Copyright theage
Former paediatric intensive care physician James Tibballs, a 43-year veteran of the Royal Children’s Hospital, has also urged a rethink, saying: “You see the start of it in North America – who knows where it will end up?” The head of the federal parliament’s standing committee on health, Labor MP and former paediatrician Mike Freelander, acknowledged the controversy over the diagnosis, but said it was a state issue. Any federal inquiry should look at the child protection and child removal systems more broadly, he said. Collaery said that, nationwide, there was “clear evidence that we’re failing to protect mothers and their partners, of good character, from totally unjustified suspicion”. Collaery was the ACT attorney-general from 1989 to 1991. In 2001, he represented a young carpenter accused in a high-profile case of shaking his baby. The man was acquitted in a judge-alone trial by ACT Supreme Court chief justice Ken Crispin.
