Honourable Speaker, I rise tonight to continue my contribution from last night regarding the Paul Reynolds child sexual abuse matter. It’s still the case that important questions about how matters relating to police officer Paul Reynolds were investigated or not satisfactorily investigated, and these have never been properly examined.
One of the biggest issues is why and how Paul Reynolds was given a full honours police funeral. Government ministers and police have repeatedly said they’ve apologised for giving Paul Reynolds, a police officer known to have sexually abused and exploited teenage boys for three decades a funeral with honours. But their determination to drop the matter and avoid the critical question about how it was allowed to happen in the first place makes their apologies seem like bad faith.
To set the record straight, there was nothing in the Tasmania Police Manual at the time that said the funeral had to go ahead. The manual then simply said: Subject to the consent of the next of kin or relatives, the commissioner may approve a police funeral for a deceased member. ‘May’, not ‘must’. It was the commissioner’s discretion.
The fact is a senior police officer suicided because he was confronted with the weight of evidence of child sexual abuse he had perpetrated, and in that knowledge the commissioner decided to mobilise the full police force to celebrate him. Which leads me to the fundamental point: there’s never been an explanation given for why former commissioner Darren Hine decided to give Paul Reynolds a full-honours funeral and glowing eulogy.
The commissioner did this despite knowing the extensive evidence Tasmania Police held about Paul Reynolds in relation to his 2018 abusing, and despite the commissioner himself personally being involved in handling prior allegations made against Reynolds 10 years earlier in 2008. Were the officers in Tasmania Police who knew about Reynolds’ sexual abuse opposed to the decision to give him a police funeral? Or did they give it their full blessing?
It’s a matter of public record that commissioner Hine’s decision caused much pain and uproar among some serving police officers and betrayed victim/survivors. The honouring of a man who was objectively dishonourable also, by association, tarnished the reputation of all police officers in Tasmania and that is shameful. It was a deeply problematic decision by the commissioner. We still don’t know how it could have happened, which is a significant reason for why it deserves proper examination.
There are also questions about whether the personal relationships that existed between Paul Reynolds and senior members of the Tasmanian government and senior Tasmania Police influenced their decision-making or actions on matters before his death and surrounding his funeral.
Those questions also go to significant matters that were not able to be covered by the Weiss review including:
- the inappropriate way concerns about Reynolds’ sexual abuse of young people were handled internally within Tasmania Police in 2008;
- the circumstances around Reynolds’ so-called self demotion to a lower position;
- Reynolds’ connections to criminal associates and allegations he shared police information with them, which were highlighted in the coroner’s report into his death; and
- why the police Professional Standards investigation into Reynolds was dropped after his death.
Both the coroner’s report and the Tasmanian commission of inquiry stated they did not have the jurisdiction to fully examine these matters. That is exactly why the Greens called for an independent investigation into these matters by the Weiss review, and it’s why we remain troubled today that the review was not given the scope and powers to adequately address those matters and why the government refused to refer outstanding matters from the review for further investigation.
Here we are today, with a podcast seeking to answer questions because the government has refused to do it, and there’s some déjà vu to that, because it was Camille Bianchi’s brilliant work on The Nurse podcast that shone a spotlight on the James Geoffrey Griffin matter and ultimately led to the commission of inquiry.
Five years on and here we begin again. Jay Walkerden is doing a fantastic work on Badge of Betrayal and the people speaking to him are amazing and brave; but they’ve been forced to do this because the government has failed to do its job to properly investigate decisions made at the highest level of Tasmania Police and government about the Paul Reynolds matter.
I can’t explain why the government has been so reluctant to do this in the past, but I implore them to rethink their position now.
