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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 9 Hansard (7 September) . . Page.. 3089 ..
MR RUGENDYKE (continuing):
for the purpose of locking up crooks and offenders. It is a great piece of legislation and I applaud it.
Debate interrupted.
That standing order 76 be suspended for the remainder of the sitting.
Debate resumed.
MS TUCKER (10.57): The Greens support this bill in principle, but I should first make the point that the word "forensic", in reality, means pertaining to the law and the term in this context, as any forensic scientist would remind you, should be forensic science. Perhaps the meaning of the word is changing simply because of the context in which it has been employed.
In regard to the Crimes (Forensic Procedures) Bill it is very clear that advances in forensic science technology have significantly improved the process of identification. The Greens acknowledge that it is important for the law enforcement agencies to be empowered to take advantage of these developments. However, any substantial change to these identification procedures and associated databases and facilities has civil rights and privacy implications.
Mechanisms which force suspects to provide a DNA sample, combined with the establishment of a national database which is accessible to an extensive and expandable list of law enforcement agencies, may well be open to abuse. There was a recent example in New Zealand of Maori and islander men between 25 and 40 years of age being pressured to volunteer blood samples. At the time, the police were reported as saying that any samples taken would be destroyed. Later indications, however, were that they were not destroyed and may be placed on the DNA database; so it is not quite as simple as Mr Rugendyke has painted it.
Furthermore, various royal commissions have uncovered extensive corruption in the police forces of Australia and this DNA database will have a national and global reach. For example, the Wood royal commission revealed that police medical officers were subject to pressure from investigating officers to corruptly alter evidence, while a 1997 US Justice Department investigation revealed that FBI DNA laboratories had engaged in a systematic distortion of tests results in order to favour the prosecution.
There is also the problem of unreasonable faith in the technology. DNA evidence at a crime might be consistent with innocence, but a jury might be bamboozled by what appears to be incontrovertible evidence that the accused is guilty simply because of the presence of identifiable and possibly coincidental DNA.
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