Pure Poison IconNo, this isn’t about Willow Rosenberg, it’s about a News Ltd story on the subject of a woman (who happened to be a lesbian, although the story doesn’t explain what that has to do with anything) released on parole this week after 21 years in prison for brutally slaying – and apparently drinking the blood of – a Brisbane council worker in 1989.


Lovely, lovely click bait words

The story indicates (despite itself) that she’s long been remorseful (which makes sense if she’s being paroled) about her terrible crime:

“I was an animal,” Wigginton said during an interview in 1996.

But even for a completely changed woman with that history – 21 years in prison for a brutal murder – it will be almost impossible to find work (a point the Courier Mail enthusiastically repeats), and consequently society will release her to starve to death in the gutter deign to pay her some kind of meagre welfare so she can eat. Because she’s apparently got serious medical problems, for example with mobility, she might even qualify for disability support, as, you know, a person with a disability. I know – outrageous, right?

Still, Centrelink payments – less than $250 a week on NewStart, about $350 a week if she’s genuinely disabled and can jump through the Centrelink hoops to get them to agree to it – are vastly cheaper for the taxpayer than prison, which is about $100,000 a year per prisoner. So, if the Parole Board have assessed her properly – and there’s nothing in the story to indicate that they haven’t – then at the very least this is great news for taxpayers.

Surely, the headline would be something like:

“Vampire killer” paroled after 21 years; cost to taxpayer to drop dramatically

The News.com.au headline (which you’ve already seen above):

Taxpayers foot bill for lesbian vampire killer Tracey Wigginton

Then they repeat the words “lesbian vampire killer” in the dot points and the intro text. (Some depraved pornography hunter is going to be very disappointed by Google search one day.)

FREED lesbian vampire killer Tracey Wigginton will cost taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars a year for the rest of her life, with no boss willing to take the risk of employing her.

TENS of thousands of dollars a year! WOW. Almost subsistence! If you take out $250 a week in rent, she’ll have between nothing and a hundred dollars to spend on food and utilities (which, for the sake of this story, we won’t claim are ridiculously high these days). I know! The high life!

Who else is thinking about going out and committing a serious crime so they can enjoy the luxurious treatment we mete out to criminals? Some of the Courier Mail readers certainly are…

But just to be clear – it’s probably not unreasonable to conclude from the headline etc that the Courier Mail is opposed to income support for unemployable ex-prisoners. So are they campaigning for the reintroduction of the death penalty? There is nothing in the article addressing the serious concerns with such a proposal, so apparently not. Are they campaigning to leave ex-prisoners starving in the street, or forced to turn to crime to survive? If not, what would they have them do?

Who knows.

Anyway, lesbian vampire killer.