Allen’s effective barrister, Matthew Hickey, is a strong questioner who can sing for his supper. Literally. Having started as a boy soprano, he became an operatic tenor, performing with Dame Joan Sutherland and then helping start The Ten Tenors with some 1500 shows on tour around the world, according to Wikipedia.
His voice projects with booming clarity in Court 40 but Allen should have been drawn to the line in his CV about “considerable experience in reputation-sensitive litigation”. Hickey must perform fancy footwork while giving his vocal chords a powerful workout if he’s to pull his embattled client out of a hole.
Yesterday, he put to a senior scientist, Kylie Rika, who had already signalled her grave concerns about the lab’s workings, that she would agree that her boss, Allen, was not “corrupt” or “dishonest”.
It was a risky question.
Ms Rika paused. Tension rose. Her silence – and then her deflections – spoke volumes.
Ms Rika believes the lab is “toxic” and has suffered for years from significant management failings that inevitably prevent it solving some serious crimes.
She’s alarmed that Allen pressed into practice changes to lab testing, changes that would doom, not solve, serious cases.
Because she found the changes impossible to justify and hard to comprehend scientifically, she predicted that non-scientist police who had to sign off on the changes would have had no idea what they were agreeing to.
Rika was saved by Commissioner Walter Sofronoff KC from having to answer Hickey’s question about whether she regarded her stood-aside boss as corrupt or dishonest.
Mr Sofronoff said to the talented tenor: “It’s really a question for me, isn’t it?”
But Rika’s prediction that police would have been baffled by the lab’s incomplete explanations for wanting to stop thoroughly testing thousands of crime scene samples was on the money.
Because right after Rika left the witness box, we heard from police inspector David Neville, who has been in charge of the DNA unit in the police service since mid-2018. The cops are meant to be the clients. The laboratory is the service provider. But it doesn’t work like that.
Neville’s evidence and emails already paint a deeply worrying portrait.
He didn’t use all these words – but the upshot was that he came to regard Allen as an aggressive, unreasonable executive who treated police like mushrooms and ran a DNA testing lab with a cavalier disregard for victims of crime.
He said Allen had warned him: “You can either be my friend or my foe – and when you’re my foe, there’s no coming back.”
Neville came to regard her explanations as inconsistent and slippery. He found it hard to understand some of the complex scientific papers he was given by lab management.
He began running his own reviews of the lab’s results. From the reviews, he knew for sure the lab was a forensics basket-case.
Now the cop and Allen really are going to be foes for all time. There’s no coming back.
And Hickey won’t be playing play matchmaker.
Do you know more? Email shandee@theaustralian.com.au
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If Cathie Allen, senior scientist and newly stood-aside manager of Queensland’s strife-torn DNA testing laboratory, watches the live-streaming of witnesses at the public inquiry, she’d need a stiff drink before stumps on Day 2. Or at least a Panadol and a lie-down.