bed, but I neglected to add that Tom Easling himself told The Australian that he had had boys in his bed. The member for Davenport's indignation about this is, in truth, not that there are no documents showing that semi-naked boys were in Tom Easling's bed—there are such documents and they are available—but that there is not a document that shows that there was more than one semi-naked boy in Tom Easling's bed at the same time. It is on this basis that he has been calling for the minister's resignation. That is the member for Davenport's case at its highest.

I am all for the polite convention that once an accused person is acquitted he or she is entitled to the presumption of innocence. Tom Easling is entitled to the presumption of innocence having been acquitted by a jury on 18 counts, 12 by unanimous not guilty verdict and six by majority verdict. What I say is that a not guilty verdict is just that: it is not a verdict of innocent. It is a verdict that the prosecution did not prove its case beyond reasonable doubt. It sometimes happens that a criminal prosecution fails to prevail beyond reasonable doubt but that the same allegation prevails in a civil court on the balance of probabilities.

Mr Archer, Mr Gout and the member for Davenport prey on this legal principle not being widely known in society. It is appropriate that, once a not guilty verdict is given, the media, parliament and society should then apply the presumption of innocence. But Mr Archer, Mr Gout and the member for Davenport have not been applying the presumption of innocence as a shield for Mr Easling: they have been using it as a sword to assert that the not guilty verdict means that the investigation was crooked, the prosecution should not have been brought and the witnesses lied.

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