Call for Victims to Come Forward

By Patrick Billings
The Mercury
December 2, 2015

http://www.themercury.com.au/news/scales-of-justice/call-for-victims-of-tasmanian-paedophile-priests-to-come-forward/news-story/adad88498fc9e802bbd8822048983430

THE victim of a Tasmanian paedophile priest is urging other victims to report to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse ahead of a Hobart hearing next month.

The commission will hold a public hearing in Hobart into the Church of England Boys’ Society and the Anglican ­Dioceses of Tasmania, Adelaide, Sydney and Brisbane.

The commission wants to hear from people who have information relevant to the hearing, including allegations involving Louis Daniels, Garth Hawkins, Robert Brandenberg, Simon Jacobs and John Elliott, against whom legal action has already been taken.

One of Hawkins’s victims, Steven Fisher was ­recently interviewed by the commission’s investigators.

He was ­as a teen abused for two years in what he describes as an interstate paedophile ring.

The Hobart hearing was the culmination of a 15-year push for justice, Mr Fisher said.

“We are talking about ­ferrying boys between Hobart and Adelaide and Melbourne and Queensland,” he said.

“We want as many people to come forward as possible.”

The crimes of the former clergy Hawkins and Daniels rocked Tasmania’s Anglican Church when they surfaced more than a decade ago.

Daniels and Hawkins, along with convicted paedophile John Litton Elliot, were instrumental in the Anglican youth wing the Church of England Boys’ Society, active in Tasmania.

The society’s chief commissioner, Robert Brandenburg, who is also subject to the ­inquiry, killed himself in 1999 just before child sex charges were brought against him.

Brandenburg was involved in bringing groups of boys from South Australia to Tasmania.

Daniels, a former Burnie Anglican archdeacon, was ­jailed in 2005 for preying on boys as young as 11 between 1974 and 1993.

During his hearing the court heard evidence that a Brisbane boy travelled to Tasmania ­during his holidays and stayed with Daniels for several weeks.

Hawkins was jailed in 2003 for sexually abusing seven teenage boys in the 1970s and ’80s in what the judge ­described as “a chilling litany of devious sexual abuse”.

Convicted paedophile Simon Antony Jacobs, of Sydney, who abused boys while a leader in the Church of England Anglican Boys’ Society, will also be a focus of the hearing.

Anglican Assistant Bishop of Tasmania Chris Jones said the church was co-operating with the commission and welcomed the hearing.

He said the church had been asked to provide documents spanning five decades.