Queensland DNA lab discoveries to keep on coming

Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk on Wednesday. Picture: Tara Croser.

It must be finally dawning on the strategists and advisers in Annastacia Palaszczuk’s seven-year-old government that any public perceptions of political failure which has led to rapists and murderers going free is voter poison.

With a fiercely independent commissioner in Walter Sofronoff and the likelihood victims of crime will come forward and describe how they have been completely failed by the criminal justice system, Palaszczuk will need to deploy all her political skills and present as a leader determined to take charge and fix this mess.

To their credit, the Premier and her Health Minister, Yvette D’Ath, did finally respond to an obvious serious problem with the establishment of a royal commission-style inquiry.

But it took them until June this year and only after a sustained series of alarming revelations starting in late 2021 when forensic biologist Kirsty Wright’s disclosures were first aired in The Australian and its podcast series.

Until a few months ago, it was as if the political advisers and the politicians were determined to tough it out, notwithstanding the facts and circumstances which were being raised every week since November.

That was a lamentable political response. But fortunately for the Palaszczuk government, the opposition was hopeless too.

Senior opposition figures, who should have known better, were paralysed and hopeless late last year, unable to appreciate the gravity of the situation. The opposition missed an early opportunity to do its job of holding the government to account.

Opposition Leader David Crisafulli’s predecessor Deb Frecklington did her best but the wider team forfeited a golden opportunity to do its job early and effectively. The new leader should have been better briefed and all over this, as he is now.

How this will play out for the government, midway through its third term, will depend on several swing factors.

Firstly, the responsiveness of the government from here on is crucial to how it will be perceived by the end of Sofronoff’s inquiry to have handled this serious problem for the criminal justice system.

The decision to stand down two executive managers of the government’s broken DNA testing laboratory was not recommended by Sofronoff, but given what he has already reported it was the right move.

But there will also be risks. Senior public servants thrown under the bus can respond with damning evidence of the difficulties they may have faced getting more funding from a heavily indebted government to exhaustively test DNA samples from major crimes.

Look out for disclosures of internal briefing notes or management pleas for more funding – and how these were handled.

The operation and funding of the Queensland Health-run DNA-testing laboratory are not new problems.

Nor are they unique to the Palas­zczuk government. This lab has had serious defects going back to the Labor government of Peter Beattie in 2005.

So far, retesting of crime scene DNA samples is extending back almost five years, to the start of 2018. But this will need to be extended.

The Australian’s sources and the extraordinary work of Wright highlight shoddy testing since 2005 when the Beattie government and its then-health minister Gordon Nuttall were put on ­notice by scientists in the lab.

In early 2005, a damning internal document was leaked to me when I was a reporter at The Courier Mail. The resulting articles led to a review by an external agency but its findings were never released and Nuttall, for completely different reasons, ended up in prison after being prosecuted for corruption.

The 2005 report will be of interest to the DNA inquiry investigators now as they look for root causes of this crisis.