Thread: DPP to consider charging Henson

if this is going to decend to personalities i will lock it as it is achieveing nothing.

if you have something to add to the debate itself, feel free. if not, dont bother please.

I've watched this thread with some interest particularly in that I've observed some people here who on other occasions have walked very close to the edge of the rules of conduct of this forum. These same people have suggested that a man whose demonstrated abilities as an artist have earned him a living and a reputation for excellence in his chosen field should be pilloried for doing likewise.

And you will say that here no harm is done by pushing the limits here..and I will say what harm has Bill Henson done?

A greater harm will be done by stifling freedom of speech and expression when no malice is intended or indeed harm done.

I saw a doco on internet freedom in China. Try googling "Dalai Lama" in China and the freedoms we take for granted are curtailed.

It will be the courts and not the police who finally decide whether the artist, the displayers and or the guardians will be punished according to our law. If we don't like the law then we need our elected representatives to change it. Beware.

I liked this letter to the editor of the SMH:

With a foot in both camps, I have watched with interest as this sorry Bill Henson episode has unfolded. I am in a position, perhaps unique in this farce, of having been a member of the NSW Police Force for 34 years and, for the most part concurrently, proprietor of a commercial exhibiting gallery for more than 25 years.
I am gobsmacked and bitterly disappointed that a police force, which is far better than the one I joined all those years ago and far better educated, still fails to see when it has been ambushed by the pursed-lipped paragons of public morality; those zealots who can't separate nudity from sexuality and who rely on an obsequious police to do their bidding in glorious ignorance. Let's face it; most police would not know their Ansel Adams from their elbow.
Debate is one thing, criminal sanctions are another. Debate should be welcomed - criminal sanctions stifle any opportunity for debate.
Henson's art has nothing to do with exploitation or pedophilia, but enough has been said about that by those more qualified than I.
Not one of the pedophiles I arrested and prosecuted advertised their vile workings. They operated under the coward's cloak of darkness and familiarity. Not for them the arc lights of a legitimate gallery - more the deeper crevices of the internet or the well-thumbed pages of their sordid juvenilia and other paraphernalia.
That senior police fail to utilise their discretion to uphold the independence of a profession I still hold dear, setting themselves up again to be pilloried for ill-informed actions that must surely fail, is a bitter pill for me.
Having worked with scarce resources, I shake my head at the waste portrayed by television images of police seizing crates of artworks, and wonder to what better use their expertise might be applied. Child protection, perhaps?
Ill-informed comment and motherhood statements from political leaders that further cast the burden on police are regrettable.
To ensure that public disquiet is addressed in the future and that the police do not continue to undo their normally laudable work, perhaps those same political leaders might consider a mechanism where pious complaints can be referred to censorship arbiters.
In the meantime, I commend Elizabeth Ann Macgregor, the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, for standing tall when others have lacked the backbone to do the same.
In my various command positions, I would not have sanctioned the actions being taken by police. I would also have no hesitation in exhibiting Henson's work.

In time, this whole inane episode will appear pretty dumb, but the damage to Henson and his subjects and lost opportunities for professional policing are inestimable.
Alan Leek (retired superintendent of police) Breewood Galleries, Richmond