one piece of possibly life-saving evidence went that way. One answer that came too late. It was brutal. Qantas admitted that almost a month after my arrest – a month after we’d first started asking for it – evidence was destroyed. A Qantas lawyer gave us the news in an email nearly two months after my arrest, saying that vision recorded at Brisbane Domestic Airport in October 2004 that might have had shots of me checking in was destroyed about twenty-five days after my arrest.
Qantas uses digital video recording equipment to record images from the cameras installed at Brisbane Domestic Terminal. Images are stored in these for a limited period before being overwritten. The retention time is typically about one month.
Unfortunately, during October, the recording equipment at Brisbane had been suffering from an intermittent fault and on or about 2nd November the unit underwent substantial repairs which appear to have resulted in the loss of the data pertaining to the period of interest.
Qantas email, 1 December 2004
Unfortunately. This was my life! What the hell was the problem with these people? Aren’t Qantas supposed to help their passengers? Not only had my lawyers been screaming out for this evidence from day one but my mum had driven to Brisbane airport four times, begging to see any videotape from that day. She begged them – begged them – but no one could even tell her whether it existed or not.
Each time, she got a different story. First it was: ‘Yeah, we have it, but we’re too busy to look through it.’ Too busy? Wasn’t this situation exactly the reason why they had multi-million-dollar visual security? Apart from assisting one of their passengers, it might also have helped them discover how 4.2 kilograms of marijuana had got by their airport security.
Mum asked if she could look at the tape. ‘I’ll make the time,’ she told them. ‘ I’ll look at it – please . . . please!’ But: ‘No, sorry, it’s against the Privacy Act.’ So while I was locked up in my filthy Polda cell like a caged animal, sure that Qantas would be doing everything possible to help me gather evidence, they were too busy to even look at some footage.
Mum didn’t let it rest. But all of a sudden, she was being told different stories: ‘The tape never existed’; ‘It had existed but it had been wiped.’ This was within the first few weeks, before Qantas officially claimed that it was destroyed. Why was it so hard to get an answer? What were they hiding? My lawyers couldn’t find out whether it existed either. To then be told in that December email that yes, it had really existed but no more, was gut-wrenching. No one from Qantas had even bothered to view the tape.
We’ll never know what was on it. Maybe it showed the size and shape of my boogie board, or perhaps it just showed me looking happy and relaxed as I checked in. It may or may not have been the killer blow we needed, but now we will never ever know.
Qantas did send its international security manager to Bali about a week after my arrest, but he simply talked about how the baggage-handling procedures worked. He told Lily that no ‘unauthorised’ people had access to the bags during the time that they were transferred from domestic to international terminals. With what we later found out regarding certain ‘authorised’ airport workers in Sydney, this wasn’t much of an assurance.
We did eventually get one piece of evidence from Qantas: the total baggage weight of all four bags checked in under my name – sixty-five kilograms. But unfortunately it was not a legal requirement for Qantas to weigh bags individually, and the total weight was useless because of bad police work in Denpasar, where they didn’t bother to search, weigh or keep as evidence the other three bags checked in under my name – those belonging to Katrina and Ally, as well as my suitcase.
It took weeks of phone calls, emails and fob-offs to find out that my bag was
Qantas uses digital video recording equipment to record images from the cameras installed at Brisbane Domestic Terminal. Images are stored in these for a limited period before being overwritten. The retention time is typically about one month.
Unfortunately, during October, the recording equipment at Brisbane had been suffering from an intermittent fault and on or about 2nd November the unit underwent substantial repairs which appear to have resulted in the loss of the data pertaining to the period of interest.
Qantas email, 1 December 2004
Unfortunately. This was my life! What the hell was the problem with these people? Aren’t Qantas supposed to help their passengers? Not only had my lawyers been screaming out for this evidence from day one but my mum had driven to Brisbane airport four times, begging to see any videotape from that day. She begged them – begged them – but no one could even tell her whether it existed or not.
Each time, she got a different story. First it was: ‘Yeah, we have it, but we’re too busy to look through it.’ Too busy? Wasn’t this situation exactly the reason why they had multi-million-dollar visual security? Apart from assisting one of their passengers, it might also have helped them discover how 4.2 kilograms of marijuana had got by their airport security.
Mum asked if she could look at the tape. ‘I’ll make the time,’ she told them. ‘ I’ll look at it – please . . . please!’ But: ‘No, sorry, it’s against the Privacy Act.’ So while I was locked up in my filthy Polda cell like a caged animal, sure that Qantas would be doing everything possible to help me gather evidence, they were too busy to even look at some footage.
Mum didn’t let it rest. But all of a sudden, she was being told different stories: ‘The tape never existed’; ‘It had existed but it had been wiped.’ This was within the first few weeks, before Qantas officially claimed that it was destroyed. Why was it so hard to get an answer? What were they hiding? My lawyers couldn’t find out whether it existed either. To then be told in that December email that yes, it had really existed but no more, was gut-wrenching. No one from Qantas had even bothered to view the tape.
We’ll never know what was on it. Maybe it showed the size and shape of my boogie board, or perhaps it just showed me looking happy and relaxed as I checked in. It may or may not have been the killer blow we needed, but now we will never ever know.
Qantas did send its international security manager to Bali about a week after my arrest, but he simply talked about how the baggage-handling procedures worked. He told Lily that no ‘unauthorised’ people had access to the bags during the time that they were transferred from domestic to international terminals. With what we later found out regarding certain ‘authorised’ airport workers in Sydney, this wasn’t much of an assurance.
We did eventually get one piece of evidence from Qantas: the total baggage weight of all four bags checked in under my name – sixty-five kilograms. But unfortunately it was not a legal requirement for Qantas to weigh bags individually, and the total weight was useless because of bad police work in Denpasar, where they didn’t bother to search, weigh or keep as evidence the other three bags checked in under my name – those belonging to Katrina and Ally, as well as my suitcase.
It took weeks of phone calls, emails and fob-offs to find out that my bag was
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