As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted...

(Scroll down to watch Derryn Hinch's first editorial in five months)

It's great to be back here with a brand new website. Great to be back on 3AW. It is even better to be alive. Thanks to an organ donor and his family I have a new liver. And thanks to Bob Jones and his team I have a new life.

Five months under house arrest. That's 153 days. That's more than 3,600 hours or actually more than 13 million seconds.

What was it like? I handled it. Didn't go stir crazy. Didn't get bored. Got used to the rules after being reprimanded in the first weeks for being 28 seconds late back from the exercise yard.

And for those of you who think: 'Well, it wasn't really jail, was it?' Just imagine having somebody knock on your door at 9.15pm for a random breath test. And having to seek permission to go to the doctor or dentist – the only excuses permitted for me to leave my home. And wearing a cumbersome ankle bracelet from July 21 until it was cut off my leg yesterday.

They call it home detention, which sounds like being kept in after school. But it was house arrest. I was banned from sending emails, from giving interviews, from broadcasting. Banned from earning a living. I was made a non-person.

Magistrate Charles Rozencwajg said he wanted to make it as much like jail as he could. And he did. I was even banned from using Facebook which I have since discovered has more than 100,000 names from people supporting my position over the suppression of the names of serial rapists and pedophiles.

And that's what this was all about. It is weird, even ironic, that while I was locked up, so much was happening on this issue.

I guess if my name were Senator Derryn Hinch I would not have been convicted, not have been jailed and not spent five months of my life locked up under house arrest. While I was gagged, Senator Nick Xenophon named a Catholic priest who had allegedly raped another Catholic priest. But Xenophon spoke under parliamentary privilege so he was protected from any legal action.

Xenophon said he felt 'duty bound' to name the priest.  The people in that parish, he said 'had a right to know'. Sound familiar?

My wife Chanel, who has been amazing through all this ill-health and house arrest, echoed the Senator Hinch line and said 'it highlights the ludicrousness of the law currently in place in Victoria'. And she's right. It is ludicrous.

To make it crazier, as I reached the half-way mark of my incarceration, the same Justice Department which charged me and had me muzzled for so long, they went into court to try to have  a suppression order lifted on one of Australia's worst pedophiles. Go figure.

David Grace QC said the man had been allowed to make unsupervised visits in Ballarat and to Melbourne even though he was still regarded as an unacceptable risk to the community. The lawyer said people had a right to know this serial offender was quote 'in their midst'. Hello? What have I been on about all this time?

Derryn Hinch back on air at 3AW. Photo: Craig Abraham

And, in West Australia, the Lower House has just passed a bill authorising the setting up of a public register for sex offenders. Something that we must have here. Something that is in operation, without fear of vigilante attacks, in the United States and Britain.

In my weekly sessions with case managers from the Department of Corrections  they did their job and tried to get me to pledge that I would never do such a thing again. I pointed out, with respect, if seven High Court Judges, and other judges from the Supreme Court and Magistrates' Court hadn't convinced me that what I did was wrong then they didn’t have much of a show.

The scandalous facts are these: Under the new law brought in in 2009, which is worse than the one under which I was convicted, more and more of the worst sex offenders in history are anonymously out in your communities. It is called the Serious Sex Offenders Monitoring Act. And even though it only applies to men who are likely to re-offend it is now hard for the media to even report such cases. Often, they are not even registered on the daily court lists. Shades of a dictatorship. The courts are saying that you, the mothers and fathers of young children, are not allowed to know why they are in court, who these men are or where they live or what they look like.

In the first 18 months after the new law came in, in late 2009, the County Court put 30 men under supervision orders. Do you know how many of them had their names suppressed? 28. They virtually rubber stamped them.

There are dozens of such men who have been released back into the Victorian community in recent years. Dozens more rapists and pedophiles in jail now and soon due for parole will benefit from such anonymity. I believe these men have no right to be able to go about their foul business under a cloak of court-sanctioned secrecy. They must be named. The campaign cannot end. Too many children are at risk. And, if I put myself at risk again, well, that's life.

These men all move anonymously amongst you. Their identities protected. By the courts. A protection not given to murderers or swindlers. Or me. And these cunning predators use their anonymity as a weapon.

One judge talked about the 'emotional and psychological effect on the respondent if material is published'. What about the victims – and future victims? What about the emotional and psychological effects on them?

I believe, that whenever released on parole they must be on such a short leash they have little opportunity to attack again. You not only deserve, you should demand, that such serial sex offenders be identified. The fight must go on.

As I walked, or shuffled, into court to be sentenced on July 21, only two weeks after having a liver transplant, I was fighting for breath and couldn't say much. [I correctly suspected I’d be banned from talking to the media on the courthouse steps after sentencing.]  I did manage to say: 'This is a bad law. It will change. May not be in my lifetime but it will happen'.

With my new liver I am now confident I will still be around when this mad, bad, dangerous law is dust binned.

And if by giving up five months of my new life, five months of my freedom, if that helps change a bad law and saves the innocence of even one child … then, has it been worth it?

My bloody oath it has. And if necessary, if an obscenely bad law does not change, I would do it again.

If you are viewing this page via our Iphone App, you must log into a computer to watch the video below

Derryn Hinch free from detention

Derryn Hinch has welcomed freedom after five months of home detention with a tweet and a glass of non-alcoholic wine. Read more and view Hinch's first moments of freedom by clicking on the image of Derryn on the right.

BACKGROUND CONTENT:

Hinch detained and banned

UPDATE: Derryn Hinch has received five months home detention and has been banned from broadcasting or publishing during that time for naming sex offenders whose names were suppressed.

Derryn Hinch sentencing

DERRYN HINCH: "I am under no illusions. If it hadn't been for my serious medical condition I would be in jail right now instead of writing this." Read the report Hinch wrote after his dramatic day in court on Tuesday.

'I'm not scared to go to jail'

UPDATE: Derryn Hinch has been found guilty of four charges of breaching a suppression order. One of the five charges he faced was dismissed. Read and listen to Hinch's say here by clicking the image on the right.

This is why Hinch keeps fighting

HINCH BLOG: "Now, these men, whom I have named, are evil men. Cunning, plotting rapists and pedophiles. One of them even plotted with the notorious Mr Baldy in prison about how they would run a farm with young boys as sex slaves when they got out."

Hinch 'didn't identify' pedophiles

LATEST: "On the other side the SC argued that merely naming them was enough because of the plethora of other material out there in the public domain – especially on Google – for somebody to put it all together and identify the person involved."