Sue Higginson sure does love her baby killers. When she’s not shilling for the creeps who strangled the Bibas children and burned babies alive in their parents’ ovens, she’s crying crocodile tears for a woman who murdered her newborn for the sake of her sport career.
Keli Lane, the woman convicted of killing her baby daughter in one of Australia’s most notorious criminal cases, has been identified in New South Wales parliament as a victim of convicted sex offender and former prison officer Wayne Gregory Astill […]
In 2022, Astill was found guilty of 27 charges, including aggravated sexual and indecent assault, for abusing at least 14 inmates at the Dillwynia Correctional Centre, near Windsor, and was sentenced to a maximum of 23 years’ jail.
Now, it might be understandable that some see this as just desserts for the woman who terminated at least two children in utero, dumped two more in orphanages, and murdered a fifth shortly after she was born, to try and keep her sporting career on track. But a sexual assault is a sexual assault, regardless of what we think of the victim. Astill is a serial predator who was rightfully jailed in 2022. Where he’ll no doubt enjoy just the sort of gentle treatment prisoners mete out to former guards.
But there’s no excuse for an odious Greens politician to use it as leverage to release a baby murderer.
Greens MP Sue Higginson identified Lane as a victim of Astill in a speech to parliament in which she called for Ms Lane’s application for parole to be reconsidered.
Since 2010, Lane, 49, has been serving an 18-year prison sentence for the 1996 murder of her newborn daughter Tegan […]
Ms Higginson said Lane had been “sexually assaulted, harassed, intimidated, abused, bullied and dehumanised by the state of NSW by a number of state government-employed corrections officers during her time in prison, including Wayne Astill”.
That still doesn’t wash away what she did. Nor does it mean she shouldn’t serve the rest of her sentence.
Ms Higginson said: “We now know that after allowing such harm to come to her, the state then relied heavily on her and her painful and honest testimony to obtain the criminal conviction of Wayne Astill.”
What does she want? A prize?
In March last year, the State Parole Authority denied Lane parole, under NSW’s “no body, no parole” laws.
In a statement issued at the time, the authority said it was “not satisfied that the offender has co-operated satisfactorily in police investigations, or other actions, to identify the location of Tegan”.
The “no body, no parole” laws were introduced in October 2022 in response to the high-profile murder trial of former Sydney teacher Chris Dawson, who was convicted of killing his wife Lynn 40 years earlier.
In true Greens’ fashion, Higginson thinks that the law should be waived, depending on the murderer’s intersectionality points.
“These laws were designed specifically for a man who killed his wife to marry his student, murderer Chris Dawson,” she said.
“This is not Keli Lane’s law.”
Neither is murder, but that law still applies to her, too. The laws were designed, too, to see that murderers who refuse to disclose the whereabouts of their victim’s body serve the full term of their sentence as punishment.
“Keli is now languishing in a prison because of the wrong application of and the retrospective operation of the ‘no body, no parole’ laws.”
No, she’s languishing in prison because she murdered a newborn baby.
“Keli has a husband and a daughter, and they’re all suffering.”
So did the days-old baby girl she murdered.
We can always rely on the Greens to cheer squad for the worst people in the world. They feel the affinity, I guess.
