Bob Collins, Senator, Statesman, Pedophile & Rapist

Somebody Help Us Out Here!

Bob Collins was a Senator. He was an important statesman in days of my youth. What I saw of him as a politician was a solidly policy-based, tough, direct kind of guy who would not mince words. He'd tell us, the people of Australia, straight if it was going to work or not. For years, I was comfortable with that impression and never revisited it. I really thought he was one of the few men of integrity in a sleazy business.
Now it turns out he was up for charges in child rape.

A MAN has told how the late Labor minister Bob Collins raped him when he was a 12-year-old, while watching pornographic videos in his Senate office.

Ben Helwend has told Fairfax Media that Collins was a friend of his family in Darwin and offered to pay for his journey to Canberra in 1989 so he could learn about the workings of democracy.

"Over a period of four days in Canberra he penetrated me, masturbated me and had me [perform oral sex]," Mr Helwend, 30, said. "I was just 12. I didn't know anything about sex and I was scared not to do as Mr Collins asked me because I played with his kids and my mum and dad were friends of the Collins family."

The Federal Government has granted Collins, 61, a state funeral in Darwin this Saturday following his death last Friday - just three days before he was due to face a committal hearing in Darwin on child sex offences against another three boys in the western Arnhem Land township of Maningrida some 30 years ago. The charges were dropped on Monday, but now there are claims Collins committed suicide to avoid the humiliation of being prosecuted.

Collins was also charged in Canberra last September with two counts of committing acts of indecency on Mr Helwend and one count of sexual intercourse with the child in the capital when he was a senator in September 1989. Mr Helwend said last night his lawyer had told him those charges had also been dropped.

He has come forward as The Bulletin, published today, details allegations by the Aboriginal actor Tom E. Lewis of being sexually assaulted by Collins.

"It's caused a lot of bitterness, and twistedness in my spirit," Lewis tells the magazine. "I've been beaten, flogged, you name it, when I was a kid. I can forgive those people. I've been ripped and called a f---in' whitefella in a black community. Everything. I can still forgive those people. I've got no room to forgive this Collins. Bullshit. [If] black people rape everybody and anybody who do anything like that, they have their name splattered everywhere."

What do we make of this?
Here's Bob Collins according to Wikipedia.

Federal Politics & Senate
In the 1987 federal election, Collins was elected to the Australian Senate representing the Northern Territory.
The Prime Minister Bob Hawke chose Collins as Minister for Shipping on 4 April 1990, and a month later on 7 May, Aviation Support was also added to his portfolio. In addition, he served during that term as Minister assisting the Prime Minister for Northern Australia. In May 1992, Prime Minister Paul Keating elevated Collins to the Cabinet as Minister for Transport and Communications. In December 1993, he was made Minister for Primary Industries and Energy.
After the Coalition lead by John Howard won the 1996 election, Collins continued to serve in the Senate until he resigned on 30 March 1998; Trish Crossin was

Honors:
In the Australia Day Honours of 2004, Collins was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) for services to the Northern Territory and indigenous rights.[3] appointed to his Senate seat.

The section covering the Child Sex allegations are twice as long.

On 19 June 2004, Collins was involved in a serious car accident when his car rolled over as he swerved to avoid a pig on the road near the town of Jabiru. He was taken to Royal Darwin Hospital, then flown to Adelaide, South Australia on 22 June for specialised surgery.[4]
As Collins recovered in hospital in Adelaide, officers of the Northern Territory Police flew to his hospital bedside to inform him that his home had been raided and that he was charged with child-sex offences. His home computer had been seized that prosecutors said contained 54 child-porn images[5]. Additionally four men had made allegations that Collins had sexually assaulted them as children, more than thirty years previously.[6] One of the alleged victims was Tom E. Lewis, a young actor who had played the title role in the 1978 Australian film The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith.[7]
Another allegation was made in 2006 of the sexual assault of a 12-year-old boy in Canberra in September 1989. Collins was charged with two counts of committing an act of indecency and one count of sexual intercourse with a child.[8]
Collins's continuing medical problems, including surgery for bowel cancer and injuries from his car accident, meant that he was unfit to attend the ACT Magistrates' Court for four scheduled hearings of the case in September and December 2006 and March and May 2007.[9][10]
An additional charge of possession of child pornography was set down against Collins in the Darwin Magistrates' Court in November 2006. Collins faced 21 child sex charges in the Northern Territory which were due for a committal hearing in April 2007. The child pornography charge was due for a hearing in the same court on 1 May.[11] He died before he could face court.

Appalling. So the whole thing got me thinking.

Thought No.1 - Innocent Until Proven Guilty?
What really gets me about this case is that Bob Collins being a former Senator probably got a substantial amount of protection exactly for having been a Senator and a man of considerable standing in the Northern Territory. So you wonder how innocent we can imagine him to be, given the amount of documented allegations. How can there be no fire with so many strands of smoke? And yet, we must all be vigilant and say innocent until proven guilty. If indeed Bob Collins has committed suicide, then he's evaded all charges. But was it worth dying for?
If you were going to commit suicide over your sexual proclivities, no matter how offensive, why do it? Was he insane? Was he deluded? What the hell was he thinking? Assuming he did it all, that is.

The point is, now we'll never know even on a juridical level - As in we won't even get to test justified true belief of whether he committed these heinous acts or not. However, I am saying that I now have justified belief that Bob Collins was a Child Rapist. Is that unfair? Well, as a cynic let me say this: I have to raise the bar of my cynicism considerably higher not to think so. Short of doing so, I have to assume that they're all somehow perverts.
John Howard? Rat-Fucker.
Kevin Rudd? Dog-Fucker
Peter Costello? Pig-Fucker.
Julia Gillard? Snake-Fucker.
Tony Abbott? Croc-Fucker.
Wayne Swann? Drug-Fucked.
George Brandis? Got his penis caught in a milking device when he was 12.

Who's to say the dirt on just who and what they fuck, won't come out on these people one of these years?

Thought No.2 - Who Knew About This Shite? Who Else Has Dirt?
"Bob Collins = Child Rapist" is such a shocking concept that I am asking myself, how did he get to be Senator?
Didn't anybody know? Or did they knowingly just let it slide?
What else is being hidden in Canberra's halls of power and press gallery?

BTW, I was told of a guy who moved to Canberra as a gigolo. He found so much work doing the wives of politicians, that he got to know so much about how Australian politics worked and was so disgusted he moved back to Sydney. What's amazing - apart from the fact that politicians' wives are so unimaginative that they all want to be serviced by the one guy - is that sex & sleaze is the order of the day in Canberra. So I ask again, who else knew about this shite, and what else aren't they printing?

Thought No 3 - Are His Crimes Enough To Cancel Out His Good Deeds?
What are the good deeds of Bob Collins the pollie? I can't actually recall. It's not like Paul Keating who reigned supreme as Treasurer and PM; he's not even Gareth Evans who was balling Cheryl Kernot senseless in his office while attending to *Foreign Affairs* (yeah, right); he wasn't even John Dawkins who brought Tertiary Education to its knees in this country.
But surely he must have done some good.

Now that he's been found out to have been a dirty little child-molester, we can all say yar-boo-sucks to that and flush his legacy down the toilet - because he sure did a good job of shoving it in there in the first place. I ask you, is this how we should be remembering our statesmen? This particular statesman?
If yes, then I think I'm forever done reading the news on politics. Whatever they may do, they fuck one goat or child and it's all in vain. And from Thought 2, we've established that they could be fucking anybody and any thing.

Thought No.4 - Politicians As Role Models?
There's this cult of people that screams blue murder every time an athlete turns out to be less of a man than he is an athlete. Take Andrew 'Joey' Johns and his drug habit. It didn't surprise me in the least bit that Andrew Johns was doing drugs for his entire career; that he never got caught; and 'fessed up afterwards.
However, some people say "he should have thought of his young fans. A Star is a Role Model."
After all, a traumatised kid in 1921 did ask of Black Sox's Shoeless Joe Jackson "Say It Ain't So, Joe!"
I think it's simply too much to ask of a boof-head pituitary case to be a great man as well as a great athlete. However, how about politicians? These are the very people who are *lawmakers*. If anybody should be leveled with the "Say It Ain't So", it should be politicians.
So on that line of thought... Bob Collins... WTF!?

Clearly, we all should be jumping up and down screaming our tits off because the Role Models have let us down badly. But you know what? People will just let this slide and go back to the booths to vote in the next person who they only know by name and affiliation. No wonder there are those who think Democracy is little more than Mob-ocracy.

Thought No. 5 - No Wonder the Right Hates the Left
One of the surest things in the politics is that the Right is always out to show that the Left is less than they claim they are. It delights the Right that a social reformist turns out to be nothing but a pedophile. Indeed The Angry Fat Man would be having a (pardon the pun) ball dancing on the 'corruption of the Labor Party' that allowed such a man into the halls of power on this land.
Christ almighty, what can the Left say about that?
It's unfair? He's innocent until proven guilty but he can't stand trial so he's always going to be seen as innocent?

Whatever the case, it seems to me that the Labor Party will have trouble living this one down. They may as well have had a vampire or Frankenstein's monster or an ex-NAZI in the House for those years.

The Left always stands up for obscure causes. Heroin Injection Rooms. Legalising Marijuana use. Dugongs in Okinawa. Nukes in France. Gay Rights. It's a miracle they won't stand up for Pedophile's Rights except for the fact that they stood up for Children's Rights already.
Now, I'm not saying it's wrong to do so, but you can see that the Conservatives and Reactionaries and Right Wingers are all going to see it as defending the moral decline of Civilization. That the Left want to stick up for things that brought down the mighty Roman Empire, is sufficient reason to anger the Right. Things like homosexuality drug-taking, and being kind to the slaves and all that...

Thought No.6 - Bob Collins As Gilles De Rais
Has It Always Been Like This?
I've been re-reading Georges Bataille's account of the trial of Gilles de Rais. Gilles was a man with power in his society, who used it to satisfy his peculiar lust. By the victim's accounts, Bob Collins seems to be in the same vein except without the killings. All the same, he seems to have been just as rapacious and predatory.
It's a crappy deal, but ever so often we get a total pervert who gets away with evil-shit acts for years, and that it has happened through out history. Thanks for the reminder Bob Collins, you evil pig-bastard.