The New South Wales government has offered an unreserved apology to the victims, survivors and families of historical gay hate crimes in the state. It's backed all 19 recommendations from a special commission of inquiry which examined unsolved deaths across four decades and exposed investigative shortcomings, and record-keeping failures.
Category
📺
TVTranscript
00:00The government has spoken of drawing a line in the sand today. This is their formal response
00:06to the recommendations, which came down back in December last year. And government representatives
00:11have just said that they can't undo the harm that has happened in past decades, but they
00:16can work towards making sure that nothing like the shortcomings exposed in this inquiry
00:21ever happen again. Now, this was looking at the period of 1970 to 2010, and it made 19
00:27recommendations, this inquiry. The government is now supporting all of them. The inquiry
00:31closely examined 34 deaths. Many of them were described as lonely and terrifying, and it
00:36really exposed investigative failures in the police response and various ways that these
00:42different people were let down by government institutions. Also explored the cultural issues
00:47around the time, issues of homophobia and transphobia and prejudice, not just in society
00:52generally but specifically in the New South Wales police force. Now, we heard from the
00:57police minister Yasmin Katli. She has just said that she wants people to hold her and
01:01the police force accountable so that all the recommendations are implemented fully. Some
01:05of them are already underway. Others are already completed, shorter items that might have been
01:10more simple to implement. In its response, the government has issued an unreserved apology,
01:15and it said that victims and the families of victims were fundamentally failed in these
01:20cases. We'll hear from Penny Sharp, who is a senior government minister in New South
01:24Wales. She spoke to us about the different groups who were affected by these crimes,
01:29but also the people who were involved in pushing for this inquiry to happen.
01:34First of all, I want to say to the victims and the survivors of this violence that it's
01:40taken too long to get here, but we are going to now turn the page on this. And the only
01:47reason we were able to do that was because of the work of, as I said, family, friends,
01:54community organisations, some very good journalists, and others who just refused to let this go.
02:01Justice John Sacker, who presided over this inquiry, he recommended that consideration
02:07be given to four fresh inquests in specific cases. There was also a recommendation for
02:12more ongoing training for New South Wales police. There was a suggestion that there
02:17should be a review of all unsolved homicides in the decades this inquiry was concerned
02:22about. It also recommended monitoring of DNA databases for any matches between the
02:27database and the inquiry's evidence. That really fed into one of the main themes, which
02:32was about the storage and retention of evidence and problems with record keeping. The inquiry
02:37heard about examples where entire investigative files were lost or misplaced. Evidence went
02:43missing. In some cases, murder weapons were misplaced. Crime scene photographs showed
02:48things that weren't reflected in the evidence that was retained. That was a really key theme.
02:53Also, one of the most interesting things was that a confidential volume of the recommendations
02:58has been handed to the police force and the Crime Commission to inform any current or
03:03future prosecutions. While many of these cases, the amount of time that's passed might make
03:09it seem as though it could be impossible to get some kind of justice, there are perhaps
03:13others in a different category where technological advancements, for example, and anything that
03:20this inquiry has uncovered might feed into new leads and perhaps resolutions.