Sex Offenders should never get a clean slate
Predator Santa exposes sickening failure in child protection
There is something seriously wrong in this country when a man convicted of indecency can sit in a Westfield mall dressed as Santa, with children lining up to climb on his lap, and nobody bothers to ask the right questions.
Timothy Fisher should never have been anywhere near children. He had three convictions for indecency in 2002, a police “red stamp” in 2014 warning he was unsafe around kids, and then, just this year, he was jailed for abusing nine girls while working for a tutoring company.
Somehow, despite this history, Fisher was employed in 2022 and 2023 as Santa at three of Auckland’s biggest shopping centres: St Lukes, Newmarket and Manukau. The explanation? A vetting failure. The photo supplier simply didn’t run proper checks. Westfield’s parent company Scentre Group is now scrambling to review its processes.
That is not good enough. Parents had the right to expect that the man in the Santa suit had been properly vetted. Instead, they were unwittingly putting their children in front of a predator.
The Clean Slate Act, designed to wipe the slate clean for old convictions, played its part in this disaster. Laws that prioritise offenders’ privacy over children’s safety are indefensible. No one with child sex convictions should ever be able to legally conceal them when applying for a role involving kids. Full stop.
The Teaching Council also has questions to answer. In 2014, police stamped his file to say he should never be left alone with children. The council still renewed his practising certificate. How many warnings does it take before action is finally taken?
This is not a one-off mistake. It is a catalogue of systemic failures - weak laws, rubber-stamping regulators, and private companies asleep at the wheel. The result was that a predator ended up working as Santa Claus, of all things, right in the heart of Auckland’s busiest malls.
Parents and children deserve better. They deserve a system where child protection comes first, every time, no exceptions.
Until this country gets serious about confronting the sheer number of predators hiding in plain sight, New Zealand will remain a place where paedophiles find loopholes and second chances and where children are left exposed.
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There is one reform that cannot wait and the Clean Slate Act must be rewritten. The idea that a convicted sex offender can simply wait out a period of time and then have their record concealed is obscene…