Gee, what a surprise. Some lawyers take drugs and others find themselves convicted of s-x crimes. How does that make the legal profession different from any other group in the community? It doesn’t, unless you have McCarthyist zeal about you. New South Wales Liberal Senator Bill Heffernan is firmly in that category.

Yesterday, Senator Heffernan, fresh from his personal PR offensive to apologise over his Julia Gillard “barren” remarks, was wading into battle again on another of his favourite obsessions — s-x and the legal profession.

According to Heffernan, the conviction of Sydney prosecutor Patrick Power earlier this month on possession of child pornography charges is a sure sign that there is an epidemic of s-x crime among judges and lawyers. “For many years I have said that there is a serious compromise at work in our legal and judicial circles and the quicker we get beyond denial on this the better,” fumed Senator Heffernan at an Estimates Hearing yesterday.

And where’s the evidence to back up this sensational claim? Oh, there’s an old piles of papers of unknown authenticity floating around, that names three lawyers, all of whom were referees for Power, as child-abuse offenders.

But the problem is that Federal Police Commissioner Mick Keelty reckons these allegations have been investigated before and found to be “baseless”. Which is copper-speak for there’s not a shred of evidence. Believe me, if there was, you can bet that the police would be on to it, because there’s nothing they like better than skewering lawyers and then parading their heads around on a stake for all the media to see.

Why does the media continue to give Heffernan airtime on his obsession about lawyers and s-x? If Joe Citizen gave the media the same information as Senator Heffernan proffered yesterday in the defamation-free zone called the Senate, no journalist would give it the time of day, after they rang Keelty and got his dismissive response.