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Canberra - A state funeral planned for a former federal Labor minister has been cancelled following lurid allegations of child sex and rape of Aboriginal children.
Former Senator Bob Collins, made an Officer of the Order of Australia three years ago for services to the Northern Territory and indigenous rights, died last week.
As the Northern Territory's first federal minister, Collins was to have been given a state funeral in Darwin on Saturday.
But Prime Minister John Howard said yesterday that he had instructed Government protocol officers to suggest to the former senator's family that it would now be more appropriate to hold a private service and the family agreed. Howard was supported by Labor leader Kevin Rudd and other senior politicians from both sides of Parliament.
The decision followed graphically detailed allegations in the Bulletin and major daily newspapers of the rape of Aboriginal boys, and suggestions that Collins killed himself rather than face an impending committal hearing over sex charges.
His alleged victims included actor Tommy Lewis, famous for his role in the 1978 movie The Chant of Jimmie Goldsmith, who said Collins had taken him home for sex as a 13- or 14-year-old in Darwin.
"He humbugged me there [had sex], then let me have a shower," Lewis told the Bulletin.
Lewis described Collins, a huge man who weighed 200kg at his death, as scary, like the spider in the web, who kept photograph albums of young boys in sarongs.
Collins was charged with 21 offences in the Northern Territory relating to child sex over 30 years, another child pornography charge, and three further child sex charges in the Australian Capital Territory.
Collins was being eulogised as a great fighter for the north, the Bulletin said in an article by Paul Toohey, who has won a Walkley award for his reporting from the territory, and was Graham Perkin Journalist of the Year in 2000.
But he did untold damage along the way. When he had his way with boys, he was consumed by a sickness. On the times he spoke up for the rights of children, he was the worst kind of hypocrite.
Collins was a Labor hero, leading the Opposition in the Northern Territory before moving to federal politics in 1986.
He resigned from Parliament in 1998 and worked as a private consultant, but was plagued by rumours of child sex.
The Bulletin said that supporters of Collins believed the charges were trumped up as revenge for his political activities, but the reality was that the people with the most active grudges against Collins were those he assaulted.
The magazine said it believed a four-wheel-drive crash in 2004 in which Collins was badly hurt was not an accident, but a suicide attempt.
