Canberra launch of A Certain Maritime Incident:

Professor William Maley praises book’s exact scholarship and ethical integrity. Tony Kevin appeals for whistle-blowers, and thanks the people of Canberra for their support of his work in exploring the SIEV X history

- remarks at Canberra launch of A Certain Maritime Incident by Tony Kevin (Scribe, August 2004), at Paperchain Bookstore, Manuka, on 10 August 2004

Professor William Maley, Head of Graduate School of Diplomacy, Australian National University, Canberra:

It gives me great pleasure to be invited to speak on this occasion and to take part in the Canberra launch of A Certain Maritime Incident. It is particularly fortuitous that our gathering today has come in the immediate aftermath of the publication of a letter from "the 43 immortals", of whom Tony is one. That has had the effect of drawing attention of people in a much wider circle than simply in Canberra to some of the real difficulties which afflict the way in which public life has developed in Australia in recent times, particularly as far as truth is concerned.

To me, it was a measure of the effectiveness of the critique that had been put forward that the best that the government could do was to produce the mighty intellect of Miss De-Anne Kelly to respond – not to the arguments that had been put forward in the letter, because they were just way over her head - but rather to the alleged antiquity of the contributors. I have always been a great believer in the advice of Sophie Tucker that life begins at 40.

I was reading the other day Bacon’s essay on truth which begins with the famous line:

" ‘What is truth?’, said jesting Pilate, and did not stay for an answer". Tony’s great contribution in A Certain Maritime Incident has been to deploy forensic skills in the exploration of what the truth of a particular historical episode would be. And that, I think, is one of the first things that makes this an important book.

As we know, on the 19^th of October 2001, the vessel that now is universally referred to as SIEV X foundered with huge casualties somewhere between Indonesia and Australia. The initial response of our government was to the effect that it had sunk within Indonesian waters, that it simply wasn’t a matter of concern to us, and that it was not something that we should take up. That particular claim is one which is explored intensively and exhaustively in the book, and it builds a compelling case for repudiating that initial defence of government policy that was put forward.

Of course, most of us were not immediately aware of what had happened. But within a few days, a story that was published in The Australian by Don Greenlees and Vanessa Walker meant that none of us had any excuse for not paying the closest attention to the SIEV X disaster. This was a story that made the point that all that was left from three little girls drowned on that boat was a single photograph in the hands of their father, who was living in Australia legally, as a refugee who had been accepted as such within the meaning of the definition of refugee in the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, and who had been given a temporary protection visa.

In a way, the aspect of the SIEV X affair that I found most utterly nauseating was that, when the Prime Minister had it drawn to his attention on the eve of the 2001 election, that the terms of the visa issued to this gentleman forbade him to re-enter Australia if he travelled abroad to join his grieving wife, he had the gall to say that he had compassion for the gentleman but that this didn’t extend to granting him the right to re-enter Australia. And to me, that is the kind of compassion that deserves to be spat on.

The book of course goes beyond the specifics of the sinking of SIEV X to do a number of different things.

Firstly, it highlights for me just how much can be achieved if one sets one’s mind to the task of mining information that has been put on the public record. In fact I think one of the great achievements of this book has been to draw together material from parliamentary committee hearings, from other forms of testimony which are significant sources of light on this particular episode, and to extract some of the lessons which are to be derived. It is a magnificent example of what in the old days used to be called exact scholarship. It does not advance claims which are implausible or are unjustified in the light of the hard evidence which has been adduced. And to that extent, I think it is a much more profound challenge to the entire set of policy settings which allowed this disaster to come about, than would have been the case had it delved into realms of idle speculation unrelated to the evidence. And I think that is a great achievement.

But I think perhaps the greatest strength of A Certain Maritime Incident is to recover the position of those who were actually the victims of that disaster. Of course we don’t know everyone who was there. It does seem that there are lists floating around of the names, but they are not being revealed. That brings back to my mind the famous description in Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, of the circumstances in which Lara disappeared:

"One day she went out on the street and did not come back again. She must have been picked up from the street, as was common in those days, and disappeared into one of the camps in the north, a nameless number on a list that was afterwards mislaid".

And yet through this book, we have a reminder that the people who were victims of the SIEV X sinking were all people related to others, loved by others, cherished by others, parts of families – people who were no different from us, except that they happened to be confronted by circumstances which we are mercifully spared. They happened to live in countries in which the circumstances went beyond their control – the sky had fallen in. And they did what I hope all morally defensible people would do in the circumstances, to use their resources as best they could to try to obtain better lives for their nearest and dearest. That the episode ended in a disaster was not their fault, because they were confronted, coming from the countries that they came from, with horrors of a sort that are simply unimaginable in Australia.

And I think one of the greatest indictments of political leadership in this country – not just in respect of SIEV X, but more generally in respect of the whole issue of asylum seekers - has been the rank incapacity of members of the political elite to put themselves in the shoes of people not fortunate enough to live in Australia. So that instead of serious empathising we get arch moral condemnation from people who in many cases have never done a stroke of serious work in their life, or had to confront the kind of challenges which drive people into this sort of situation in the first place.

So in that sense, A Certain Maritime Incident is not simply a work of scholarship; it is also a memorial. And I think in that sense, we can all benefit both from a scholarly point of view but also from an ethical point of view, by absorbing its message very carefully. For me it is not just a pleasure but also an honour to be invited to launch the book in Canberra, which I am happy to do.

 

Tony Kevin, author:

First of all, thank you Bill, Professor William Maley, for these very perceptive words on my book. I have spoken to many people about my book in the past two weeks, I have had launch events, one in Sydney and one in Melbourne, I have been on radio. Bill, your words just then were the most perceptive and warming words I have heard about my book, so thank you very much. My decision to invite you to launch in Canberra has been fully vindicated ! Thank you to Penny Ramsay of Manning Clark House for MCH’s sponsorship and support of this event, and to Richard Baz and Maxine Tall of Paperchain. .

I also want to welcome Kerry Tucker, the Senate candidate for the Greens in the ACT. And Senator Kirk, a sitting Senator who has always taken a great interest in the SIEV X story and worked hard in Senate estimates committees to try and get to the bottom of it. I’d like to welcome Peter Peek – Admiral Sir Richard Peek – for making the effort to come along tonight. And Malcolm Mackerras, who had the courage to invite me to address a group at ADFA [the Australian Defence Force Academy] on SIEV X.

I could go on thanking people all night, in fact the end of my book has a long list of acknowledgements, but the point is that the last few years have not been all that easy. I have really noted, although people may not have known that I was noting, people who had the courage to stand by me in some lonely moments. It is not much fun after 30 years as a professional public servant, to be called a fantasist and conspiracy theorist and failed diplomat and grudge-bearer. Those aren’t nice things to wear, particularly when they come from people speaking under Senate privilege. So every little bit of support and friendship along the way helped.

At this point I’m feeling happy, that a job has been done that needed to be done. I’m happy now to pretty much pass the baton to others, and particularly to the Senate, because the Senate has now passed three motions over the last three years calling for a full powers independent judicial enquiry into the people smuggling upstream disruption program and the sinking of SIEV X. Those motions were passed as a result of exemplary cooperation between the three opposition parties in the Senate.

The Government’s only response to those three motions has been a dismissive flippant remark by Alexander Downer at the end of last year: "Oh, those motions are just a political stunt.". And it is interesting that a government which is prepared to call a judicial enquiry at the drop of a hat into a question of rents of an office building in Canberra, which happens to be owned by the Labor Party, for three years has ignored a call for a judicial inquiry into the sinking of SIEV X and the death by drowning of 353 human beings. I think people might remember this when they cast their vote. I hope they do.

I want to say that this is not about party. I believe in integrity in government, as I believe in unity of laws for everybody, regardless of which party is in control. I do have hopes for the Liberal Party. I think there are good people in the Liberal Party. I think the little cabal around the present Prime Minister have lost their moral bearings, and I am distressed at the way in which they have intimidated and corrupted senior levels of the public service in Canberra today.

This book is not only, as Bill says, a work of scholarship and a memorial. It is both those things, but it is also a call to arms. It is an attempt to fight back. It is trying to tell public servants, whistle-blowers, people within the system: " I had the guts to stick my neck out, to tell this story the way it really is. Now you have the guts to tell us what you did in this story."

Because the SIEV X story has touched on hundreds of public servants in their jobs. There are hundreds of people who would have read minutes of the People Smuggling Task Force in the Prime Minister’s Department, hundreds of people who would know something about what was going in the upstream people smuggling disruption program, or what was going on at sea in Operation Relex.

They are all pieces in a jigsaw, and if they come together, as they will in a judicial enquiry, this story will be told. And once it starts to be told, it will be told very quickly. Because when the first person blows the whistle from inside the system, there will be a lot of people saying "I’d better cover my tracks too". That is the way truth comes out.

I want to thank the ANU and Professor Jim Fox especially, for giving me the tenure of my Visiting Fellowship there . It didn’t pay me any money but it gave me a certain public stature . Rather than just saying ‘I’m a retired old fart" I was able to say "I’m a Visiting Fellow at the ANU" – which helped.

Incidentally, I loved that Pryor cartoon in the Canberra Times today, with members of the "Old Farts Club", looking out aghast from the club windows as Howard and Downer drive past doing moons at them! That summed it all up fairly well.

And I’d like to thank the Canberra Times, because it has actually been very outspoken and brave on this issue. As you will see in my book, the strongest editorials on SIEV X have always come from the Canberra Times.

I want to thank my family and neighbours and my local school community. That really matters – people up at St Bedes where my little girls go to school have always given me a fair go, and I have never felt at St Bedes that I was in any way being excluded or that my children were being excluded because of me being –let’s be honest – a political dissident, which is what I have been over the past two years. I value that greatly.

I also thank my publisher Henry Rosenbloom at Scribe Books in Melbourne. I had given up on any hope of ever publishing this book. I was writing it pour le tiroir, for the drawer, after two disappointing experiences with mainstream publishers who initially looked at it, but finally dropped it like a hot potato.

But Henry – Alison Broinowski urged me to get in touch with Henry, so I did – asked to see what I had written. I had actually written most of Part One, The Journey - so I sent it to him, and the same day he phoned me back and said "you’re on". The hard part was that I then had to write 35000 words in seven weeks, and that was 1000 words a day, so you can see why I have to thank my family – they let me do that.

I could say something about Gerard Henderson’s pieces in the SMH and The Age today [10 August]. It was another own goal, because by writing a nasty piece about me in The Age , he was really drawing attention to the SIEV X story. And the government’s strategy since October 2002 has been to pretend that story doesn’t exist any more. Gerard blew that today.

I challenged Gerard publicly in a letter that I hope will be run in the Age and the SMH tomorrow [TK - it wasn’t] to debate the subject with me in the Sydney Institute. You know the Institute is well-funded, and maybe Gerard could invite me down to Sydney to debate SIEV X with him, we could have a good intellectual exchange of ideas there.

I want to thank the Labor Party in particular, because Gerard was trying to suggest today that I was having a go at Labor. That is wedge-driving and it is not true. Yes, it is true that in Chapter 13, I had some fairly hard things to say about the agreed consensus report. But I balanced that, very accurately, with tributes to the exact and strong words of Senators Cook, Collins, Faulkner, Bartlett from the Democrats, in expressing their disquiet about this report and what it had to say about SIEV X. And the proof of this pudding is in the eating, because opposition Senators have gone on over the last two years in Estimates committees - probing, challenging, and testing. So I want to salute the work of the Labor Party and in particular of Senator Faulkner on this issue.

I also want to salute the work of the two smaller parties in the Senate because they also played very important roles. Andrew Bartlett from the beginning was attentive to the humanitarian aspect of this story. He drew out – it was like drawing teeth - just how callous and inhumane was the interception of SIEV 4, Olong, by Adelaide, the incident that gave rise to the children overboard story. . Isn’t it funny how we keep on getting completely the wrong end of that story ? We talk about the forgery of photographs, when the real story was that 200 people were left at risk of drowning for 22 hours to stay on board an unseaworthy boat after they were rescued, and that an honourable decent Navy captain Commander Banks would have carried on his conscience for the rest of his life, and possibly faced criminal charges, if they had drowned during that illegal and immoral order that he was forced to carry out. That is the real story of the children overboard.

And similarly on the Palapa. The real story is not what Captain Arne Rinnan of Tampa did , though that was praiseworthy. The real story is that a disabled Palapa was seen and detected by Coastwatch aircraft the day before, but then left to its own devices in an overnight storm, from which the 400 people on board might have very well perished, and that could have then been the first SIEV X. And my book sets out the indications that that boat Palapa may also have been a disruption operation.

I’d like to thank Bob Brown, because although the Greens did not take part in the Senate CMI Committee, they have been tremendously important in subsequent Senate motions. I should just say that today I had a lovely hand-written letter from Bob Brown, which I will read out:

"Dear Tony,

Thank you so much for "A Certain Maritime Incident – the sinking of SIEV X", and the intellectual integrity and determination that goes with it. This episode is not over. A judicial inquiry must come.

My very best wishes, Bob Brown".

I am grateful for that message.

Now in case some of you may wonder where Labor might stand on a judicial enquiry, quite recently, Carmen Lawrence spoke at a RAC rally in Canberra and she gave an undertaking that a Labor Government would pursue the judicial inquiry. And I value that undertaking.

So where do we go from here? First of all, thank you for buying the book and thank you for coming here. That in itself is a tremendous affirmation of support.

What more can I do ? Probably not a great deal. The book is basically my "J’Accuse", and from now on I think it is up to the community to show that they care about this, and that it is part of our national honour and national integrity. I don’t want to have to say to my children when they grow up and ask me, "What shall I do in my career?" : I don’t want to have to say to them: "Don’t join the government service or the defence force or the police, because those are basically dishonourable organisations." And so I want to help my former colleagues in those organisations to clean up the mess. And we will clean it up.

What can you do? Send your second or third copy that you buy to your favourite MP or or Senator – tell him or her how reading the book affected you and what you want done about it, because that is what our politicians listen to. The government has managed to put a big invisible ‘Do Not Touch’ rope around this story. We need to break that taboo.

I have already spoken about whistleblowers. The only thing I would say finally is: we have heard a lot of euphemisms about this story. We have heard about "Operation Relex" and "the upstream disruption program", Senator Heffernan talking to Father Frank Brennan about the need to "burn a firebreak on your neighbour’s property to protect your own", about "a bit of upstream interference" . They are all euphemisms. They are all really about an operation that resulted in the deaths of people. And that is what we must never forget.

Thank you all for coming.