EDITORIAL: The Director of Public Prosecution’s bungling of the Colleen Gwynne abuse of office case is the latest blow to the public’s confidence in this crucial office and the director’s outright refusal to tell Territorians what happened in this matter directly contradicts his own published “mission” statement to publicly explain terminated high-profile cases.

On Tuesday, the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions withdrew its case against Gwynne for abuse of office for legal reasons not completely made public yet, except for the single take-away that the DPP knows it royally stuffed this up and couldn’t even conclude its opening remarks in the Supreme Court before realising they could not prove their case.

They only had three years to get this right and a war chest of millions of taxpayer dollars, unlimited police resources, and the wisdom of a high-priced Sydney silk to run the matter and still it never dawned on any of them that they could not make their case.

So, how did they stuff this up so badly?

The NT Independent sent nine questions to Director of Public Prosecutions Lloyd Babb on Tuesday afternoon that he refused to answer.

Those questions urged Mr Babb to explain to the public what went wrong, how nobody in the office had picked up on the “fundamentally flawed” case (as one legal insider put it) sooner, why deputy director Victoria Engel pursued the case with blinders on for years under the director’s approval, and how much all of this to date has cost taxpayers to get to the Supreme Court.

We even told him we’d accept a ballpark estimate for costs.

But Mr Babb refused to comment, in violation of his own “role and mission” statement published on the office’s website – quoted to him by the NT Independent – which states that the decision to terminate a case should provide “at least some explanation” to the public when the case has “attracted significant public interest”.

Mr Babb’s predecessor Jack Karczewski understood the importance of this, finally moving to explain in a letter in 2015 why he was not pursuing charges against CLP slush fund Foundation 51, after the police prepared a brief of evidence they said would result in a reasonable chance of conviction.

For Karczweski’s faults, he understood his obligation to the public in the role of director of public prosecutions to explain when prosecutions are terminated. Mr Babb clearly does not. Maybe that goes back to his time as DPP in NSW and a conflict of interest he had in the Chris Dawson case that the police were not aware of when he was being provided briefs of evidence with no action being taken to lay charges. He liked to keep things quiet then, too.

Back here in the NT, the Gwynne case was a failure on all levels by Mr Babb and his office and he needs to explain what happened and who will be held accountable for not catching the fact they couldn’t make their case a long time ago.

But make no mistake. As much as Colleen Gwynne likes to claim she was “victimised” by all of this, she is by no means “innocent” as she contends.

All this case has proved is that our public systems for addressing suspected corruption and holding those in positions of power to account are broken beyond all repair.

We’ve all already written off the Office of the ICAC for their previous bungling and current complete and utter inertia.

With these kinds of incompetents in charge of holding people responsible for corruption, the Territory has no hope of cleaning itself up.

Mr Babb does not seem to understand that the public need to have confidence in its justice system and its office of public prosecutions.

Just last month he also refused to explain why his office appears to have colluded with the Police Commissioner in 2019 to pursue a criminal murder charge against Constable Zach Rolfe despite the office initially telling police investigators not to use their proposed use-of-force experts because neither was qualified and were later found to have been manipulated to produce the evidence the police and DPP needed to make its murder charge stick.

Nobody is investigating that one currently, and sadly, we feel better for it. That can wait for the royal commission or federal public inquiry because nobody here has any faith left in the established public systems that are supposed to investigate these kinds of matters impartially and hold people accountable for their actions.

Which goes to a couple other thorny questions we sent Mr Babb on Tuesday. What role did the Police Commissioner Jamie Chalker play in influencing the decision to prosecute Gwynne? And was Victoria Engel influenced by any outside parties to pursue this matter?

Just because the DPP refuses to answer, against his own public policy, does not make the questions go away – it simply adds to the public’s mistrust.

This latest expensive stuff-up by the DPP is yet another argument for why we need the Federal Government to come in and run a public inquiry into how broken the Northern Territory is. Because it is broken and the public have lost confidence in its established bodies to do their crucial jobs.