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Aussie watchdog clears officials

A corruption watchdog in Australia cleared officials yesterday of covering up hundreds of Aboriginal child abuse cases amid a furore over why nine males who gang raped a 10-year-old girl were not jailed.

The Queensland State Crime and Misconduct Commission found there was no evidence to back claims from a senior police officer that government ministers in the southeastern state gagged social workers dealing with abuse cases.

"Any suggestion that inappropriate action was taken by a minister or senior public servant is incorrect," the commission said in a statement.

The Australian newspaper reported the allegations yesterday amid outrage over the gang rape of the girl and the court system's subsequent failure to jail her attackers.

`WIDESPREAD'

Documents cited by the Australian suggested child abuse problems have long been widespread in Aboriginal communities in the Cape York region in Queensland's far north.

The paper cited a leaked interview with a police child protection officer, questioned by the gang-rape inquiry, who said social workers had failed to report cases where Aboriginal children had been raped or abused.

"I believe ministers got involved and certain people were told not to speak to police," detective sergeant David Harold told investigators, according to the leaked transcript of his interview.

He also said police investigations had shown there were "numerous child protection issues through the Cape we haven't been advised of."

Queensland State Premier Anna Bligh immediately called for a report from the corruption watchdog into Harold's claims.

`NAUGHTY'

The prosecutor in the gang-rape case last year, who described the nine attackers as "naughty," was suspended this week pending an inquiry into how the case was handled.

Critics say they would not have escaped jail if the victim had been white.

The girl, who cannot be named and is now 12, had been abused previously at the age of seven and put into foster care with a non-indigenous family in the town of Cairns.

But in April last year she was returned to the Aurukun community, where she suffered the gang-rape. Six of her attackers were under the age of 17, with the three others aged 17, 18 and 26.

Australia's original inhabitants make up some 2 percent of a population of 21 million.

Aborigines were marginalized after the first British settlers arrived in 1788 and many live in squalid outback camps, where unemployment, alcohol dependency and lawlessness are rife.

In June, the government moved to crack down on high levels of child sex abuse in Aboriginal communities by deploying police and military to improve living standards and impose controls on alcohol and pornography.
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