CLIMATE ROUNDUP

Three current articles below

Climategate: ordering a better scare for Australia

The exchange and comments presented below by Andrew Bolt include something that is really explosive for anyone with the most basic knowledge of statistics. The Warmist scientist has undertaken to present changes that are not statistically significant (i.e. random changes) as if they WERE statistically significant. See the update at the foot of the article. Once again we see a total lack of scientific integrity among Warmists. The UEA is just a propaganda institution. It's not a real university's anus

CSIRO alarmist Barrie Pittock tells off Climategate scientist Mike Hulme of the University of East Anglia for not presenting material that’s scary enough for green groups:

I would be very concerned if the material comes out under WWF auspices in a way that can be interpreted as saying that “even a greenie group like WWF” thinks large areas of the world will have negligible climate change. But that is where your 95% confidence limit leads.
Sorry to be critical, but better now than later!…

Dr A. Barrie Pittock

Post-Retirement Fellow*, Climate Impact Group

CSIRO Atmospheric Research

Hulme agrees to help, up to a point, to hide some doubts:

My reason for introducing the idea of only showing changes in T and P that *exceed* some level of ‘natural’ variability was a pedagogic one, rather than a formal statistical one (I concede that using ‘95% confidence’ terminology in the WWF leaflet is misleading and will drop this). And the pedagogic role of this type of visual display is to bring home to people that (some, much or all of) GCM simulated changes in mean seasonal precip. for some regions do *not* amount to anything very large in relation to what may happen in the future to precip. anyway…

The point behind all this is to emphasise that precip. changes are less well-defined than temp. changes *and* that we should be thinking of adaptation to *present* levels of precip. variability, rather than getting hung up on the problems of predicting future precip. levels. This pedagogic thinking is hard to communicate in a short WWF brochure.

Your concern about my message is well taken, however, and I intend to remove any reference to 95% confidence levels, to re-word the text to indicate that we are plotting precip. changes only ‘where they are large relative to natural variability’, and to reduce my threshold to the 1 sigma level of HadCM2 control variability (e.g. this has the effect of showing precip. changes for the majority of Australia even in the B1 scenario).

But I do not intend to abandon the concept. I think it important - even for Greenie groups - to present sober assessments of magnitudes of change. Thus making it clear that future changes in T are better defined that future changes in P, and also to point out that future emissions (and therefore climate change) may be as low as the B1 scenario (is B1 climate change negligible? I almost think so), whilst also being possibly as high as A2 is I think very important.

The alternative is to think that such a more subtle presentation is too sophisticated for WWF. But I think (hope) not. Thanks again Barrie for forcing me to think through this again.

Pittock then explains why he’s so keen to “improve” this material - and also illustrates just how close green groups are to the CSIRO (whose climate change risk expert Penny Whetton is married to a Greens politician):

I should perhaps explain my delicate position in all this. As a retired CSIRO person I have somewhat more independence than before, and perhaps a reduced sense of vested interest in CSIRO, but I am still closely in touch and supportive of what CAR is doing. Also, I have a son who is now a leading staff member of WWF in Australia and who is naturally well informed on climate change issues. Moreover, Michael Rae, who is their local climate change staffer, is a member of the CSIRO sector advisory committee (along with some industry people as well) and well known to me. So I anticipated questions from WWF Australia, and from the media later when the scenarios are released...

Hulme then alerts another colleague to this exchange, under an interesting header, as an example of the massaging of their message to fit an audience:

From: Mike Hulme

To: Jennifer F Crossley

Subject: Re: masking of WWF maps

... it illustrates nicely the nuances of presenting climate scenarios in different Fora

Word sure had got around the green traps about how helpful the University of East Anglia was prepared to be to green campaigners. Here is an email from green entrepreneur Adam Markham to Hulme, asking for “beefed up” scares and directing him to Pittock’s more alarming scenarios, as and example of what WWF likes:

From: Adam Markham

Subject: WWF Australia

Date: Thu, 29 Jul 1999 09:43:09 -0400

Hi Mike,

I’m sure you will get some comments direct from Mike Rae in WWF Australia, but I wanted to pass on the gist of what they’ve said to me so far. They are worried that this may present a slightly more conservative approach to the risks than they are hearing from CSIRO. In particular, they would like to see the section on variability and extreme events beefed up if possible. They regard an increased likelihood of even 50% of drought or extreme weather as a significant risk. Drought is also a particularly importnat issue for Australia, as are tropical storms.

I guess the bottom line is that if they are going to go with a big public splash on this they need something that will get good support from CSIRO scientists (who will certainly be asked to comment by the press). One paper they referred me to, which you probably know well is:  “The Question of Significance” by Barrie in Nature Vol 397, 25 Feb 1999, p 657

Let me know what you think. Adam

UPDATE

Reader Grant:

There is an explosive admission in this exchange that needs to be drawn out and it is to do with the following comment:

Your concern about my message is well taken, however, and I intend to remove any reference to 95% confidence levels, to re-word the text to indicate that we are plotting precip. changes only ‘where they are large relative to natural variability’, and to reduce my threshold to the 1 sigma level of HadCM2 control variability (e.g. this has the effect of showing precip. changes for the majority of Australia even in the B1 scenario

In statistics this is important because any 1st year undergrad is told that the scientific approach for testing for significance is a 2-sigma test; ie the 95% confidence interval. Results that are significant at no more than 1-sigma significant are as good as meaningless in the sense that they are no different to sheer randomness and would be laughed all the way out of a 1st year course on stats.

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Nature will decide Earth's future

By Professor Bob Carter, currently aboard a research ship near New Zealand. He is a research professor at Queensland's James Cook University - where he was Professor and Head of School of Earth Sciences between 1981 and 1999 - and the University of Adelaide

AS the core samples from deep underground pass through the logging sensor before me, the rhythmic pattern of ancient climate change is clearly displayed. Friendly, brown sands for the warm interglacial periods and hostile, sterile grey clays for the cold glaciations. And for more than 90 per cent of recent geological time the Earth has been colder than today.

We modern humans are lucky to live towards the end of the most recent of the intermittent but welcome warm interludes. It is a 10,000 year-long period called the Holocene, during which our civilisations have evolved and flourished.

The cores tell the story that this period is only a short interlude during a long-term decline in global temperature - they also warn of the imminence of the next glacial episode in a series stretching back more than 2 million years.

Together with 50 other scientists and technicians, I am aboard the drilling ship Joides Resolution. JR, as it is affectionately known, is the workhorse of the Ocean Drilling Program, an international program that is to environmental science what NASA is to space science.

JR's drilling crew can retrieve cores up to 1km or more below the seabed and we are drilling today about 80km east of South Island in New Zealand. The ancient muds and sands that make up the sediment layers we pass through are the most important record of ancient climate that scientists possess. And they tell the tale that climate always changes.

Some core alterations are ruled by changes in the Earth's orbit at periods of 20,000, 40,000 and 100,000 years, others by fluctuations in solar output and others display oceanographic and climate shifts caused by . . . we know not what. Climate, it seems, changes ceaselessly: sometimes cooling, sometimes warming, oft-times for reasons we do not fully understand.

Similar cores through polar ice reveal, contrary to received wisdom, that past temperature changes were followed - not preceded but followed - by changes in the atmospheric content of carbon dioxide. Yet the public has been misinformed to believe that increasing human carbon dioxide emissions will cause runaway warming; it is surely a strange cause of climate change that postdates its supposed effect?

The now numerous special interest groups who continue to lobby for unnecessary and economically harmful carbon dioxide taxation need to appreciate that nature, not the world's governments, will determine future climate. Second, that there is no scientific evidence that warmings greater than the much-talked about 2C will cause environmental catastrophe; rather, this number is one plucked out of the air for reasons of political targetry and control. And, third, that to limit atmospheric carbon dioxide to 450ppm, also a widely touted figure, makes no sense, because past carbon dioxide levels attained more than 10 times this without known adverse environmental effects, while greening the planet.

Politically popular though it may be, the belief that atmospheric carbon dioxide is the primary driver of average planetary temperature is junk science. For instance, Earth experienced an ice age about 450 million years ago at a time when atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are estimated to have been 15 times the pre-industrial level.

It is simply science fiction to believe that 450ppm of atmospheric carbon dioxide and 2C of warming are magic numbers that somehow mark a "tipping point"in Earth's climate system. Rather, they are politically contrived targets, erected for the purpose of stampeding scientifically innocent citizens into a gaping corral of carbon dioxide taxation.

The simplest explanation for the mild warming that occurred in the late 20th century is that it was part of Earth's ever-changing pattern of natural climate change and the job of scientists is to seek evidence to test that interpretation. They have and literally thousands of scientific papers to date have described climate evidence that is consistent with natural change.

Despite all the efforts of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and the expenditure of about $100 billion of research money since 1990, no scientific paper exists that demonstrates that the late 20th century warming, or the past 10 years of cooling for that matter, fall outside the rates and magnitudes of past (geological) climate change.

Melting glaciers (but, in some places, advancing), rising sea levels (but, in some places, falling), increasing numbers of storms (actually, currently at a 30-year low), increasing numbers of polar bears and changes in migratory patterns of birds may very well all have happened or be happening. But these facts say nothing about a human causality for such changes.

It is not for the independent climate scientists (the so-called "climate sceptics") to disprove that dangerous human-caused warming is happening. Rather, it is for the alarmist scientists of the IPCC and CSIRO to show that the simple idea of natural climate change can be invalidated. This they have failed to do.

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Thank heavens cap and trade is dead

By Gary Johns -- previously a minister in the Hawke Labor government

KEVIN Rudd never actually fought the 2007 election on an emissions trading scheme. After all, John Howard offered the same.

There was a consensus on an ETS; Rudd lassoed votes by offering to sign the Kyoto Protocol, just as it was coming to an end. It was a cheap gesture. Now comes the hard part, convincing the electorate that what once seemed like a good idea remains so despite the fact it will not achieve its objective, or at least will be costly and ineffectual in solving climate change, and that it will be positively harmful in distracting from other big world issues such as poverty. Remember the promises made to make world poverty history? What happened to that money?

In all this, the Prime Minister has been operating as an international bureaucrat. His involvement in multilateral matters is immense and mostly futile. The real action takes place in country to country deals, in gas, uranium, climate adaptation and technical co-operation. On these matters he has been largely absent. Labor opted out of the climate change debate years ago by following the consensus between climate change scientists and European economics. There was no political antenna telling them that this stuff really hurts. The consequence is that there is no plan B.

How did this happen? Climate change advocates have become the bullies of policy-making. They have pushed aside a score of important international issues. They are sucking up money and policy oxygen. They claim their demands supersede poverty, clean water, Third World health, international free trade, and that they will protect the poor from catastrophe.

But climate change measures to save the world will not solve world poverty, provide clean water or solve health problems. Indeed, developing a trade in a gas that is essential for life, difficult to measure and therefore easy to cheat to avoid complying with an international agreement will interfere with free trade.

Successive Australian governments fell for this bullying. Fortunately, now the faux consensus between the main parties on climate change response has collapsed, there is no chance the ETS will pass. More importantly, Rudd will not want to take a new version to an election for fear it will be treated like all referendums where there is disagreement among the main parties. They fail.

The prospects for an ETS do not improve with the likely outcomes from Copenhagen. Three things will happen at Copenhagen. There will be no agreement that the world can move to a cap-and-trade system for greenhouse gas mitigation. Politicians in developing countries, China and India in particular, will announce national targets for carbon intensity (the amount of carbon dioxide emitted for each unit of gross domestic product) but not lower carbon output. Politicians in poor countries will have their hands out for money to help them develop or adapt, which will look pretty much like the old foreign aid game. The agreement will begin to talk about adaptation because scientists are telling the community it is already too late to stop climate change.

Sooner or later we will have to accept that reducing carbon dioxide emissions is not like a crash diet, there is no lap-band surgery. And since modern societies cannot exist without cheap, non-renewable fuel, realistic substitutes such as nuclear energy are fast coming online everywhere except in places such as Australia, where coal and gas are cheap.

The implications for Australia are that the government's ETS is dead. In policy terms it is a rebuttal of the process whereby climate scientists, international diplomats and some economists came up against reality and failed to find the path they wanted. The politicians' job now is to find a way out of the mess.

How did this come about? Bullying. Environmentalists were given too much prominence because too many advocates for other causes stood aside. Even within the climate abatement debate there was bullying. The ETS has a premium on setting limits to greenhouse gases, but in so doing causes price to fluctuate. A carbon tax can make price more certain (at least that part which is the tax) but cannot guarantee certainty in greenhouse gas output.

Cap and trade won over carbon taxes because the environmental lobby was obsessed with setting an absolute limit of carbon output. It drove the economists to deliver a cap-and-trade mechanism. But it will not work without a full international market. And that will not happen, not even in the wildest dreams of the international bureaucracy's wildest fantasies. Cap and trade was road-tested in Europe. But Europe is not the rest of the world. Europe has been working on a common market for 50 years. In a sense the carbon cap and trade suited its greater cause of bedding down its internal market and, incidentally, building barriers to other trading blocs.

The advocates of cap and trade lost their way because the process has been so drawn out. Copenhagen is the 15th UN Climate Change Conference. The game changed beneath the players. Cap and trade seemed a sensible goal when participants aspired to a global response, but without a global response cap and trade falls in a hole.

China and India signed a joint agreement on climate change in October, in which both rejected legally binding caps on their CO2 output and gave equal priority to adaptation and mitigation.

So cap and trade is dead; what to do now? The Coalition at least had a debate; at no time has Labor debated climate change or mitigation strategies or countenanced adaptation as a strategy.

Labor simply chased one mitigation non-solution. The Rudd ETS was a giant washing machine churning taxes. Labor looks vulnerable to an attack that its politicians are dreamers, willing to chase far off threats while forgetting to care about more immediate matters closer to home.

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GOVERNMENT HEALTHCARE ROUNDUP

Three current reports below

Pregnant mum and bub fall down ancient lift shaft at hospital

EIGHT weeks' pregnant and with her toddler daughter in her arms, Shavaun Nemere could do nothing but scream as she plunged down a Kingaroy Hospital elevator shaft after its doors malfunctioned. The screams continued as they lay seriously injured at the bottom of the shaft, with a young staffer coming to their rescue before the lift could descend and crush them.

Shavaun, 17, and daughter Izabella, 14 months, face more surgery for the horrific injuries sustained in the accident six weeks ago. They have made almost daily trips to hospitals in Toowoomba, Brisbane and Caboolture from their Benarkin home in the South Burnett to be treated for multiple fractures and gashes so bad they needed plastic surgery. Shavaun is still too distressed to talk about what happened.

Her mother Julie Nemere has spoken for the first time about the ordeal because she wants the hospital's 68-year-old elevator to be replaced. "The hospital has been asking for a new lift for years but their requests have fallen on deaf ears," she said.

Ms Nemere said her daughter was visiting a sick relative at the hospital and decided to go up a floor to make an antenatal appointment. With Izabella in her arms, she opened the exterior polished doors to the elevator and then pushed back the inside metal security doors and stepped forward - into space.

Desperately trying to protect Izabella, she fell 1.6m to the bottom of the lift shaft landing on her left hip, arm and cheek, while the little girl hit the concrete floor with her face. A staff member heard their screams and jumped down the shaft handing the baby up to a doctor and rescuing Shavaun.

Both were airlifted to Brisbane where Shavaun was treated for multiple fractures to her left arm, shock, concussion and amnesia. Izabella's badly gashed face needed stitches and plastic surgery. If the injuries had been a few millimetres higher, she could have lost an eye. Ms Nemere said there had also been bleeding complications with Shavaun's pregnancy and doctors were still monitoring a small haematoma behind her uterus.

The executive director of the Darling Downs-West Moreton Health Service District, Ray Chandler, said the lift had been tested by engineers and was safe and fully operational. "It undergoes a service check every month," he said. [A very cursory check, obviously]

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Blame dodged in public hospital death case

TEARS and anger have followed a coroner's finding that no one was to blame for the death of a Mareeba mother-of-five twice turned away in pain from her local hospital. Coroner Kevin Priestly yesterday said Mareeba Hospital did not have the staff or equipment to save Sharon Con Goo, who died of bacterial septicemia in January 2007. But he cleared its doctors of any negligence, finding it was unlikely they could have done anything to save her life.

Relatives reacted angrily yesterday after Mr Priestly found there was "no missed opportunity for medical intervention that would have affected the outcome" of Ms Con Goo’s case. Ms Con Goo was not admitted to the hospital on January 7 nor January 9 after presenting on both dates with serious pain caused by a septic leg. On one occasion she was sent home with Panadol to ease her suffering. [No missed ipportunity???] She returned to the hospital on January 10 and was transferred to Cairns Base Hospital, where she died on January 11.

During the inquest in August, Mareeba Hospital doctor Asif Majeed said he offered to admit Ms Con Goo during her second visit, but she refused. But her husband, Andrew Con Goo, testified that his wife was not given the option of being admitted, despite having her bags packed to stay overnight.

Ms Con Goo's mother, Faye Rigg, broke down outside court yesterday, telling reporters that her daughter was in such a poor state of health, family members had to carry her to the hospital. She said she was upset at the verdict, labelling it ""bulls---''.

Mr Priestly said he reviewed a range of expert medical opinions to conclude it was unlikely Mareeba Hospital staff could have prevented Ms Con Goo`s death. But he also found the hospital was "not properly equipped with the resources or medical professionals required''.

Former Tablelands MP Rosa Lee Long, who attended the inquest, said yesterday's findings should prove worrying for people who rely on Mareeba Hospital. "She packed her bags to be admitted, and what did they do? They turned her away,'' Ms Lee Long said. "Everyone should be frightened, everyone should be concerned.''

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Rudd fails to deliver on 35 GP super clinics

KEVIN Rudd's promise to build 35 GP super clinics across the nation appears to be in tatters, with only one completed centre in operation after two years of Labor government. The Australian can reveal that despite the Prime Minister's claims that six more centres are partially complete, at least two are offering little more than conventional GP services. And one centre claimed by Health Minister Nicola Roxon as a partially functioning GP super clinic -- in Darwin -- is in fact being fully funded by the Northern Territory government.

Mr Rudd campaigned for the 2007 election promising to spend $275 million on super clinics -- medical one-stop shops in areas struggling with inadequate medical services. The centres were to offer after-hours general practitioners, specialists, mental health services, chronic disease management, allied health practitioners and training for medical students and trainee specialists.

Yesterday, as the opposition savaged the scheme as a politicised con, Mr Rudd refused to answer questions from The Australian as to whether the scheme was on target and exactly how many clinics he expected to deliver by the end of his three-year term. Instead, the Prime Minister, who was criticised earlier this week by health sector groups for taking too long to deliver promised reform to the health system, blamed the Howard government for being negligent on health.

Last month, Ms Roxon told parliament the GP super clinic program was being well received, with the nation's first super clinic -- at Ballan, in Victoria -- already operating and another six offering "early services".

Inquiries by The Australian yesterday revealed that at least two of the partially complete super clinics -- at Palmerston in Darwin and at Woongarrah in NSW -- were offering simple GP services. The Palmerston facility was offering after-hours, bulk-billed GP consultations. Local mayor Robert Macleod said he was pleased with the extra services. But the super clinic is not due to begin operating until March next year.

Despite Ms Roxon claiming the Palmerston facility as evidence of the success of the program, Health Department officials told a Senate budget estimates committee earlier this year that it was funded by the Northern Territory government and was not a super clinic. The Woongarrah clinic also offers limited services and the super clinic is not due to open for a year.

The opening of the Ballan super clinic has resulted in the previous two GPs being increased to three and the addition of four-day-a-week dental services as well as a range of allied health services. Ballan Bush Nursing spokesman Glenn Rowbotham told The Australian the GPs did not operate out of hours but that one was on-call for emergencies.

Opposition health spokesman Peter Dutton said the government had used the scheme to curry favour in marginal electorates but had failed to deliver. "Mr Rudd was tricky during the election campaign by not putting a deadline on the provision of these clinics," Mr Dutton said. "But most people would have expected they would have been delivered in the first term of government."

Australian Medical Association national president Andrew Pesce said he did not know whether the scheme was running behind schedule because the government had never consulted his organisation at any stage of the program. Dr Pesce said the AMA had always argued it was wiser and more cost-effective to offer grants to existing medical practices to broaden their services rather than building a new system "from the ground up".

Earlier this week, The Australian sent written questions to Mr Rudd asking why the six GP super clinics were operating only partially and whether he would explain the hold-up. His spokesman responded with a written statement that ignored these questions. However, the spokesman said "several more" clinics would begin operating within the next 12 months. "Some GP super clinics have begun providing services while their full infrastructure is being completed in order to allow them to provide a wider range of services," the spokesman said. "The procedures for delivering many of these clinics involves tender processes."

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POLICE ROUNDUP

Two current reports below

More Queensland police misbehaviour

Former Palm Island police officer sues state for $2.7m over bullying

A FORMER Palm Island police officer who claims he was bullied by his colleagues and called a "pretty boy cop" is suing the State Government for nearly $3 million. Giovanni Roberto Palleschi, 32, allegedly suffered a mental breakdown after he was subject to ongoing derision, bullying and harassment while working on the island from October 2005 until November 2007.

In civil documents filed to the Supreme Court, Mr Palleschi alleges Senior Sergeant Paul James verbally abused him on a daily basis, including calling him a "f - - - ing ballerina cop" and a "f - - - ing lazy bastard". Sen-Sgt James allegedly belittled Mr Palleschi's police work, saying "all that touchy feely stuff with the locals is crap Palleschi, it is all about arrests".

Mr Palleschi arrived on Palm Island after the death in custody of Mulrunji which sparked riots on the island in 2004. Due to the volatile environment, Mr Palleschi's wife and children lived in Townsville. He lived with fellow officers on the island in a police compound, which is described in the court documents as an "unhappy and unhealthy environment".

The documents allege Sen-Sgt James ridiculed Mr Palleschi, often excluding him from social events. In March 2006, the court documents claim Mr Palleschi approached Sen-Sgt James to advise him he needed help to deal with work-related stress. He alleges Sen-Sgt James reacted in a violent and aggressive manner. He then allegedly said: "You are f - - - ing full of shit. You are just lazy and I have caught you out. It's all about arrests and traffic tickets and not airy fairy community policing".

Mr Palleschi began suffering physical stress symptoms such as bleeding noses, paranoia and insomnia, the court documents claim. On November 12, 2007, he was so distraught he confronted Sen-Sgt James and another officer about the ongoing harassment and soon after had a complete mental breakdown, the court documents claim. He ceased work the next day.

Mr Palleschi now lives on the Gold Coast and was medically retired from the Queensland Police in March. He suffers ongoing mental health issues, the documents claim. He is suing the State Government for $2.78 million for failing to provide a proper and safe work environment and exposing him to the risk of sustaining psychiatric injury

Sen-Sgt James is still working on Palm Island but is currently relieving at Ayr Police Station. A Queensland Police spokeswoman said they had not received any complaints against Sen-Sgt James and that this year he had received an Australian Police Medal in the Queens Birthday honours. The State Government is yet to file a defence. Sen-Sgt James is not being sued directly.

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Corrupt Victorian police agency 'lost $120 mil'

An honest policeman's lot in Australia is not a happy one

THE amount squandered by Victoria Police's troubled IT department was more than $120 million, three times the sum detected by the Ombudsman, a former senior police manager says. Richard Kennedy, the force's former manager of strategy and business relationships, said the IT department was systematically milked by IBM for years before any action was taken. "Hundreds of millions of dollars were lost, and the Ombudsman, Chief Commissioner Christine Nixon and the auditor- general were repeatedly warned," Mr Kennedy said. "The whole thing is just an unbelievable disaster."

Mr Kennedy is an auditor who joined the police in 2001 after 15 years specialising in restructuring the outsourcing of information technology contracts. He said he was astonished by what he found. "They were paying out millions of dollars for services that were never delivered," he said.

Mr Kennedy said he complained to the auditor-general, Ms Nixon and the Ombudsman as long ago as 2002, but that his concerns were whitewashed and his identity as a whistleblower revealed by some in senior management.

The Ombudsman finally investigated the matter this year. Though only examining expenditure back to 2006, he found a "gap" in funding of $39 million. "Not only is there a problem in Victoria Police, but there are significant questions which need to be asked of the auditor-general's office and the Ombudsman's office," Mr Kennedy said.

Documents seen by the Herald Sun show senior public servants in the Police Minister's office were aware of a $22.8 million cost blowout as long ago as September 2001.

Mr Kennedy said that he wrote reports for senior police, complained to both the Opposition and the minister, and was even fobbed off by the Ombudsman in 2003. "Nobody wanted to know. The problem was really that big," Mr Kennedy said.

A spokeswoman for Victoria Police declined to say whether IBM had delivered all the services the force had paid for, and declined to respond to questions about Mr Kennedy's claims. "The matters raised are historical and Victoria Police is now focused on improving its future IT practices and contract management arrangements," the spokeswoman said.

IBM spokeswoman Gisele Boulay would not say whether all the services the company had been paid for were delivered to Victoria Police. "IBM cannot provide comment, as we have neither knowledge of - nor seen - these alleged documents," Ms Boulay said. "These are matters that are more appropriate for your informant to raise with Victoria Police, if he has not already done so during previous internal investigations," she said.

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