New Developments Over Missing Sydney Activist
NSW Greens MP Sylvia Hale (see this issue’s guest op ed) recently delivered the 10th Annual Juanita Nielsen lecture, posing the question The Greens: mainstream party or minor irritant? Nielsen was an activist, campaigning against high-rise development in Kings Cross.
She disappeared in 1975 at the height of a campaign which, “brought scrutiny unwanted by the developers. Her murderers have never been brought to justice,” writes Hale. “It is widely believed she was murdered for her active political stand.”
Following questions raised on the 7:30 Report in 2004, Hale says that police indicated that they would follow up fresh leads on the case. But whether this was ever done also remains a mystery.
Observing state parliamentary procedure, Hale is seeking answers to this and other questions which may well relate to figures still active in development in NSW. Hale has put questions on notice to Tony Kelly MP and Michael Daley MP in their capacities as Minister for Planning, Minister for Infrastructure, Minister for Lands representing the Minister for Police, and Minister for Finance.
Hale has put 16 questions, in which she makes reference to a former NSW police officer, development and investment identities, records of airline tickets used around the time of Nielsen’s alleged murder, revised testimony which places Nielsen on the cellar floor of a Kings Cross nightclub dead from a bullet wound, and more than a quarter of a million dollars which may have related to payment for the alleged murder.
Hale is also following a line of inquiry regarding the son of the late developer and club owner, Abe Saffron. Hale wants to know whether elements of Alan Saffron’s book Gentle Satan: My Father, Abe Saffron have prompted police to re-interview him regarding the case, and if police have “investigated whether Alan Saffron named all the conspirators in the original manuscript of the book, which is now in the possession of Saffron’s publishers, Penguin?”
In light of other information relating to Nielsen’s disappearance, Hale also wants to know why it took police a staggering four months “to examine the area where the storeroom had been located at the former Carousel Club, after interrogating Loretta Crawford in December 2000, when she claimed that she saw the murdered Juanita Nielsen and an unidentified man holding a gun in the storeroom in July 1975?”.
At the core of Hale’s questions is a theme justice in NSW is not blind, but instead turned a blind eye to the disappearance and alleged murder of an inconvenient activist. Whether current ministers in the NSW Government share Hale’s concern will become more clear in the coming weeks, with their response required by April 22nd.
