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Legislative Council - Fifty-Second Parliament, Second Session (52-2)
2013-07-03 Daily Xml
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CHILD PROTECTION INQUIRY

The Hon. R.I. LUCAS (15:36): I rise to discuss the Debelle report, and in particular refer to the damning criticism in that report of ministerial advisers Mr Simon Blewett and Mr Harvey. There is also criticism of Premier Weatherill in that 'he misses the point in his continued defence of their actions'. It is important to note that Mr Weatherill and Mr Simon Blewett are very close friends. They are politically joined at the hip, as has been described to me, and have been long-time factional allies within the Australian Labor Party. It is certainly my view that it is disappointing that Mr Weatherill, in refusing to take any action against Mr Blewett and Mr Harvey, is putting personal friendship and factional loyalty ahead of the public interest.

One of the critical issues in the report is what is known as the missing email—the critical email forwarded to Mr Blewett and Mr Harvey. Mr Blewett indicated—and there is evidence—that he forwarded that email to a person unknown. Curiously, in giving evidence to the inquiry, he could not remember to whom he had forwarded it. At one stage he thought it might have been forwarded to Bronwyn Hurrell, the media adviser, but the inquiry had Ms Hurrell's computer checked and there was no evidence or record of its having been received by Ms Hurrell.

The other possibility, of course, is that the chief of staff to former minister Weatherill forwarded it to minister Weatherill. When they went to check the minister's computer, of course all the files had been erased, and it was unable to be checked as to whether or not Mr Weatherill had received the email. So, there was a search of Ms Hurrell's computer but, for those reasons, it was unable for there to be a search of Mr Weatherill's computer. On reading the report there appears to have been no search of the departmental backup files at all.

I refer to the record of the Cole royal commission, and a former senior federal minister indicated to me that in his view the evidence as a result of the royal commission showed that, no matter what you think you might have done when you deleted an email or cleaned your hard drive, the work of the Australian Federal Police and other forensic investigators is such that they are able to retrieve emails that people believe they had deleted from their computers or hard drives that had been destroyed.

On a quick search, I refer to a statutory declaration by the Director of the Operations Security Section of the Information and Communication Technology Branch of DFAT to the Cole royal commission. In that he refers to work that they contracted with a firm called Data Recovery Services, among others, a forensic technical firm specialising in data recovery, and in his evidence he indicates that:

Before August 2005, such electronic systems as the Department had for backing up emails on the unclassified email system were limited to the purpose of short term system recovery in the event of, for example, a server crash. These backup systems employ electro-magnetic tapes...Essentially, when a backup is made, the information that is on the email system at the time is copied to a tape, and the tape is then stored and kept until the next backup tape is made. In practice this means that backup tapes could be, and sometimes were, overwritten within forty-eight hours.

The backup systems are not designed to permit emails to be archived or retrieved.

However, with sufficient time and resources, the backup systems can be used to reconstruct historical email files where those files have been captured on the backup tape.

His stat dec goes on to indicate how they were able to retrieve, using that process, some information of value to the Cole royal commission.

It is certainly my view that that searching of backup files and tapes within the department does not appear to have occurred. Whilst there is no evidence that Mr Weatherill received the email, because his tape and hard drive had been cleaned, curiously, there was also no evidence produced in the Debelle report that Mr Weatherill did not receive the email and that the evidence of that was destroyed through the process that has been described.

In my view it certainly raises some very important questions, which are still unanswered and need to be considered further by way of further investigation and inquiry, including forensic investigation of backup systems a la the Cole royal commission.

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