If I had a dollar for every time an openly gay Australian mayor was accused and/or convicted for preying on teenage boys, I’d have two dollars, which, granted, isn’t a lot, but it’s still strange and depressing that I’d have any dollars at all.
As I reported some time ago, then-Launceston mayor and local theatre identity Danny Gibson was forced to resign after questions over police reviewing his Working with Vulnerable People registration (similar to New Zealand’s Children’s Worker Safety Check, except that it also covers the disabled and elderly) led to revelations that Gibson had pestered teenage boys in the state’s theatre industry. At least Gibson’s alleged victims were of age.
The same can’t be said about another former mayor who was prone to posing with ‘Pride’ regalia.
Meet Cameron Nation, formerly the first citizen of the City of Moonee Valley, fictional home of the cross-dressing Dame Edna Everage. Mr Nation found himself on the wrong side of the dock, answering to a charge of sexually assaulting a young person under his care, supervision or authority.
The sordid details, long shielded by the usual judicial blanket of suppression orders that various media outlets thankfully tore away, reveal a textbook case of grooming wrapped up in the modern language of pastoral care. Nation first encountered his victim as a swimming coach in Melbourne’s north-west, when the lad was a tender eight or nine years old. Years later, the boy found himself working as an assistant swim coach under Nation’s direct command.
What followed was a predictable progression of boundary-blurring.
Nation and the victim initially began communicating over text and via social media after the former mayor got in touch to congratulate the teenager for ‘coming out’ as gay.
Unsurprisingly, this digital tête-à-tête soon drifted into murkier waters. The prosecution noted that the older man expressed a keen interest in inducting the teenager into the local nightlife scene, offering to escort him to a gay establishment to ‘show him the ropes’. For an impressionable youth, such attention from a civic notable dissolved any lingering professional distance and fostered a misplaced sense of trust that would soon be brutally betrayed.
The inevitable reckoning arrived in the small hours of December 15, 2019. Having attended a nearby gathering, the 17-year-old youth accepted an invitation to the mayor’s residence for post-party refreshments. There, the pair partook in the inhalation of nitrous oxide, the humble ‘nangs’ of the suburban demimonde.
“This made me feel really spaced out, like I had no control over my body,” the victim later told police.
What ensued was a grim exercise in predatory entitlement. With the teenager incapacitated and utterly helpless, the 36-year-old civic leader took full advantage.
The court heard that Nation kissed the victim, before pulling down the teenager’s pants and sexually assaulting him.
“I did not know what to do… I felt like I had no control,” the victim said to police.
One might imagine that a man occupying the highest mayoral office would maintain some semblance of public dignity, yet Nation’s tenure was already somewhat checkered. Before his eventual resignation in March 2024, prompted in part by the uninvited attention of anti-corruption investigators raiding properties across the council, he had managed to brush against the criminal law elsewhere. Back in 2022, he managed to dodge a formal conviction for falsifying grant applications, having attempted to siphon federal funds meant for swim charities and LGBT organisations with which he had zero connection.
When the magistrate finally caught up with him, the sentence handed down was hardly draconian.
A former mayor has been sentenced to three months’ prison and an 18-month community correction order after pleading guilty to sexually assaulting a teenage boy seven years ago.
Naturally, the defence wailed and gnashed its teeth, attempting to keep the former mayor’s identity under wraps by citing fragile mental health and previous episodes of distress. This being Victoria, after all, Nation’s stay in His Majesty’s boarding house was remarkably brief. Barely had he been clapped into custody before he was swiftly released on bail to contest his sentence, securing an appeal date for early next year.
One waits with bated breath to see whether our judiciary decides that three months behind bars is genuinely sufficient for a mayor caught preying on children, or if the modern therapeutic state will continue to find compassionate excuses for those who wear the right badges and mouth the correct platitudes.
