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RELATED: Child protection worker denied bail
A FORMER Bendigo child protection worker who fled the state after police found child exploitation material on his computer and hard drives has been placed on the sex offenders register for eight years.
Cameron Dale Allan, 44, of Jackass Flat, was sentenced via video link in the Wangaratta Magistrates’ Court on Wednesday to 116 days jail.
He has already served 116 days in custody – the majority of which was in isolation – and was released after sentencing.
Magistrate John Murphy convicted Allan and placed him on a 12-month community corrections order with 250 hours of unpaid community work.
He will receive treatment and assessment for mental health concerns and to address his offending behaviour.
Seventy-five hours of this treatment will go towards his community work.
During his plea hearing in Bendigo in April, the court heard Allan was in possession of at least 980 child exploitation images.
Allan, who was a senior child protection worker at the Department of Health and Human Services in Bendigo, claimed he had downloaded “bulk amounts of pornography” in screen dumps and was unaware of some of the content.
Police found two million images on his computer, hard drives and mobile phone, but could only analyse 90,000.
The devices were seized during a raid on Allan’s Jackass Flat residence at 7.30am on February 7 based on information from detectives in Benalla.
They went back to the house at 11.40am to arrest Allan, but he was no longer at the premises. A number of his personal items were also missing, along with his car.
Investigators travelled to New South Wales and Queensland before he was found in South Australia and extradited back to Victoria.
His defence counsel Robert Timms said the time in custody was “enough” because Allan would have to rebuild his life from scratch upon his release.
Magistrate John Murphy told Allan to reflect on his offending two months before he was sentenced.
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