Lab boss Cathie Allen complained of ‘Disney villain’ treatment but the DNA inquiry’s findings are much more damning

Cathie Allen gave evidence to the inquiry remotely.

“Disney villain”: that’s how managing scientist Cathie Allen believed she had been portrayed.

Disney’s evil animations (Snow White’s Wicked Queen, perhaps) are embodiments of nastiness so simplistic as to be ridiculous – no real-life human being could be so devoid of redeeming characteristics.

And when she finally had her chance to give evidence back in October, we saw Allen as a real-life human being; tearful and baffled that her good intentions had been so misinterpreted.

“I’m not a liar,” she said, again and again, as counsel assisting, Michael Hodge KC, bombarded her with suggestions she was dissembling. Agreeing with her barrister, Matthew Hickey, that she’d been depicted “as some kind of Disney villain,” Allen said: “I find it quite, quite distressing. It upsets me, as you can see. I’m just trying to do the best job I can.”

Walter Sofronoff wasn’t buying it. His report is a breathtaking denunciation of Allen.

Her name appears at the top of the second page and then another 533 times, each mention more devastating than the last.

Sofronoff writes that in late 2021, Queensland’s Premier and Health Minister “assured the public all was well”. They could not have known Allen had fed them misleading information and that, for a long time, she had actually been lying to her immediate supervisor and to senior police about the work of the laboratory.

There are a couple of ameliorating factors: she was under pressure from Queensland police to deliver results as quickly as possible. And she was in a poorly structured role with little real oversight.

But Allen, he writes, repeatedly and deliberately lied to her bosses, police, her staff and to him as commissioner.

She lied to police and then lied to prevent anyone discovering her lies; she hounded a whistleblower, Amanda Reeves, out of her job and then lied to cover it up; she rummaged through Reeves’ rubbish and then lied to the inquiry about what she had done. “The whole exercise was merely vindictive and was carved out to demonstrate dominance,” Sofronoff writes.

“The consequences of this strongheaded style of management was to preclude any chance that the laboratory could be a place in which staff could achieve excellence – despite themselves being capable of doing so.”

Allen gave “wrong and dangerously misleading advice” to the director-general of Queensland Health as late as June 2022.

Sofronoff describes her rise as “a tragedy, but Ms Allen’s appointment cannot be blamed upon anyone. In 2008, she appeared to be suitably qualified by training and experience.”

Yet she deceived the police into agreeing to her preferred, faster way of testing samples – that is, to simply not test any sample that seemed to have low levels of DNA.

In 2018, as police insisted samples be fully tested, Allen told staff to process them in such a way as to exhaust all the material in the sample, rendering them useless.

“In my opinion this was an act of spite,” the commissioner writes.

But why? Why would any scientist want the precious evidence of crime to be wasted?

“I don’t know what the motive was,” Sofronoff said at a press conference in Brisbane with Annastacia Palaszczuk. “I didn’t ask, I didn’t care. But it seemed to me speed of returning results to police was everything and that can only be the faster you get results back to police, the better you look. Everything was sacrificed for that.”

Asked if there was a criminal case to answer, Sofronoff’s answer was chilling. “I don’t know. But the report will go to the chair of the CCC (Crime and Corruption Commission) and he can make up his mind.”

A journalist asked: “Should there be consequences for those things as part of that maladministration and, later, these poor outcomes for Queenslanders?”

Sofronoff replied: “There’ll be consequences for somebody.”

Palaszczuk was equally blunt. “What we’re seeing here is someone, according to the report, who deliberately lied. And I won’t cop that. I won’t cop that from anyone,” she said.

Ms Allen and her lawyers declined to comment.