Home Page - Save Our Kids - Police blackmailed Pedo MPs

A Children’s Commissioner passed on information to the CJC received by his office from a person who claimed to have received the information from an anonymous source.

The information suggested that an unnamed friend of the anonymous source had visited the home of a senior police officer where he had been shown a videotape featuring a parliamentarian ‘and small boys’. It was suggested that the senior police officer was ‘holding the tape as blackmail over [the parliamentarian]’.

However, the QPS said "allegations cannot be substantiated" since "That person, who had no evidence to substantiate the allegations, claimed to have no means of identifying, or contacting, the initial informant."

On Friday, 15 August 1997, the Courier-Mail reported allegations from former Deputy Premier, The Honourable Bill Gunn, and the then Minister for Police, The Honourable Russell Cooper, suggesting that police had protected members of paedophile networks from investigation.

In the same edition of the newspaper, former Premier Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen was reported as having ‘no doubt that sexual political blackmail was the oil that had greased the wheels of corruption in Queensland’.

At the same time that the Fitzgerald Inquiry was turning the spotlight on the entrenched corruption that existed at the heart of the Queensland Police Force and the rest of the broader Queensland establishment, the policing of child sexual abuse continued. After a covert operation revealed the potential risk of organised child sex offender groups setting up in Queensland, the Paedophile Task Force (PTF) was formed in 1988 with a remit to hunt down these networks. Led by crusading detectives Garnett Dickson and Kym Goldup, the PTF lasted as a specialist squad for little more than a year before being shut down amid accusations of an obsessive campaign to expose a group of child sex offenders that the squad believed was operating among the state’s elite. A book chapter "Shot down in a BLAZE" from book "Policing Child Sexual Abuse" revisits the tumultuous year that the PTF operated in, considering the events that led police like Dickson and Goldup to believe that such a paedophilia ring existed. These events include the aborted Operation Firefighter, where raids on a suspect were scuttled after news of the plan was leaked to the press. The chapter provides insight into this attempt to target child sexual abuse in Queensland, and the reasons it came to such an abrupt conclusion.

On 4 November 1997, Project Triton received information from an anonymous telephone caller suggesting that a particular police officer possessed pornographic photographs and videotapes depicting the police officer and other adult males in various sexual poses with young girls (aged 12–13 years). The information held by Project Triton refuse to take any further investigation of the matter (such as the execution of a search warrant). It was merely recorded by the CJC for "intelligence purposes."

On 3 November 1997, Project Triton received a letter from a former police officer, who conveyed various allegations concerning the investigation of paedophilia. However Project Triton merely dismissed them as "rumors" and refused any further investigation.

On 12 November 1997, A complainant contacted Project Triton by telephone, alleging that in 1989 or 1990 she had told particular police officers of her concerns regarding persons she suspected as paedophiles. The complainant also said she was told by one of the police officers to ‘go away and not gossip’. Later it was found that the officers did find a witness who had direct knowledge sufficient to substantiate a criminal charge, but the investigation was dropped simply because that person "did not wish to bring a complaint".

In 1994, a complainant (residing in New Zealand) complained to NZ Police of having been sexually assaulted as a young boy in both New South Wales and Queensland. NZ Police forwarded the complaint to the QPS for investigation of those allegations pertaining to the State of Queensland.

After a prompt investigation, the investigating officer hastily determined that no offences could be established in Queensland, and recommended that the file be forwarded to the NSW Police Service for investigation of matters said to have occurred in that State. But his superiors decided that the file should first be returned to NZ Police.

However due to a range of well crafted "errors", the files never left QPS Headquarters and NZ police never recieved any communication. When another search was conducted in QPS Headquaters in 1998, the original investigation file could not be accounted for.