Magistrate Gareth Christofi will render a verdict in the court case R v Brian Charles Houston tomorrow at Sydney’s Downing Court Centre.
In a previous hearing, he laid out what he needed to decide the case succinctly. On the last day of the thirteen days of hearing in December last year, Christofi said the issues were:
“I would say that the issues become pretty simple in the end,” said Magistrate Christofi responding to a suggestion that oral submissions could take days.
“Is there a reasonable excuse?
“What is the reasonable excuse?
“Can it be proved beyond a reasonable doubt that there was no reasonable excuse?
“Did the complainant [Brett Sengstock] say he did not want to go to the police?
Houston is charged under section 316 of the NSW Crimes act with failure to report a serious indictable offense.
That offense was the sexual abuse of Brett Sengstock as a young boy by Frank Houston, then a visiting Assemblies of God preacher from New Zealand. Frank Houston’s culpability is not in question, or the fact that Brian Houston, after a delay of decades, came to know about it. It involved a complicated chain of revelations involing Sengstock’s mother, great aunt and a chain of pastors eventually telling Brian Houston of his fathers offending in Octoner 1999 that was unreavelled in days of the hearing in December.
This testimony traversed the same ground as the Royal Commission into the Instutional response to Child Sexual Abuse did in 2014 with many of the same witnesses.
The Royal Commission found that Brian Houston failed to report his father’s crime to the police. That’s not in dispute in this case.
As Magistrate Christofi pointed out whether Brian Houston had a reasonable excuse for not reporting his father’s crime is at the heart of this case.
The reasonable excuse in question is whether Brett Senstock asked Brian Houston or others not to report the crime. The prosecution case is that Brian Houston downplayed Frank Houston’s pedophilia, using vague terms to minimise reputational damage to Hillsong Church, which was evidence of a motive not to report.
The defence argued that while Brian Houston mifght have been concerned about church reputation, he was open about his father’s crime to tens of thousands of people at Hillsong church, the Hillsong Conference and in the media – and that a concern to follow victim/survivor Sengstock’s desire for him not to report to the police determined his actions.
The Crimes Act was changed a couple of times during the period since Brian Houston found out about his father’s crime and since Frank Houston died. Significantly, a desire by an adult victimn/survivor for someone not to report sexual abuse, was made a reasonabkle excuse in the law.
One thing Magistrate Christofi has to take into account is whther that change in. the law reflects community attitudes of 1999 when Brian Houston first found out about hius father.