The State Government and its Housing NSW are now full of concern that their accommodating pedophiles not put children at risk, and it's almost heartwarmingly reassuring. Strange, then, that Housing NSW put Dennis Ferguson in among children at Ryde when it knew, as its chief has acknowledged, of Ferguson's child-assault history. Why did it take resident protests, or more likely the media's cover of those protests, to remind the department of its responsibilities?
Those responsibilities are spelt out on the department's website, and in one section it says that "Housing NSW will make every endeavour to ensure that the safety, welfare and wellbeing of children and young people are safeguarded by ... providing appropriate housing assistance to children, young people and their families".
Putting a pedophile in their midst is not ensuring the safety of children.
In my column in The Herald today I point out that Housing NSW will have another opportunity to demonstrate its new-found concern for children. A former Lake Macquarie mayor, Doug Carley, is in jail awaiting sentence for indecently assaulting a 12-year-old boy, and Carley has a flat in the huge public housing complex at Hamilton South. Carley was convicted in the mid 1990s of a similar offence. Will Carley be permitted, as not only a pedophile but a reoffending pedophile, to return to his flat in an area rich with children? True, there are many pedophiles in public housing - should they all be moved to their own complex? Near your home?
My point in my column today is that there are many other threats to children in public housing complexes, some of them more pervasive and more certainly pernicious than the pedophile next door. Among those is the housing of families with young children in the midst of concentrations of junkies, alcoholics and brawling, screeching low life. Unfortunately, even just accommodating children in public housing complexes is likely to impair their opportunities in life.
I believe that the government's duty to house children responsibly is at least as great as its duty to provide public housing. And I believe strongly that putting families with children into high- and medium-density public housing complexes as exist at Hamilton South in Newcastle is failing that duty.
Do you agree that the ideal is to accommodate families with children in what appear to be privately rented houses scattered through the suburbs? The pedophiles, then, can have their own complex and we'll know where they are.
I say children, not pedophiles, should be rescued from en masse public housing.
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