Journalist Piers Akerman is a certainly a polarising figure. But love or loathe him, one cannot deny that he has been a tireless campaigner in seeking to bring those responsible for the infamous Heiner Affair to account.
As has Senator Barnaby Joyce.
Akerman spoke with Barnaby this week about what has become Australia’s version of the Watergate scandal that brought down US President Nixon:
Fielding ignominiously leaves the Senate at the end of the month — and there is speculation that he may be feted by Labor with a government position in return for his support in blocking the inquiry [into the continuing coverup by the QLD and now Federal ALP Government’s of the pack rape of an aboriginal child in custody, implicating current Governor-General Quentin Bryce and the man who put her there, Kevin Rudd]. Nationals Senator Barnaby Joyce said Fielding had acted reprehensibly.
“The Greens are untrustworthy, but Fielding has a job … or thinks he has a job,” the blunt-talking Queenslander said. “The victim really wants to be able to speak publicly but she has been paid $120,000 by the Queensland government to shut up. For me it is quite simple: It is Australia’s version of Watergate.
“This is a blunt and blatant form of cover-up in a deal with the Greens and now, apparently, Steve Fielding. What did the Labor Party say to him?
“Hetty Johnson rang me almost in tears after she had sacked him as chief of White Balloon Day. How could anyone vote against an inquiry into the rape of an Aboriginal girl?”
Joyce accused the Greens and Fielding of being party with Labor to an “organised cover-up”.
“If they think there is nothing there, let the inquiry proceed,” he said. “In life, some things worry you, this worries me to the core of my being. A girl has been raped and there has never been an open and public inquiry. Labor has never disclosed why it doesn’t want an inquiry.”
The Senate, he said, may be peculiar, there may be people with pretty extreme views, but no one ever thought they’d be complicit in outrageously dishonorable activities.
The action this week was dishonorable, he said. Even the Clerk of the Senate, Dr Rosemary Laing, said in a written advice on a submission received on this matter that “there is no doubt the subject matter is very serious”. Which surely begs another important question.
If the Clerk of the Senate, having read a submission, regards the matter as “very serious”, has the Senate acted improperly in attempting to have it swept under the carpet?
Further, the submission which she comments upon publicly has not been released, which must be a parliamentary first. Joyce’s description of this as Australia’s Watergate is most appropriate: It was not the crime that sank US President Richard Nixon, it was the cover-up.
This crime has a victim, a girl, then 14, raped in 1988. The perpetrators haven’t been charged. She received hush money from the Queensland government last year, effectively gagging her from speaking out. She needs to have her voice heard.
This is not about an old crime. It is about an ongoing and disgusting cover-up by shameless politicians and their hypocritical supporters in a ghastly denial of justice.
See Barnaby Joyce’s “outraged” press release on this matter – “Barnaby: Transparency Thwarted By Absolute Hypocrisy Of So-Called Champions Of Transparency”
Barnaby Is Right 
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