Who was behind ‘grievous lies’ to the minister, and other burning questions from the Coroner’s Court
The slow turning of bureaucratic cogs is typically about as interesting as watching paint dry.
WARNING: This story discusses incidents of self-harm and contains the name and image of an Indigenous person who has died.
But when those cogs churn out information a top bureaucrat describes as “a series of grievous lies”, suddenly they’re a bit more interesting.
Even more so when that information is relied on by a minister to lock up children inside an isolated unit of a maximum-security adult prison.
Who was ultimately responsible for those “lies” to then-corrective services minister Bill Johnston is one of the burning questions to arise from this week’s hearings as part of a mammoth inquest into the death of Cleveland Dodd.
The Aboriginal teenager died last year after he was found unconscious in his cell at Unit 18 – the very same youth wing that was seemingly created on the basis of lies.
Searching for genesis of lies
Over the course of the last week Coroner Philip Urquhart started to piece together a clearer picture of how Unit 18 came to be, and in the process, the genesis of those lies.
A critical point was a secret meeting three senior Justice Department bureaucrats were summoned to on a Friday afternoon in early July 2022.
The only youth detention facility at that point, Banksia Hill, was crumbling.
Acting Corrective Services Commissioner Gary Budge, Deputy Commissioner Christine Ginbey and director of youth custodial operations Melanie O’Connell were in the room.
The then WA justice chief Adam Tomison addressed them from a screen.
He was flustered and flushed, recalls Ms O’Connell.
Then, Dr Tomison dropped a bombshell: out of all the proposed options for a second make-shift youth facility – a unit within the Casuarina adult prison was chosen.
And it needed to happen “immediately”, Ms O’Connell recalls.
“[We] were silent,” she told the inquiry.
“I think all of us were, I think we were shocked.”
‘We’re going to lose a young person’
Weeks earlier she had attended another youth detention crisis meeting with a wider group of senior figures from across the prisons system.
“The genuine concern was we’re going to lose a young person,” Ms O’Connell said.
“We’re going to lose a staff member, we’re going to lose the site.”
Five potential locations were identified to house young people in case that happened.
Ms O’Connell prepared a brief document identifying the pros and cons of each option.
It seems at some point after that meeting Mr Johnston picked Unit 18 and tasked Dr Tomison to break the news to his three senior staff on that fateful Friday afternoon.
The minister would take the decision to cabinet the following Monday and announce it to the world on Tuesday.
But in the meantime, they couldn’t tell anyone outside the room.
‘It was the wrong place’
Ms O’Connell, who started as a youth custodial officer at Banksia Hill in 1999, cried on the stand as she relived that period.
“It was the wrong place to do it,” she told the court.
“[But] if this is the decision that’s been made let’s make it a bloody good site, let’s throw everything into it.”
As that work progressed, the department needed Mr Johnston to do some paperwork to remove Unit 18 from Casuarina Prison and designate it a youth detention facility.
To help him do that, Dr Tomison signed a nine-page briefing note prepared for him, believing what he was being told by those who’d done the work.
He acknowledged he should have done more to spot the “grievous lies”, especially around out of cell hours and the services which would be available there.
The former director general said that document, as well as other information given to young people in detention, their families, stakeholders and the media would have passed through at least two officials.
But he did not believe either deliberately misled them.
Commissioner made a ‘scapegoat’
One of those officials was then corrective services commissioner Mike Reynolds, who told the court he warned the government about the need for more supports for years, before they made him a “scapegoat” by removing him from the role in the wake of Cleveland’s death.
He returned from weeks of medical leave on the day the minister publicly announced Unit 18 and remembers being surprised by that decision.
“Unit 18 as a second site was a bad decision,” he told the inquiry.
“I think we needed a circuit breaker for Banksia. What that was, I’m not sure, but I think Unit 18 was destined to fail.”
Mr Reynolds said upon his return to work, he relied on his deputy, Ms Ginbey, for information in relation to the unit.
The now retired commissioner insisted he’d only signed off on the communication – including the ministerial briefing notes – because he believed the information had been correct.
Ms Ginbey – the second official to have approved the information according to Dr Tomison — was also set to give evidence this week.
However, instead she hired a personal senior lawyer and made an application to delay her testimony, so her lawyer could “get up to speed”.
The inquiry was told Ms Ginbey did so as she was expecting to have “profoundly serious allegations” put to her during examination.
Strategic communications
When probed about who drafted the letters sent to stakeholders, Ms O’Connell told the court they originated from the department’s strategic communications team.
“You and Ms Ginbey talk about what would be appropriate messaging to go back to comms?” council assisting the coroner Anthony Crocker asked.
“No, it’s comms coming to us saying what they think,” Ms O’Connell replied.
The court was told the strategic communications director Sue Short was specifically tasked with the job.
Ms O’Connell added that a person named “Richard” was brought in from the director general’s office to help Ms Short with that work.
The public servant said that while the genesis of the letters may have been strategic communications, the drafts could have been altered by various parties asked to do “quality and assurance” checks.
So who misled the minister?
The complex web of reporting lines and divisions which make up the behemoth that is the Department of Justice means we still don’t know.
It’s a situation that – surprisingly – saw Mr Reynolds agree with two figures he acknowledged he often wasn’t on the same side as: former inspector of custodial services Neil Morgan and former Children’s Court president Denis Reynolds.
All three agree youth detention should at the very least be split from Corrective Services and potentially even moved out of the Department of Justice altogether, which has been done in other states.
It means more bureaucratic cogs overall, which no government likes.
But it could mean there’s fewer gaps for vulnerable young people, like Cleveland, to fall through.
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