Re: Magic Wand
"A lot of victims of false allegations have been in the news recently (probably a consequence of and backlash against actions taken when the warcry was "more rape convictions"), which is probably what provoked the speech."
I've only noticed a couple of stories, and false accusations usually get a lot of press (especially about sexual assault), in part because if a criminal solicitor get someone off a serious crime, then they would like other potential clients to know.
One case (as mentioned elsewhere in the comments) was mainly about the prosecutor and investigators either missing or attempting to bury evidence the defence was relying on. So less about false accusations and more about incompetence, which was blamed on there being "too much data" to go through.
While false accusations can fuck up a person's life, the flip side is that almost every sexual predator has been accused multiple times before they get caught. If they are even moderately intelligent they can game the system (eg John Worboy's parole).
"more rape convictions"
I personally think this was more of "stop dumping sexual assaults to duke the stats". Rape and sexual assault is one of the few serious crimes against a person that you can make "go away" by persuading the victim to not report it or be prepared to go to court*. Or you make it a specialist crime, then ensure you don't have enough specialist officers to investigate, then let the files quietly rot away. One NZ police district went six years without a child sex crime investigator, so they simply didn't investigate any complaints. No investigation, no charge, no conviction, no crime.
* In NZ there was a case were the cops claimed, repeatedly, that the victims were not prepared to go to court, hence why they didn't do anything. Even when one of the victims gave them copies if her letters saying exactly the opposite, they continued with the "after we strongly discouraged them they didn't want to go on, so we dropped it. Not our fault".