The Senate Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee report on "Security of Australians in South East Asia (Bali 2002)"

- commentary analysis by Tony Kevin, 14 August 2004

 

 

IT was a strange, sad Senate tabling debate last Thursday afternoon 12 August. Apart from a grim-faced Brian Deegan, the visitors’ gallery was nearly empty. Few Senators sat in the chamber. The tabling debate went unheralded, except for the Senate daily work schedule. No national newspaper previewed it, nor did the ABC.

In the US Congress, there were packed public galleries and days of hearings for the report of the investigations into September 11, 2001; here, maybe 10 or so people watched a quiet debate, all over in less than an hour. And media coverage since was pretty thin afterwards.

Where did the national outpouring of our grief just 10 months ago, on the first anniversary of the death of 88 mostly young Australians in Bali on 12 October 2002, go? How easily and pragmatically we seem to move on from tragedy.

READING through this thick 200-page report on why 88 Australians, who thought they were in a safe holiday resort, died in a bombing attack in Bali two years ago, I wondered how to summarise the import of it. Then I reached the dissenting report by Senators Bob Brown and Natasha Stott Despoja. In six crisp pages (pages 129-134) and a useful timeline appendix, they did the job perfectly, saying all that really needed to be said.

This should have been the majority report.

Government senators offered a smooth semantic argument (pages 117-129) that Bali had been a case of admissible intelligence failure by ONA and ASIO. These agencies had simply not known enough to be able to offer time- and place-specific warning of the Bali attack. DFAT Travel Advices had given adequate warnings to Australian travellers to Bali, in terms of what was known from intelligence at the time. In my opinion, these pages lack intellectual merit or conviction.

The Greens and Democrats firmly sheeted accountability home to the Foreign Minister and DFAT. In their view, this was where the main responsibility lay for the disconnect – as they saw it – between the ONA and ASIO intelligence, especially in the key months June-July 2002, and the Travel Advices issued by DFAT’s consular area thereafter.

Their dissenting report ‘Findings’ section (paragraphs 6.23-6.34) stated:

"The DFAT Travel Advice failed to counter the flawed assumption embedded in the mind of the average Australian tourist – that Bali was a safe haven … The Australian government was receiving regular and more insistent reports that conveyed a consistent upgrading of the level of threat, not only in the regular written reports of the agencies but in meetings and briefings at high level of officials up to the Minister of Foreign Affairs …. The Minister, having been briefed personally about an issue considered to be of sufficient seriousness to warrant a face-to-face discussion with the head of Australia’s peak intelligence agency and key officials [on 18-19 June 2002], then failed to ask his department to provide formal advice on the matter. … The government was not alerted or if it was, no commensurate public action ensued. … The minister’s inaction contributed to Australia’s unpreparedness for the attack in Bali".

 

It is also very striking – and a point not commented on in the FADC report - that, reading through the set of Travel Advices appended to the report, one sees that starting on 12 July 2002, the long-established DFAT advice that "tourist services elsewhere in Indonesia are operating normally, including Bali" was actually elevated to prominence as the last sentence in the bold-text summary header section - the part of the Advice that most busy people would focus on. So if ONA had been trying to "make an impact" on the Minister’s and DFAT’s thinking in their face-to-face meetings in June, they signally failed. From July 12 until October 12, the DFAT Travel Advices were effectively presenting Bali to the Australian travelling public as being safer than ever.

 

An important question is, why didn’t the Labor majority on FADC go with the firm approach to accountability of the Greens and Democrats? Why did Brown and Stott Despoja feel they had to submit a dissenting report from Labor? Listening to Senators Hutchins and Kirk (Labor) in the tabling debate on Thursday, I could hear little difference with the dissenting senators. All four senators seemed agreed that there had been policy failure by DFAT in failing to convey to ordinary Australian travellers the picture that intelligence agencies reported to Mr Downer and DFAT and Qantas, especially in the key reporting months June-July 2002. Yet the "majority report" is strangely cloudy and hesitant in tone.

Just one example illustrates this point: the dissenters recommend that " A Royal Commission should be set up to fully assess the performance of agencies and government in the lead up to the Bali bombings …" . In the majority report, this becomes:

" The Committee recommends that, with a view to ensuring the country’s future arrangements between intelligence assessments, threat assessments and travel advisories are optimal, consideration should be given to the establishment of an independent commission of enquiry with specific terms of reference to address these and related matters."

One senses that Labor’s heart was not in a further commission of enquiry. Mr Howard has already, on the same day the report was tabled, rejected it as unnecessary. We will probably never see any such commission.

 

Labor seems to have been reluctant to come out and say bluntly that the government’s executive performance on Bali – specifically, Mr Downer’s - was deficient. Why ? Some sense of parliamentary chivalry towards their Ministerial opponent? Some fear that the tables might be turned on them one day? But when has Mr Downer ever shown Labor any comparable political decency in cases of deaths of Australians abroad ? Or on any other foreign policy issue ?

Brian Deegan (father of Josh, who died in the Bali attack) argued cogently to the committee in Adelaide on 9 September 2003 – an emotionally distressing day of testimony from survivors and bereaved:

"By analogy, let us have this situation: one goes on a safari to a zoological park, an outdoor park. If you are transported there and you are attacked by one of the animals in the park, it is not the driver of the bus that may kill you or injure you, and one can only blame the lion, the tiger or whatever it is that causes the injury.

But, surely, the blame must also fall fairly and squarely on the individuals that were responsible for you, who knew that could have occurred. Negligence just does not stop with the person who commits the act that causes the injury. Negligence encompasses any person anywhere who owes a duty of care: in this case the Australian government, in this case DFAT, in this case Mr Downer, in this case ASIO. I am entitled to know whether any one of those individuals or organisations slipped up. The Australian public are entitled to know that."

 

On the evidence in this report, neither ASIO nor ONA slipped up – both did their job. By July, they had fed in their main intelligence to Mr Downer and DFAT, with all the high-level emphasis and urgency they could muster. And then, the recipients did nothing with it. This seems to be the true answer to Deegan’s question, based on this Report.

I cannot imagine Kevin Rudd as Foreign Minister shrugging off insistent ONA and ASIO efforts during 2002 to warn him that terrorism threats in places in Indonesia where Australians gather, like Bali, were real and increasing.

This picture of executive failure as presented by the Greens and Democrats in their dissenting report – which rings true to me, on the basis of my reading of the FADC meeting Hansards – corresponds to the US investigative commission findings of US government executive failure to respond to time-specific intelligence warnings of something that was assessed likely to happen in the US around September 11 2001. Yet such has been the power of the government spin surrounding the Blick and Flood reports, with the constant reiteration of claims of intelligence failure, that most Australians have now come to think - incorrectly – that this is what Bali was about. It wasn’t, but Labor doesn’t seem prepared to say that as firmly as do the Greens and Democrats.

One notices another oddity. The committee’s terms of reference – as seen in the original reference title – were broader than Bali. They went to security threats to Australians in South East Asia as a whole. Yet the committee re-focussed its mandate on questions of intelligence and executive action with respect to Bali (the report cover page is even bold-headed "Bali 2002"). This allowed the committee to find – quite truthfully – that there had been no known threat that was time- and place-specific to Bali.

But this is not how terrorism intelligence usually builds – it is more often time-specific than place-specific. In the days before 12 October 2002, had there been time-specific ( (if not place-specific) intelligence warnings of possible attacks on "soft targets" in South East Asia – hotels, bars etc, where Westerners gathered ? The Committee seems not to have gone to that important question, because it was not Bali-specific. (They may have addressed it in their closed session with ASIO). This is an unresolved loose end.

The dissenting report is right – this was a case of policy failure on the part of the Minister and the executive department, DFAT. This should not be the end of the matter, if Australians want better government performance of its duty of care to our citizens’ security abroad in future. But I suppose the ballot box may help answer that question.

How Downer and DFAT failed to act on ONA and ASIO warnings prior to the Bali bombings - Tony Kevin commentary of 26 July 2004, and SMH article of 19 June 2003, "I don't remember seeing Bali warning: Downer".

Flood, Cook FADC and Deegan on Bali travel advice failure - a preliminary look at the issues ( and Brian Deegan's main testimony) - commentary by Tony Kevin , 18 July 2004