A convicted sex offender allegedly told police he was "obsessed" with child abuse material and "addicted" to collecting it when he was recently arrested in Canberra's south.
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Matthew James Carlyle Minson, 52, was taken into custody at his Greenway home last Thursday after police detected a user with his internet protocol address accessing objectionable files.
The married man was refused bail the following day by Chief Magistrate Lorraine Walker, who expressed concerns about Minson's criminal history and comments he had apparently made to investigators.
Court documents since obtained by The Canberra Times detail what police claim Minson told them as they searched his place.
Minson, according to the documents, admitted to having used the internet to find child abuse material for about 20 years.
He is said to have told officers he used search terms like "pre-teen sex" to locate the disgraceful content while employing a virtual private network "to avoid law enforcement detection".
"He feels an obsession, an addiction, to find and collect child abuse material," police wrote in a summary of Minson's alleged admissions.
"He has downloaded child abuse material that depicts children in scenes of bondage, torture, and sadism.
"He cannot quantify the number of child victims that he has within his child abuse material 'collection'."
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Minson is also purported to have told investigators he had "several thousand" illegal files stored across his electronic devices.
He allegedly said he deleted his collections regularly in order to "start again", meaning this total had only been amassed over the last year or two.
The documents also show Minson was in 2002 convicted in the Queanbeyan Local Court of possessing what was then referred to as child pornography material.
He appeared in the ACT Magistrates Court last Friday following his latest arrest on a charge of possessing or controlling child abuse material.
Commonwealth prosecutor Zoe Hough told the court Minson's previous conviction meant there was a presumption against him being granted bail.
Minson's Legal Aid lawyer, Georgia Le Couteur, said the 52-year-old would lose a job he had just started if he was remanded in custody.
She said the man would be willing to provide a surety and accept a ban on accessing the internet "in any shape or form" in order to secure bail.
But Ms Walker ultimately said Minson's apparent admissions to police suggested there were no bail conditions capable of preventing him from committing offences if he was released.
She accordingly remanded Minson in custody and said the 52-year-old would be expected to enter a plea to the current charge at his next court appearance on July 23.
Authorities have foreshadowed that further charges are likely, writing in court documents that five devices seized from the 52-year-old still had to be forensically examined in a process likely to take at least six weeks.
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