"Just when you thought that you've seen and read it all, journalism students at the Queensland University School of Journalism and Communication have discovered yet another victim of abuse at the John Oxley Youth Detention Centre. The alleged abuse took place some three years after the Heiner Inquiry was closed down and had all the gathered evidence shredded by order of the Queensland Government to prevent its use as evidence in judicial proceedings and so it could not be used against the careers of the staff at the Centre.
So horrific is this new alleged abuse concerning a (then) 13-year-old boy seeing him nearly being choked to death by a staff member, continually bashed by other inmates, and permitted to be raped by staff letting inmates into his room at night, that the Centre can be justly called Brisbane's 'Abu Ghraib.'
Readers ought to remember that this is the same Youth Detention Centre which came under review by the Forde Inquiry in 1998/99. And yet, that Inquiry, with all the powers of discovery and summons like the current Morris QC Commission of Inquiry into the Bundaberg Hospital scandal, could not unearth this stark abuse. Nor could it unearth the unresolved 1988 pack-rape of a 14-year-old indigenous female inmates. The Forde Inquiry claimed that it could not investigate the shredding of the Heiner Inquiry documents because the Beattie Government just happened to restrict its terms of reference so that it could only look at the incidents of abuse, but not the act itself of destroying the related evidence to cover it up.
Everyone knows, let alone lawyers, that destroying evidence to prevent wrongdoing being discovered and thoroughly examined, is arguably more, or as serious, as the wrongdoing itself. They cannot be isolated one against the other because destroying evidence obstructs justice; and to deliberately prevent any investigation into potential wrongdoing being complete, is open to be seen itself as prima facie obstruction of justice.
The Forde Inquiry has serious questions of missing the obvious which ought to be addressed, and why didn't it seek to extend its terms of reference as the Fitzgerald Inquiry did.
The old adage of '...you can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but not all the people all the time', is coming true here. The more the Beattie Government continues to claim that this affair has been exhaustively investigated, the more foolish it looks. It's a sick, self-serving joke. It deserves being laughed out of town. This is a cover-up on a grand scale. The longer the Beattie Government and others try to pretend otherwise, the more shall be their culpability when the Special Prosecutor inevitably and finally takes to the task to getting to the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
The latest edition of The Independent Monthly (June 2005) can be seen at this link
Readers ought to take notice of Pages linked her at, 1, 2 and 3, especially 2 and 3."