Buried in the labyrinth

July 13, 2005, the Victorian Government sent one of Australia's worst pedophiles to live in a house at 137 Kent Street, Flemington - just a few hundred metres from the home I shared with my husband and two children. Ever since, I have been trying to find out why.

I am not a vigilante. When it was at its height, when the journalists were massing around me on the steps of the court, I felt the pressure to assume a role. They needed me to be "Outraged of Flemington", but I felt not so much outraged as questing.

If someone from government had said at the outset: let's sit down and talk about this, let us explain, I would have gladly dropped the legal battle. Now I feel naïve for thinking that was ever likely to happen.

Instead, I have been knocking up against the courts, against my own profession of journalism and against the bureaucracy.

Brian Keith Jones, formerly known as Brendon John Megson, was first jailed in 1981 for abducting and sexually abusing six boys. He shaved their heads and dressed them in women's clothing, which is why the media began to call him Mr Baldy - a name that has stuck.

Before he was paroled in 1989, Jones made some tapes for pedophile friends outside who were awaiting his release. They were seized by the authorities. In them, Jones was planning his next offences: "I know what my idea would be, is getting a young ... woman who may have two little children or something like that, only real bubbies or something, and put her into slavery and make her watch as the children are brought up as our own."

Sure enough, when he was released, Jones carried out his plans. This time his victims were two brothers, aged six and nine. He went back to jail in 1993, sentenced to 14 years. With no parole, he was due for release in August 2005.

Aware of his impending release, the State Government had drafted a law designed to allow serious sexual offenders to be monitored following their release. The Serious Sex Offenders Monitoring Act was known in government as the Mr Baldy Bill, but although it seemed to be part of the solution, as 2005 rolled around it presented the bureaucrats with a problem.

If Jones was to be monitored long term, then this would have to be included in his parole conditions - and the date for his release, unmonitored and without parole - was in early August. By mid-2005, there was a race on to get Jones paroled subject to supervision, and to find him somewhere to live - before his sentence expired.

In March, it was reported that a house identified for Jones by Corrections Victoria had been rejected after an "environmental scan" detected two young boys living next door. A spokeswoman for the Corrections Commissioner said this proved the system was working. "We don't see it as a stuff-up at all, we see it as the opposite - the system working." The next thing anyone heard was in early July, when it was reported that Jones had been paroled and was about to be released.

Nobody wants a pedophile for a neighbour. Who knows how many of us have just that, without knowing and without any media fuss? I don't like moral panic, and I don't like hysteria, but there was a particular reason why this house, so close to my dear children, was spectacularly unsuitable. Every weekday morning, the walking bus for the primary school meets directly outside.

The walking bus is in itself a scheme born out of moral panic. Children are no longer allowed to walk to school alone because of all the fearsome things in the street - and yet they must walk, for fear that they will grow obese through too little exercise. Therefore, councils and schools setup walking buses, and parents volunteer to "drive" them on a roster system.

Each morning at 8.30, the children gather outside the house that was chosen for the pedophile. My son, who is in the pedophile's target demographic, used to climb on the low brick fence in front of the house if I didn't stop him. So tiny is the distance from fence to house that he could almost knock on the door without leaving the pavement.

Psychologists have told the County Court that, when in jail, Jones refused to co-operate with counselling or to discuss his childhood. Who knows what there was to be uncovered? All the professionals who have assessed him have said that, given a chance, he will most probably reoffend. The only clues to his mental state are claims by the court-appointed psychiatrists that publicity causes him stress. It is said to be in the public interest to keep Mr Baldy's doings and whereabouts quiet.

Assuming the psychiatrists are right, I may well be part of the problem - and you too, for reading this.

I was working in Adelaide for the first two weeks of July 2005. The kids were at home with my husband, who was juggling madly to keep the household running. I arrived home, travel weary, on the evening of the 15th. My husband picked me up from the airport and, as he shouldered my bag, asked me if I remembered that Mr Baldy was to be released.

"Yeah. So?"

"What's the worst place they could put him if they were going to put him in our suburb?"

I looked at him with screwed-up face.

Then he told me. Kid central, as we call it.

The corner where the walking bus meets.

I didn't believe him. Then I felt sick.

Two days before, Corrections Commissioner Kelvin Anderson had announced on ABC Radio that Jones had been released under the strictest parole conditions ever imposed. The supervision was constant, he said. Jones would not be able to leave his new home without supervision.

The next day, The Age and the Herald Sun had reported "sources" as saying that Jones was "electronically tagged". Later that day, someone had tipped off the Herald Sun about where Jones was, and they found him. The reporter and photographer arrived at the house just as the walking bus met.

They photographed the children meeting, and then they got photos of Jones putting out his wheelie bin. The walking bus left. The reporters asked Jones whether he had anything to say to his victims. Of course, he didn't answer them. He put his head in his hands, ran inside and telephoned staff of the Office of Corrections, who came and whisked him away.

By the time the children gathered to go to school on the 15th, the first vigilantes had also gathered. None of them was from our neighbourhood. They were people with pinched and florid faces - the angry crowd from central casting. They frightened the children more than Jones had had a chance to do. For the second time that week, the walking bus departed in fear.

That night, lying awake, I thought about what might have happened. If I had seen Jones standing on his porch, I would have wished him good morning and chatted to him. The children would have seen me do this. What then if, one day, they were on that street corner alone, and the nice man in the little house invited them in? All this had been prevented by the Herald Sun, the same newspaper that had brought the vigilantes - who, even as I lay awake that night, could be heard chanting in the street, holding their vigil at a now-empty house.

I was writing a column for The Age at the time and decided to write about the rights and wrongs of media exposure. I rang the spokeswoman for the Department of Justice, a woman called Ingrid Svendsen, whom I knew quite well. We played telephone tag. Finally we spoke. I asked how the house had been chosen.

"They would have done environmental scans," she said.

What kind of scans?

"Whether children lived next door, that kind of thing."

I told her that children did live next door. I told her about the walking bus, and the layout of the house in relation to the street. I asked again what checks had been done and she told me that the exact nature of the checks was confidential.

"Come on, Ingrid!"

"No, really, I can't say any more. It's confidential."

I hung up.

On July 25, I lodged a freedom-of-information request with the Department of Justice about Brian Keith Jones. I asked for two things: the nature and timing of the environmental checks done before Jones came to live among us, and whether there had been any reviews of these checks to assess whether they had been adequate.

Jones, meanwhile, had been taken to live in a house in the grounds of Ararat jail. In the media, the controversy faded. We were carrying on with our lives, walking past the house.

Freedom of information is a sunny title for a bureaucratic law. When the legislation was introduced in Victoria in 1982, I was part of the team of Age journalists who explored its use. We took literally the legislation's promise: that the presumption was openness, the intention democratic - to build trust between government and citizen. That was our rhetoric. The truth is probably that we just wanted good stories.

Freedom of information used to be fun. There is nothing exciting about freedom of information these days. It is a weary process.

My request was made on July 22. Ten days later, I got a reply that acknowledged receipt, and told me that the Adult Parole Board and Corrections Victoria held relevant documents, but the Adult Parole Board, as an independent statutory body, was not subject to freedom of information.

It was September 28 before I got my decision, which was a refusal. The documents were exempt from the act, it was said.

On October 4, I submitted a request for an internal review - the first step of the appeal process. In particular, I emphasised that I did not want personal information about Jones or his victims, nor did I want to prejudice law enforcement. I only wanted to know about the environmental checks. In November, I rang once more and was told that a decision had been made to refuse me access in total.

I lodged an appeal with VCAT. The case was set down for hearing, then adjourned at the Government's request. I hired a barrister. Finally, on July 19, 2006, more than a year after Jones had been brought to our suburb to live, we had our day in court.

Two officers of the Department of justice gave evidence. The first was a small, middle-aged woman with a husky voice and an air of great sincerity. The second was the Deputy Commissioner of Corrections Victoria, Paul Delphine. This was the man who had overseen the "environmental scans".

He gave the air of being affronted by the cross-examination process. Had he been aware, my barrister asked, that the walking bus met outside the subject house? He replied that he hadn't known this until he read my statement. Had he been aware that children lived next door? Not until he read my statement. They hadn't known. Nor, it emerged, had they checked with police, or the council, or local schools, or neighbours.

I had part of the answer I was seeking, but then my barrister was stopped from asking more questions, since it was clear that the stuff the department was trying to suppress was coming out in any case.

The department's lawyer asked Delphine if he was confident the environmental checks had been "rigorous and professional". "Yes", he said.

The judgment came down on October 19, 2006. I had lost. Justice Davis said the public interest in the effective operation of the parole system, including public servants being willing to give full and frank reports to the Parole Board, outweighed my "private interest in examining the process by which the property at 137 Kent Street came to be selected in a particular instance".