Armed fugitive Tom Phillips was no hero. It’s a huge mistake to think he was anything other than a dangerous and deluded armed thug. He was, as Police Minister Mark Mitchell succinctly put it, a monster.
I’d add to that: an armed bank robber, a kidnapper, a thief, and a selfish narcissist with little emotional intelligence and a short fuse, who lacked empathy.
He was also delusional and a man in serious need of proper mental health services. He clearly had little insight into what he was up to and the damage it was doing to those he professed to care for.
That he thought he knew best by taking his kids into the bush for four years shows how much the guy cared for his own needs and put himself first, ahead of everyone including his three young children. It’s not an overstatement to say he stole their childhoods.
I think Phillips had some kind of god complex - where he controlled situations through manipulation and force. He thought he was right all the time and blamed everyone else for his predicament. At no stage was anything his fault.
The damage he has done to his children may well last a lifetime. Certainly, the stigma will. And who knows what is yet to be revealed about their physical and mental state?
Some people tried to convince me over the past four years that he was some kind of fatherly freedom fighter. They are eating their words. And then some.
It’s obvious he had help from people in the community, and those people will no doubt in time be flushed out, as they should, for aiding and abetting this guy in his selfish pursuit of whatever he was trying to achieve.
And while I thought we could have done more to rescue those kids much earlier, I’m not going to second guess the police here.
I am a father of four, and no matter what I have been going through, battling the highs and lows of life, I have never in any way deliberately put my kids in harm’s way. Not for a second. Once you become a parent, there is something that takes over and the love and care and protection you feel for your kids is overwhelming. All you ever want is for them to be healthy, happy, safe, warm and fed. The rest is a bonus.
If anything, I’ve probably been too soft. But let’s get this straight, anyone who loves their kids does not do what Phillips did. Whatever reason he came up with, it doesn’t justify kidnapping them and taking them into the bush for four years and engaging in alleged burglaries, an armed bank robbery and a final, violent armed stand-off.
I can’t begin to understand how Tom Phillips convinced himself he was doing the right thing. He could have handed himself in and the kids back on any given day and there are well-established processes for custody battles. You may think they’re not fair, but you have to suck it up and put the kids front and centre -- any personal issues you are dealing should be kept well away from the children. But Phillips used his kids as human shields. It’s just lucky no one else died during this four-year ordeal.
I don’t know how on Earth the children survived. Four winters, four summers, four bad weather events, four times they missed Xmas. How long will it take to get them back into normal society? How will this damage their future relationships?
They have missed school, had no social contact with the outside world. And eldest daughter Jayda was with him as he shot a police officer and may even have seen her father killed. Will she ever recover?
The police and the authorities need to review this saga thoroughly to make sure it never happens again. And I hope Julie Christie’s pending documentary following the police investigation team doesn’t glorify or glamourise Phillips in any way.
As Mitchell says, Phillips tried to kill a police officer -- a man with a wife and young kids. Only the country’s worst gangsters and cornered thugs do that. And that was Phillips. Attaching the word “father” to him seems wholly inappropriate.
Anyone who thinks he was a hero may well need help themselves, or at least they need to take a really hard look at themselves.
And the next time Phillips’ kids need a father, he won’t be there.
