The mother who catalyzed the Debelle inquiry has clashed angrily with Government MPs this morning in the opening hearing of a parliamentary committee investigating the issue.
Danyse Soester, whose child attended the western suburbs school at the centre of justice Debelle’s inquiry, gave evidence before the Legislative Council committee this morning.
She carried with her a box of small Lego figures, taking them out and dropping them on the table one by one as she read a prepared statement.
“The education department is from the outside looking like they’re trying to fix this, but on the inside it is business as usual,” she said. “Cover up at all costs.
“I’m not going home without an education ombudsman.”
Soester said she called on Facebook for her supporters to send in Lego figures representing incidents of child abuse. She told the committee she received 220 figures in a week.
Questioning from Labor MPs Kyam Maher and Russell Wortley focused on her interactions with Opposition education spokesperson David Pisoni.
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Maher asked her if she supported people in authority informing the police immediately after becoming aware of alleged sexual abuse – to which Soester answered she did.
Maher then followed up by asking whether she was aware if Pisoni had informed police about alleged sexual abuse cases immediately after being told by community members, which drew a furious response.
“Really, is that where you’re going with this? Is that what we’re doing with our time? Because I’ve got better shit to do.”
Her comment drew applause from the packed public gallery.
The hearing then heard evidence from Andrew Mills, the chief information officer from the Department of Premier and Cabinet.
Mills was called to discuss issues about record-keeping, particularly computer records.
The Debelle inquiry found that Education Department officers had emailed two of Jay Weatherill’s advisers about a sex abuse case at a public school, but that they had not been passed this on to the minister or informed him in any other way. The email had been forwarded on by Blewett to another unknown address, but Debelle could not find any evidence about to whom it was sent and Weatherill’s staff could not recall.
The inquiry also reported that Weatherill’s computer had been wiped after he left the education portfolio, as part of a standard government practice.
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Mills told the committee that information – like an email – could be recovered from wiped hard drives with enough expertise and money.
He said it was nearly impossible to totally destroy information stored on a hard drive.
“Nothing’s impossible in electronics,” he said. “It depends on how much money you’ve got to spend. If you overwrite a harddrive for 72 hours continuously, the possibility of recovery is minimal.
“When you delete something from a computer, you don’t delete the information. It is always possible to find something.
“The harder it gets, the more expensive it gets.”
The State Government’s email system didn’t store emails on ministers’ computers. Instead, they were stored on servers operated by Telstra.
To recover a deleted or lost email – for example, the one sent from Blewett – from those servers would be prohibitively difficult, Mills said.
“We have 21 servers with seven hard drives on each. We don’t even know that this hard drive from 2010 is still there, because it might have broken and they might have replaced it.”
Mills said there was no policy to preserve email traffic logs, which show the point of origin and destination for emails sent within the government network. Those traffic logs were regularly deleted, he said.
The DBAN process that wiped a minister’s hard drive after he or she shifted portfolio had been general practice in the State Government since the 1980s, he said.
“Depending on the classification of the information on the laptop, they either have to use a process that cleans it … or if it gets to national security classification they have to destroy it.”
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