Matthew Collins faces Queanbeyan District Court sentence hearing

Despite admitting he sent the depraved messages, counsel for Matthew Grant Collins denied on Friday that the Conder resident had a sexual interest in children.

Barrister David Mulligan made that claim in the Queanbeyan District Court as Collins, 39, faced a sentence hearing.

Collins, a member of the Australian Defence Force, had previously pleaded guilty to two counts of using a carriage service to make it easier to procure a child for sexual activity.

An agreed statement of facts shows he committed the offences on June 30, 2022, when he initiated a private conversation with the undercover officer on a website called ChatIW.

Collins chose the username "Bored Soldier".

The conversation later moved to WhatsApp and, over the course of an hour, became increasingly depraved.

Most of the messages are too graphic to publish, and Judge Peter Whitford SC said on Friday their sexually explicit nature was "emphatic".

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Collins sent the NSW Police officer lewd photographs and a video while, according to his messages, in a changeroom at work.

He told the fictitious mother he was interested in girls aged from "around 9 up to 14".

The soldier suggested meeting the undercover officer and her made-up daughter, who was said to be nine, at a motel in Canberra for a sexual encounter involving all three people.

"Oh I want it for real!!!" he wrote.

Collins was arrested at work about a week later and extradited from the ACT to NSW, where he spent the next four-and-a-half months behind bars.

He was granted bail last November to live with his mother in northern NSW and engage with mental health services provided by the Defence Force.

On Friday, Mr Mulligan asked Judge Whitford to take the offender's post-traumatic stress disorder and major depressive disorder into account when deciding on a sentence.

While the defence barrister accepted the messages were sexually explicit, he argued the offending was of low objective seriousness.

He based this submission on factors that included the offending having only lasted an hour, and Collins having stopped communicating with the undercover officer of his own volition.

Mr Mulligan said many offences of this kind took places over a period of "days, weeks, months".

The barrister asked Judge Whitford to consider imposing an intensive correction order.

But Commonwealth prosecutor Laura Hannigan argued this would not be appropriate, telling the court such a sentence would not adequately deter others from similar crimes.

Ms Hannigan also said the Crown did not believe it would be open to Judge Whitford to find a material connection between Collins' mental health conditions and the 39-year-old's offending.

The prosecutor urged Judge Whitford to exercise "great caution" before accepting Mr Mulligan's suggestion that the evidence did not allow for a finding that Collins was sexually interested in children.

She said the short duration of the offending messages did not mitigate against the content of the conversation, which she argued spoke for itself.

Ms Hannigan also expressed concerns that Collins had only sought psychological treatment for his post-traumatic stress disorder since being charged, with no intervention directed at his specific offending.

Judge Whitford ultimately reserved his decision, indicating he planned to hand down a sentence in Sydney on July 21.

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