http://www.news.com.au/national/dfat-as-bad-as-church/story-fndo4bst-12265327459...DFAT as bad as church
A FORMER Jakarta-based diplomat has urged the government's royal commission into child sexual assaults to include an investigation into the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, claiming it was involved in "paedophile cover-ups" 30 years ago.
"The South-East Asia division was then known as the 'ped division'," Shane Carroll, 62, who spent 23 years with DFAT, said.
When fellow diplomat William Brown kidnapped a small boy and held him captive in 1984, Mr Carroll organised his safe passage out of the country. William Stuart Brown, who hanged himself in a Bali jail in May, 2004, after being convicted and sentenced to 13 years' jail for sex offences against boys, was posted as second secretary at the Australian International Development Assistance Bureau, (AIDAB), the predecessor to AusAID, in Indonesia between 1982 and 1984.
"Brown was running parties with white men with pre-pubescent boys and the locals were getting very upset, and when he kidnapped a boy, local police told me they were going to kidnap Bill Brown, so we got him out of there. We all knew he was a paedophile," Mr Carroll said. "I saw he was living with little children in taxpayer-funded housing."
Mr Carroll said he told his then consular general Noel Allanson and he also wrote a report to his superiors.
"I used the word paedophile in the report," Mr Carroll said. "He just went back to work in Canberra and my reports were buried."
William Brown returned to Australia to continue working. It was later claimed in an Commonwealth Paedophile Inquiry in 1996 that Brown lived openly in Canberra with an under-age Indonesian boy.
Brown retired from DFAT in 1996 and moved to Indonesia, where he was charged with paedophile activities in 2004, two decades after Mr Carroll first blew the whistle.
In 1996, then foreign affairs minister Alexander Downer ordered the Commonwealth Paedophile Inquiry into claims against DFAT officers. The inquiry found there was no official cover-up.
"There was no official toleration of paedophile behaviour within the agencies of the Foreign Affairs and Trade portfolio during the last 21 years, and no cover-up," Mr Downer said of the inquiry's report.
But it did hint at previous tardy responses before 1996.
"It notes that the department is now a significantly different place, and suggests that instances of misbehaviour are now handled in a more decisive and prompt fashion," Mr Downer said.
Several other suspected paedophiles investigated during the commonwealth inquiry were later charged by overseas authorities for indecent assaults on a child.
Mr Carroll wants the royal commission to look into what he terms "institutional protection" given to the likes of William Brown. "DFAT claimed they never knew where he was, yet were renewing his passport," he said.
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