“Facing criticism” – Letter from Tony Kevin published in the Canberra Times, 5 April 2005  

 

One week after Paul Malone’s feature profile on DIMIA Secretary Andrew Metcalfe, to which I responded as published (below), there was a further profile in the ‘Canberra Times’  on senior Commonwealth  public servant Jane Halton. I did not write in again, considering that her leading role in the 2002 children overboard and SIEV X Senate enquiry was already on public record,  e.g., in documentation on Marg Hutton’s website www.sievx.com and in my book “A Certain Maritime Incident: the sinking of SIEV X”..  TK, 17April 2006

 

http://canberra.yourguide.com.au/detail.asp?story_id=470925

 

It's nice to see the human side of senior public servant Andrew Metcalfe ("Facing the criticism head on",   [feature by]  Paul Malone, April 3, Canberra Times) .

But many Canberrans still want to hear more about his years as first assistant secretary of the Border Control and Compliance Division at DIMA, 1998-2002 (during part of which period he acted as deputy secretary, overseeing that strategically vital division), on which only a euphemistic account is given here.

These were the years of the DIMA/AFP People Smuggling Strike Team, which worked out of Australian Federal Police headquarters in Canberra, and the now notorious associated DIMA-AFP people smuggling disruption program in Indonesia - a program that brought fear and misery and loss to thousands of people who were trying to reunite with families in Australia, forced to resort to dangerous unauthorised entry vessels because DIMA policy would not allow their legal entry as refugees.

There were hundreds of deaths by drowning, the causes of which are still not clearly known. The whole history of people smuggling from Indonesia to Australia has yet to be authoritatively written. When it is, it is unlikely that Australia's hands will be found to be clean.

Tony Kevin, Forrest