Selective deafness will not quell DNA clamour

Scientist Kirsty Wright. Picture: Lyndon Mechielsen

There are a couple of explanations for the abject failure of Annastacia Palaszczuk and her most senior ministers to act in the public interest over Queensland’s trainwreck of a DNA laboratory.

One is that despite the reams of documented evidence pointing to the biggest forensic disaster in the history of Australian crime labs, the Premier is selectively deaf.

It would follow that she has somehow not heard the rising clamour over damning evidence of a culture of concealment and incompetence in the Queensland Health-run DNA testing lab.

And that is why her government has failed to grasp the seriousness of the scandal with all of its repercussions for victims of crime, particularly rapes and murders, and community safety.

The evidence has been mounting, piece by piece, in the public arena since late last year when Kirsty Wright’s first revelations in The Australian’s Shandee’s Story podcast series were published.

It is the most worrying story I’ve investigated and reported in more than 35 years as a journalist.

Because of its scale across hundreds of cases, it is the most ­serious law and order challenge for the Queensland government in many years, perhaps in decades.

It will get worse until it is ­properly investigated – and that will only be possible when ­scientists and bureaucrats are compelled to give evidence under oath in public hearings run by a retired top judge. If the Premier, her spinners and advisers have been deaf to every startling new discovery by forensic biologist Dr Wright of systemic failure in the state’s major DNA testing laboratory, there is something very off.

I don’t buy it. The alternative and more ­likely explanation is that Palaszczuk and Health Minister Yvette D’Ath and Attorney-General Shannon Fentiman do understand that the DNA lab has grave problems.

Problems which – over at least the past decade – have resulted in DNA from crime scenes being botched and not properly tested; murderers and rapists across the state going about their merry business because their forensic traces are not being detected; and offenders who should be behind bars roaming free to reoffend.

It is an extraordinary situation. A DNA lab shown, repeatedly, to be applying methods and processes which – as the latest revelations on Wednesday from Queensland police show – are failing to detect offender DNA that was always there.

A lab failing victims of crime, cops, prosecutors, courts and the community.

And a government in its third term determined to avoid taking bold action – the sort of action ­former Labor premier Peter Beattie would have taken very promptly.

If the Premier and her ministers keep trying to contain this debacle with PR devices such as a meaningless and secretive desktop “review” of the lab, they deserve unremitting censure all the way to the next state election.