Rob Davis of the Queensland Law Society is opposed to using private laboratories to augment the John Tonge centre’s DNA testing. Apparently private companies couldn’t be trusted not to tamper with the evidence!
Read Bernie Matthews’ series of articles about the centre and DNA testing in general on On Line Opinion, and you’d be left wondering how anyone, private or public, could do a worse job.
On Tuesday two accused drug dealers walked free because after 15 months the laboratory hadn’t been able to do the analysis, and what’s more couldn’t tell the magistrate when they would be able to. That latter point appears to have been cleared up yesterday when in another case, apparently also regarding drugs, they told another magistrate they couldn’t assign a scientist to his case for at least 2 years!
When Chris Puplick gave his maiden speech in the Senate in 1979 he based it around a joke. According to him the three great lies of the 20th century were “My cheque is in the mail”, “Of course I’ll still respect you in the morning”, and “I’m from the government, I’m here to help you”. Apparently after 26 years people like Davis don’t get the joke.
The John Tonge centre has proven it’s incompetent to produce results to any reasonable timetable, and its analysis in any case has been shown to be frequently flawed. Not only that, but when it comes to evidence tampering, it’s hard to go past the police force, from verballing up to serious and widespread corruption.
How is it that, despite the evidence, some insist on believing that the same person paid from the public purse will behave like an angel, but when paid from a private purse will debauch the public good? There’s a few books on public choice theory that Davis should read. Come to think of it, the John Tonge centre could make an interesting case study.