IN the late 1980s while I was living in Sydney, my home town, there were two horrendous murders that were a frightening reminder to those of my generation and others that evil would often take innocent life as its victim.
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Within two years of each other, Anita Cobby and Janine Balding were abducted at suburban railway stations, raped repeatedly and then left to die in the most appalling circumstances and by groups of assailants.
I was one of these women’s contemporaries, close in age and often like them, had often found myself travelling on the city’s railways.
But I remember clearly, following Ms Cobby’s murder, sitting in a car outside Blacktown railway station waiting for my husband to arrive home on the train and ensuring all doors in the car were locked.
I eyed the passers-by and particularly the younger men with grave suspicion, knowing well that only a couple of years before that Ms Cobby had been taken from this very same railway station.
And Ms Balding’s situation was similar although she was taken once she had reached her own car, this time at Sutherland station.
Yesterday’s admittance by a fortunately now former Labor member of the NSW Parliament of his “love” for Ms Balding’s killers could only be described as sickening.
Peter Breen was elected to the Parliament in 1999 as a candidate for the Reform the Legal System Party, but in May this year had been wooed to the Labor Party by Premier Morris Iemma to lift the Government’s numbers in the Upper House.
Yesterday, it was revealed Breen had written a new book in which he described the three killers having “rosy cheeks”, “pleasant smiles” or being “hapless”.
For those of us who recall the story of Ms Balding’s death and discovery of her body in a dam alongside a suburban freeway the book can only be described breathtakingly obscene.
I can’t imagine what it must be like for her family, not only to have been sent a copy of the book but to have such a naive endorsement of their daughter’s killers.
Janine Balding’s mother Bev describes Breen as “misguided”.
I think she is being unnecessarily polite to him.
It appears that Breen has embarked on a campaign for Stephen Jamieson’s release and to convince the public, almost 18 years after the murder, that his fellow killers Matthew Elliott and “B”, aren’t such bad blokes after all.
Not only that, but it appears he has spent parliamentary time writing his book and spending our money visiting three men regarded as being among the state’s worst criminals.
And then he has the nerve to describe his book as “the true story of the Janine Balding murder”.
It seems to me that not only should Breen be thrown out of the Labor Party, he should also be well and truly thrown out of the NSW Parliament.
This is the kind of reform the NSW legal system can do without.
There are far more deserving projects and individuals he could have turned his attention to.
And perhaps he could have spared the Balding family pain they certainly never deserved.