Approche production.

In the last episode of this podcast, you heard the account of a former detainee of the Ashley Youth Detention Center.

He was a child when he first went into remand before he'd been convicted of any crime, before he had any real power to protect himself.

In that interview, he spoke carefully about things that happened to him inside that center, about the things he says he suffered and the things he says he watched happen to others.

Those allegations were later the subject of a civil proceeding.

The state accepted liability in a compensation process.

The Ashley Youth Detention Center is the facility the government, as previously said, would be closed.

That closure has still not happened.

The center remains very much open.

This government remains committed to closing the Ashley Youth Detention Center as soon as possible, as confirmed and reaffirmed by the Commission of Inquiry.

I note that the opposition during the election committed to closing the Ashley Youthed Detention Center sooner than that, which means sooner than possible.

And we know that the position of.

The Greens and others has been for immediate immediate closure.

Now, everyone here would agree that the most important thing is the safety in well being of the young people who find themselves in detention as a result of decisions of our courts.

If there were more suitable, fitful purpose facilities and services available to provide for the safety in well being and the therapeutic care of young people currently and actually will be.

Using them right now.

Now, we spoke to this young man in the second week of January of twenty twenty six.

Four days later, he was arrested.

Police allege he breached his bail conditions was driving well disqualified.

His family tell a different version of that day.

They say he was driving to a pharmacy to collect prescribe medication for a serious mental health condition, medication he needs daily medication they say he didn't receive for many hours after being taken into police custody.

Now, we don't know the full details of that case, but what we do know is this, he was willing to speak publicly for the first time, using his own voice about the abuse inside the youth detention center, and within days of doing so, he was back behind bars.

His family have expressed concerns about how he's been treated since that time.

Now, We're not in a position to independently verify those concerns, and we make no allegations of wrongdoing by Tasmanian police, but we do wish him and his family well in what remains a difficult and ongoing situation.

In this episode, we're going to turn to a different story, the story about documents and decisions, about how an institution responds when disturbing information begins to surface inside its own walls.

The material you're about to hear comes from right to information requests.

It concerns the late Paul Reynolds and the police funeral that was held for him in September of twenty eighteen.

By that time, Reynolds was already the subject of serious allegations known within professional standards.

The decision to grant a police funeral rests with one person, the Commissioner of Police, and at that time that person was mister Darren Hine.

Now, before we go any further, we want to be precise.

We don't allege mister Hein had any prior knowledge of Reynolds's alleged conduct before being formed briefed.

We do not allege that mister Hein acted unlawfully, corruptly or with any personal wrongdoing.

What follows is a simple timeline of events drawn from official records, not to assign personal blame, but to understand how this decision unfolded.

As you've heard, on September twelve, twenty eighteen, Professional Standards raided the home of poor Reynolds.

The next day, Reynolds took his own life.

Five days later, on September seventeen, Commissioner hin sent a formal briefing note to the then Police Minister, Michael Ferguson.

That document matters because in it, the Commissioner sets out three things.

First that Professional Standards had executed a search warrant of reynolds home.

Second, the allegations had emerged involving the exchange of explicit materials between male Use and Reynolds.

And third that a police funeral was scheduled to take place just two days later, on September nineteen.

That funeral went ahead, full ceremonial honors, a guard of honor and senior officers in attendance.

Commissioner Heine delivered the eulogy.

He's part of that eulogy from Reynolds's funeral.

These are his words, but not his voice.

Both successfully completed many courses throughout his career and he put those skills to good use wherever he served.

His loss will be deeply felt across Tasmania Police and our thoughts and prayers are with his family at this difficult time.

The briefing notes sent from Hein to the then Police Minister itself did not come back signed by the Minister until October eighth.

In twenty twenty four, Michael Ferguson, the then Police Minister, was interviewed by the ABC Drive program Drive Lasy Braden.

This is where Hobart conversations.

Began on l Hobart.

Senior Sergeant Paul Reynolds, who served as a police officer for almost forty years, died by suicide in September twenty eighteen.

This was while he was under investigation by Tasmania Police into allegations of child sexual abuse.

So what did Michael Ferguson know?

And when?

Good afternoon?

So what happened?

When did you find out?

This interview was close to election time in Tasmania and it was brought forward because of an Artis submission made by the Tasmanian Greens.

One thing you may have wanted to mention in your introduction is that the Greens have received information under quite open and transparent RTI which occurred last November, and then we get these questions held until this particular period of time.

What is clear from the documents that we're going back five and a half years ago.

I've also had to refresh myself on the contents of the documents, and it's quite clear that the advice that was provided to me by the then Police Commissioner in my then role as Police Minister was signed by me on the eighth of October.

The contentious issue that was raised by the ABC was when the Police Minister saw that briefing note that was sent from the Commissioner of Police to the minister.

What did he do and when did he see it.

I've been very open and I've made it clear that it would be very customary for me to sign a brief as soon as I've read it.

I signed that brief on the eighth of October.

Any suggestion that's been made today by the Greens or the Labor Party five days before an election, that there was any attempt at cover up is plainly wrong and proven wrong by the fact that the document that we're all talking about, contains details of two investigations into the late Paul Reynolds of behavior.

The question pose from the ABC journalists in Hobart was why is this very important briefing document that seemed to be high price already to be signed?

Why did it take almost three weeks to make its way back to the Commissioner's office on October eighth?

Well, it's a fair question.

Can I just let you and your listeners know that as ministers, we received many documents, many briefing notes, and many minutes.

Minutes are decisions for ministers and they would require an approval or a rejection.

Why did it sit on your desk for three weeks?

Well, first of all, I can't agree with that because we can't know exactly.

We're going back five and a half years, and I can't answer that part of the question.

What I can say is that important my whole career, I have stood against firmly crimes against children.

The questioning went on for some time, and the big question that was posed was what were the steps taken to ensure this never happens again?

Well, first of all, a proper investigation, I mean, you've got to get to the bottom of these matters, the facts of the matter, and they of course were being done by in dependent coroner, which is like the magistrate's cord, totally separate from police and secondly the police themselves.

And I would urge the same in the future as well, because the truth must come out when crimes against children are committed, and any allegation needs to be tested and investigated so that justice can be done and seen to be done.

The questioning of mister Ferguson continued on the ABC Drive program around what he did post seeing the briefing document which spoke of allegations of Reynolds being a pedophile.

So when you read the note, when was your call to then Police Commissioner Darren Hine.

Well, I'm not able to answer that right now because I don't have that information.

Lucy.

If I did, I would tell you.

Was it relatively quickly?

Would you say, Dave, I'm not able to answer that question.

I'm not avoiding it.

I don't know.

I'd be going back to October twenty eighteen to know the answer to that.

Why didn't you trigger an independent review at the time, Well.

There was an independent review underway at that time.

I wanted to stop at this point because this document was signed on October eighth by the then Police Minister and sent back to the then Commissioner, Darren Hine in twenty eighteen.

From our research, there is no record of an independent review that was taking place at the time the coronial process was underway, which happens as a matter of law after a reportable death.

The Reynolds coronial matter had a case management conference on the twenty seventh of May twenty twenty two, almost four years later.

This included the three other officers who also died by their own hand.

The hearing dates for these happened in November and December of twenty twenty two.

The Weice review happened in twenty twenty four, and a police professional standards investigation was stopped once Reynolds took his own life in twenty eighteen.

When will you have.

More information about that call to the then police commissioner about what you had read?

When will we hear more about that?

Well, I don't know the answer to the question.

I honestly, you know, I understand your curiosity, But I noted a brief which told me at that time that it was being properly investigated by the coroner and by police professional standards.

So I'm not sure I will be able to provide you with that because you know, the information was noted, which means it's been understood, and it's then on those other agencies to get on with the investigation and ensure that justice has served.

A few months after this interview on the ABC, mister Ferguson was questioned in Parliament's House of Assembly in relation Sir Reynold's funeral and some other claims that were uncovered in the RTI.

Right to Information documents reveal on the fifteenth of September, four days before you gave a full police funeral to the disgrace pedophile, police officer Paul E.

Mark Shelton contacted your then department seeking background information for a condolence speech he was planning to make to the Parliament.

His office told the department there was and I will quote no doubt that mister Shelton would wish to make a condolence speech given his long association with Paul Reynolds, and requested the information be provided as a priority.

However, mister Shelton never gave the condolence speech, did you or your office inform him of the allegations against Paul Reynolds.

You good question, Taty Premiers.

Madam Speaker, I'm grateful for the opportunity to respond to this question because of the very regrettable way that this was brought up during the election campaign.

And I've spoken very openly and in an extended period of time, including in front of the Tasmanian public through media conference, to give a full account of myself of the events that occurred more than five five years ago.

And Madam Speaker, I was very disappointed that in the heat of an election battle that I would be accused in the way that I was more by the Labor Party, but it was initiated by the Greens who had received an ARTI I believe it was back in around November of last year, but sat on it until the election.

Now I am appalled.

I am appalled, Madam Speaker.

I'd like to be heard, Madam Speaker.

I am appalled at any instance of the most horrific of crimes against children and vulnerable people.

And I share with every member of this.

House at the horrors that we've come to understand were inflicted by the late mister Paul Reynolds a serving inspector in Tasmania Police and I was the police Minister at the time when he took his own life after professional Standards had begun an investigation into his behavior.

I would invite members, including the one that Miss Butler who just asked me that question, to do what I have done and examine the documents in relation to the RFI, which is the only physical documents I have, as well to refresh myself on the events of that case.

Later in that same sitting, mister Ferguson was questioned by another member.

During the recent electric campaign, you repeatedly stated you were not aware of the allegations against mister Reynolds until the police funeral had been held.

How is that possible given it appears your office has advised mister Shelton not to make the condolence speech he had planned.

And why were you able to warn mister Shelton but not stop the police funeral from going ahead?

Madam Spigger, I wish to differ from the member who has claimed things that I have said.

I've made it very clear that going back to events of more than five years ago, and I've got a good memory but I've only been able to go in relation to the documents that everybody has available to them.

I did not prove the police funeral the question, nor could.

I have stopped it.

It was a decision of the Commissioner, and I hope you would be aware of the separation of powers in this case.

Probably right.

We have not been party to covering up of this matter, but I can say that as Minister for Police, I had no involvement in that decision.

Police funerals are at the discretion of the Commissioner.

Now that answering the question with the benefit of findsight that we all have, it shouldn't have happened, that's right.

It should not have happened that our funeral full honors should not have occurred.

Deputy premmccaskater resumed.

You said, while I take upon of order, Miss Butler.

The Deputy Premier is not either not understanding the question or fails to answer the question relevance.

My question was not around the information you're providing now.

My question was did you stop the condolence motion from proceeding?

Thank you, Premiance.

Well, actually I did answer that question, Madam Speaker, where I said I am only able I am only able to refresh my own memory on the basis of those documents that were released, which I believe all members had the same set of documents, to refresh myself on those matters.

But I want to emphasize, although I don't have that ARTI with me right now, I know that it says that mister Reynolds may have committed these horrible events, these horrible apps, and that they were being investigated.

They hadn't been established, but there.

Were two separate investigations at that point in time underway, at the point when I noted the brief, which I as police Minister noting it wasn't a minute for decision, it was a brief for my information, and the information made clear that mister Reynolds, despite the fact that his life had ended, was being still nonetheless investigated through two separate processes, one the Professional Standards Unit in Tasmani Police and secondly the Coroner's Court, which of course both of those processes are independent of the elected government and me as minister.

And I will now refute again, I think for the third time what the member is trying to do here, which is to try to somehow somehow establish Madam speaker somehow established a connection between myself and mister Shelton in relation to those matters.

I cannot verify one way or the other what was known in those days, but I can verify that the government played no role in the allowance of a police funeral.

Years after Reynolds died, the current Commissioner of Police, Donor Adams, would apologize for the decision to hold a funeral.

Mister Darren Hine, the former Police Commissioner, retired in October twenty twenty two after more than forty years in the police service.

One month later, the Colonial hearing began into the deaths of Paul Reynolds and three other officers.

Mister Hein provided an affidavit to those proceedings.

Now, for the past four months, we've tried to contact mister Hein to give him the chance to have his say.

To date, we've not heard back, but we do have an open invitation for him to join us anytime.

I want to now turn briefly to mister Heine's service history, not to imply knowledge, not to imply complicity, but to understand the institutional context in which these decisions were made.

Mister Hein joined the Police Academy in February nineteen eighty Paul Reynolds joined on the same day.

Official posting records then placed them together in Bernie in nineteen eighty one and again in nineteen eighty four, two documented periods where they were stationed at the same location at the same time.

There's no evidence of wrongdoing between them, but their early careers clearly overlapped.

Over the decades.

Mister Hein rose steadily through the ranks inspector, superintendent, acting commissioner, and then in twenty ten was officially made Commissioner of Police.

After two years acting in the job.

Darren Hine becomes the permanent police commissioner who's been in the service for thirty years and says morale is good.

We've got crime the last we ever have, from sixty thousand down to under thirty thousand.

We want to continue that, but we still got some challenges, you know, stalin murder, vehicles, a challenged, some home burglars or a challenge for us.

So we want to make our community save as we possibly can.

By the time mister Hine was appointed Commissioner in twenty ten, Tasmanian Police was already emerging from a period of deep institutional turmoil.

His predecessor, Commissioner Jack Johnston, had stood aside in two thousand and eight after allegations that he had exposed official secrets.

The secrets he's.

Alleged to a revealed relate to a police investigation into claims about political favors.

The Police commissioner was arrested this morning and appeared in the Hobart Magistrate's Court.

In two thousand and nine, criminal charges against mister Johnston were permanently stayed by the Supreme Court, but he never returned to his police commissioner role.

In twenty ten, mister Johnston resigned from Tasmanian Police with a payout reported at seven hundred thousand dollars.

Subsequent findings held that the allegations of corruption against him were baseless.

By then, public confidence in the leadership of Tasmanian Police had already been badly damaged.

It was in that context, a police service under intense scrutiny recovering from a leadership crisis, that Darren Hine was appointed commissioner.

Mister Heine inherited an organization already grappling with questions about transparency, accountability and trust.

During his fourteen year tenure as Commissioner of Police, mister Heine presided of the moments that shaped Tasmanian police moments like in nineteen ninety six, Darren Hine was part of the senior command response to the Port Arthur massacre, one of the most traumatic events in Australian policing history.

More than thirty people are dead and eighteen injured after the nineteen year old.

Gunman open fire with a rifle in a.

Port Arthur coffee shop.

Witnesses say the victims included a baby, several children, and interstate and overseas tourists.

It was an experience that shaped an entire generation of senior officers, and one that later informed how Tasmanian police approached crisis scrutiny and public accountability.

No, we don't understand why it's happened that that is one of the major issues confronting the police at the moment.

I can't tell you what the demands are.

I think that would be wrong at the stage to tell you that, because we're in the negotiating period with the man.

That was what we tried to achieve was for him to give himself up and go before the courts.

After the Port Arthur massacre, there were internal reviews inside TASPOL around historical investigative failures.

There were public apologies for missed opportunities to stop known offenders.

Mister Hein really became the face of institutional reckoning.

Although Darrenheim was not a police officer in nineteen sixty nine when Lucille Butterworth disappeared, he was commissioner decades later when the coronial inquest concluded, and when Tasmania Police formally acknowledged the failures of the original investigation.

WHILSTO I cannot bring Lucille back or make right the wrongs that were done in the initial investigation, but I can certainly offer my apologies for the way Tasmania Police conducted the investigation back in nineteen sixty nine.

But Lucille was not the only reckoning of his tenure.

Commissioner Hind also led the police through the findings of the Commission of Inquiry into Institutional Child Abuse, an inquiry that examined how allegations against serving and former offices had been handled and how failure of oversight had allowed harm to persist for decades.

Most recently over the handling of abuse allegations highlights it during the Commission of inquiry.

I've never been afraid to come out and apologize for where we.

Can do better and we should do better.

In interviews with the ABC and The Mercury newspaper, he spoke openly about how damaging institutional failure can be, how to moralizing unfair suspicion can be, and how hard it is for the police service to confront its own mistakes.

He acknowledged that police culture encouraged officers to internalize trauma, stay silent and move on, a mindset he later described as absolutely the wrong thing to do, and he accepted that while he could not undo the past, he carried responsibility for how the institution accounted for it.

He's an art called from The Mercury in Tasmania, written by Amber Wilson.

These are her words, but not her voice.

He's also publicly apologized for the instances in which Tasmania Police failed to act on notifications about Griffin, the now infamous laun Systant General Hospital nurse and prolific pedophile, losing opportunities to stop the predator in his tracks.

However, Commissioner Hind said it could be demoralizing when subjected to unfair criticisms, such as the conspiracy theories that had sprung up about Port Arthur.

We know there's various websites supporting the conspiracy theory, he said, I was down there.

I was part of the response.

I also feel for the other police officers involved in some of these conspiracy theories.

I know they're professional, I know they've done the job really well, but it is demoralizing to some of them, those people and the community that have either lost someone or had to deal with.

Port Arthur Commissioner Heine has also weighed into the ongoing debate around Sue Neil Fraser's murder conviction, previously saying only selective arguments were used by her supporters.

In October twenty twenty two, hein retired.

Weeks later, the coronial inquest into Reynolds began.

In an interview on the ABC, the police whistleblower that brought the allegations about Reynolds to light told the interviewer.

Paul was not only a well respected member of the community, he was a well respected member of the football community that I participated in.

He openly admitted that he had a very strong friendship with a Commissioner of Police.

I was a young, aspiring police officer at the time.

He was well connected within the service.

He was a welcome to person within the community.

Now, we want to stay clearly we don't allege that mister hine knew of Paul Reynolds's alleged conduct before being formally briefed.

We do not allege that he acted improperly or corruptly.

This is not a story about personal guilt.

It's a story about process, about timing, and how institutions make decisions when serious information is emerging, and when those decisions years later are judged very differently.