As I’ve written several times, Australia’s systems supposed to protect children too often fail badly. Not least the various state ‘card’ systems supposed to regulate who gets to work with children. In recent shockers, a woman who murdered her own baby was cleared to work with children, while multiple child molesters managed to hang on to their working with children clearances. These have included prolific paedophiles who continued to work in child care while their names were under suppression and a family of brutal foster carers who first raped then murdered a 12-year-old girl.
It’s not just in Australia that such systems are failing miserably.
Timothy Fisher should never have been anywhere near children. He had three convictions for indecency in 2002, a police “red stamp” in 2014 warning he was unsafe around kids, and then, just this year, he was jailed for abusing nine girls while working for a tutoring company.
We can imagine that Fisher’s dream job involved a steady stream of children sitting on his lap. Well, waddaya know…
Somehow, despite this history, Fisher was employed in 2022 and 2023 as Santa at three of Auckland’s biggest shopping centres: St Lukes, Newmarket and Manukau. The explanation? A vetting failure. The photo supplier simply didn’t run proper checks. Westfield’s parent company Scentre Group is now scrambling to review its processes.
Some are also blaming New Zealand’s Clean Slate Act.
The Clean Slate Act, designed to wipe the slate clean for old convictions, played its part in this disaster. Laws that prioritise offenders’ privacy over children’s safety are indefensible. No one with child sex convictions should ever be able to legally conceal them when applying for a role involving kids. Full stop.
Except that no one can: at least, not under the Clean Slate Act. The Clean Slate Act includes a list of “specified offences”, a conviction for any of which means that criminal convictions will not be concealed. As you would hope, those “specified offences” include the gamut of sexual offences, specifically including “indecent assault”, “sexual conduct with a child under 12” and “sexual conduct with a young person under 16”.
So, it’s not the Clean Slate Act to blame here, it would seem, but organisations who didn’t practise due diligence.
Including one which absolutely should have known better.
The Teaching Council also has questions to answer. In 2014, police stamped his file to say he should never be left alone with children. The council still renewed his practising certificate. How many warnings does it take before action is finally taken?
More pertinently: why are bodies like the Teaching Council allowed to skate on what bishops and churches have rightly had their feet held to the fire for?
This is not a one-off mistake. It is a catalogue of systemic failures – weak laws, rubber-stamping regulators, and private companies asleep at the wheel. The result was that a predator ended up working as Santa Claus, of all things, right in the heart of Auckland’s busiest malls.
This is true: too many systems fail far too often to be excused. Too few responsible parties are held to too little account.
Parents and children deserve better. They deserve a system where child protection comes first, every time, no exceptions. Until this country gets serious about confronting the sheer number of predators hiding in plain sight, New Zealand will remain a place where paedophiles find loopholes and second chances and where children are left exposed.
There is one reform that cannot wait and the Clean Slate Act must be rewritten. The idea that a convicted sex offender can simply wait out a period of time and then have their record concealed is obscene…
Except that, as we see, a convicted sex offender can’t. Not under the Clean Slate Act.
But it’s certainly true that those who let these spiders crawl in plain sight must be held to account.
