0/5

TV crew arrested in bushfire zone

A television crew, believed to be from Lateline, has breached a restricted bushfire zone set by the Victorian coroner.

latelineA television reporter and cameraman have been arrested inside a restricted zone left devastated by the Victorian bushfires.

AAP reports the pair allegedly avoided or bypassed a police road block before being detained at Kinglake, one of the areas worst-hit by the deadly Black Saturday bushfires.

Last week, Victorian Coroner Jennifer Coate issued an order banning unauthorised entry to bushfire areas where lives may have been lost.

Updated: 3AW has reported that the journalist who was detained is Rafael Epstein from the ABC TV program, Lateline.

A Victoria Police spokesman said the journalist and cameraman were arrested on suspicion of breaching the Coroner’s Act and interviewed at the scene before being released without charge a short time later. Camera equipment and vision were seized by police as evidence.

ABC claims the crew was filming interviews that had been pre-arranged with local residents.

The maximum penalty for breaching the Coroner’s Act is up to three months’ jail, the police spokesman said.

Source: AAP / The Australian, 3AW

15 Responses

  1. To sum up all this madness (reminiscent of South Africa’s old Apartheid State of Emergency press embargo back in the 80s), as Walter Kronkite once said about this type of press censorship: “I don’t think that, in a ‘democracy’, we would want the government acting in our name unless we knew what the government was doing.” Too right, Wally!

  2. Did they do a risk assessment? Were they qualified to assess the hazards? Did they contact anybody who had carried out a risk assessment? Did they know the Coroner had set an ‘exclusion zone’? Did they check the Coroners brief? Did they have the appropriate safety equipment for a fire zone? All these questions and more will be blah blah blah………….

  3. I repeat people: there is no excuse for what the authorities have done here. I am still not sure whether you are right in saying it is a crime scene or not – but what I do know is, for it to be a crime scene, their must be at least some suspicion that an actual crime took place (a fairly reasonable requirement, I would have thought). Either way, banning reporters from entering the areas is just the tip of the iceberg. The reason why I am so fast to get irate about this is because I know people who live in the area who have been denied the right to enter and leave their own town, and even worse, forbidden from entering their own properties. I have also heard the story of a man whose dog died of dehydration because the police wouldn’t let him into his own house. We could have gone up there and helped out some friends of ours, but no – they police turned us away at the road block and those people who we could have helped were forced to endure living in third world conditions for an extra week.

    The way to help people through times like this is not to baby them. The last thing they need in times like this is to deny them access to their homes, because “boohoo, their might be asbestos there!”. People go on and on about these fires bringing out the bets in people – well, in my view they have brought out the worst, because at the time when it was more critical then ever to give people the chance to deal with these matters free from interference, we have trampled all over their rights – their rights to their property, their rights to free movement, their rights to see their friends and family who live outside the exclusion zone, and even their rights to see for themselves whether or not their loved ones are dead. That is all.

  4. Some news reports stated the “said new crew were warned a day before and yet still chose to break the law and come back. Is this is the case, throw the book at them.

  5. The media have to realise that these areas have not been sealed off just to make their lives/jobs difficult. They are there so that the police can collect all evidence and a proper investigation can take place. What is not said is that many of the victims would have been cremated alive (distressing but true) and it can be very time consuming to work out what are human remains and what are not.

    The restrictions are also in place for the community’s own safety. Many of the older houses in that area may have contained asbestos in their walls and roofing and with their collapse, it will have been stirred up and can be easily inhaled.

  6. It’s a crime scene because people died. The police need to find and identify the bodies before the scene is contaminated. The residents themselves aren’t even allowed back into some area’s. Once the police clear it, the media will be free to go in.

  7. @someone BBBA, yes there are some silly laws out there for reporters but banning cameras from snooping into crime scenes where 30+ people have died is not one of them.

    @retter2critical, trust me if this was 7 or 9 there would be 60 comments here by now, the opposite network & fanboy army would have a field day and they would remind people of it at any excuse possible for the next 19 years. the ABC seems to dodge media attention easily.

  8. Arson has been ruled out a a possible cause for the “Kinglake complex” fire. Either way, there would be zero justification for fencing off the town as a crime scene unless the fire was actually started there, in the town.

  9. Jeez, throw em in jail or let them be free to film any crime scene. What contrast in the responses here. They proberbly made a mistake as there is a lot of land and they proberbly entered without knowing. Its a crime scene but surely a mistake. Inless they went through personal belongings in burnt houses I doubt their intent was bad, just poor judgement. We will see.

  10. Recently ABC’s Media Watch was criticising other networks for being intrusive when trying to obtain footage and stories about the bushfires. Now an ABC crew has been arrested for entering a restricted zone to do a report on the Victorian bushfires. I wonder if Media Watch will do a report on this during their next program.

  11. They have done nothing wrong. The lands are public, so they have a right to enter them, full stop. You cannot ban the public from entering an entire town – doing so is a grievous violation of one of the most basic liberties we should all be able to enjoy in a supposedly free and democratic country. Banning reporters is even worse, because despite how over-saturating I believe the media coverage of this event has been, banning reporters from entering the land is nothing less than censorship.

  12. I’ve never suggested it was Tony Jones who we would consider the anchor rather than a reporter as the story indicated.

    I was very clear on noting sources here and it has since been confirmed as a Lateline crew. Previously when TT and ACA stories are reported I’ve used other anchors for pics.

  13. I don’t care what network they were from retter I still say throw ’em in jail. Like the authorities don’t have enough to bother about without these kind of dimwits wandering about.

    And David…it’s a bit misleading to have a photo of Tony Jones linked to this story given there’s no confirmation who the journalist was (in your story you say it’s only speculation by 3AW that it was a lateline crew)

Leave a Reply