PROGRESS CHARGE FORWARD, BE WILLING TO MAKE MISTAKES.

VICTORIA'S worst sex offenders will be tracked by police for the rest of their lives under new laws.

For the first time, all pedophiles and the most dangerous sex offenders will no longer be able to hide when they are released from prison on parole - all their details will be held on a sex offenders' database.

Those registered on the database will have to tell police personal information, including current and former names, home and work addresses and even details of tattoos, birthmarks and scars.

They will no longer be able to move suburbs, change their names, buy cars or travel interstate without telling police.

One of Victoria's worst pedophiles, Brian Keith Jones - known as Mr Baldy - is expected to be among the first offenders to be tracked under the system when it is introduced this year.

The register will apply to all sex offenders who are sentenced to jail, are in a correctional centre or are on parole from that time.

It will be linked to a national database tracking sex offenders interstate and overseas.

Police Minister Andre Haermeyer said the Sex Offenders Registration Bill, due to be introduced in Parliament this week, would help protect the most vulnerable members of the community.

He said the new laws would also ban registered sex attackers from working with children.

He said offenders would face a year in jail and fines of up to $12,000 if they even applied for a job that involved contact with children and did not tell their employer of their history.

Registered sex offenders will face fines of up to $24,000 and two years' jail if they fail to comply with reporting obligations or provide false information.

Registration on the sex offenders database will be mandatory for all adults found guilty of a sex crime against children.

Mr Haermeyer said police would be able to use the database to monitor sex offenders as soon as they were released from jail.

"Sex offenders, and pedophiles in particular, are notoriously compulsive and recidivist," he said. "Sex offenders are known to go to great lengths - to move house and to even change states - to avoid police scrutiny. Now they will have nowhere to hide."

Sex offenders will be tracked on the database for a minimum of eight years - for people with no previous convictions who have committed crimes like an indecent assault of a child - and for life for serial sexual predators.

Mr Haermeyer said while registration was mandatory for adults convicted of sex crimes against children, courts would also have discretionary powers to add other sexual offenders to the database.

They include people convicted of a serious sexual offence where the victim is an adult and offenders who posed a serious risk to the community.

Courts will also have the power to add sex offenders under the age of 18 to the register, but the amount of time their details are kept on the database will be half of that of an adult offender.

Crime Victims Support Association president Noel McNamara yesterday welcomed the Government's move.

Mr McNamara said the register would complement the Government's new Victims Register, currently before Parliament, which keeps victims of serious crimes informed of a prisoner's movements.

Mr McNamara said the community was particularly concerned about Jones - for kidnapping young boys, shaving their heads and then molesting them - being up for parole in August.

Jones has been eligible for parole since last year, when he completed a minimum 12-year sentence for the rape and indecent assault of two young boys.

Mr McNamara said the register would also help prevent serious sexual predators, like serial rapist Peter Norris Dupas and pedophile Andrew Timothy Davies, from repeatedly inflicting their crimes on the community.

Dupas, who is serving a life sentence with no minimum for the murder of Nicole Patterson, terrorised women for more than 20 years and often offended while on parole.

Only two months after being freed from jail for raping a woman at knifepoint in Mitcham in 1979, Dupas raped a woman and stabbed an elderly woman in Frankston.

And only one month after being released from prison in 1985, he raped a woman at knife point at Blairgowrie back beach.

Pedophile Andrew Timothy Davies, 34, of Ardeer, was convicted in July 2002 of abducting two six-year-old girls and digitally raping them in a classroom.

Davies was last jailed in 1998 for breaking a community-based order by being caught in the girls' toilets of a Melbourne primary school.

Mr Haermeyer said the confidential computer-based register would be maintained by Victoria Police and would only be accessed by those with authority from the chief commissioner.

Police who disclose personal information on the database without authority will face serious sanctions including up to two years in prison.


I CAN ONLY HOPE OTHER AUSTRALIAN STATES WILL FOLLOW.