"The sinking of SIEV X ; the unanswered questions -

Senator Faulkner renews Labor’s call for a judicial enquiry"

– website commentary by Tony Kevin, 12 January 2004

 

As the Labor Party National Conference (Sydney, 29 – 31 January 2004) and the National Conference of Rural Australians for Refugees (Albury, 6 - 8 February 2004) approach, Senator John Faulkner has bravely restated in print Labor’s call for a judicial enquiry into the sinking of SIEV X, and Labor’s questions about the Australian authorities’ people smuggling disruption program in Indonesia in 2001.

The following succinct article by Faulkner appears in the current issue of the "Labor Herald’, Summer issue 2003/2004, pages 22 and 23.

http://sievx.com/articles/challenging/2004/20040105LaborHerald1.gif

http://sievx.com/articles/challenging/2004/20040105LaborHerald2.gif

(with thanks to www.sievx.com for reproducing this important article).

Faulkner’s article will be read by many thousands of Labor Party members and supporters. I hope that it might generate a supportive motion at the Labor Conference, when the issues of border protection and treatment of asylum-seekers are likely to be discussed. Such a motion, if it followed Faulkner’s article, should not be at all controversial within the Party since Faulkner’s article simply sets out the facts and the unanswered questions of public accountability in a serious matter of 353 drownings that arise from those facts.

Faulkner’s article concludes:

"The only way we can be certain that nothing illegal or inappropriate has occurred under the auspices of the disruption program is through a full and independent judicial enquiry."

This same view was endorsed repeatedly in 2002 and 2003 (in the form of agreed passed Senate motions) by the Labor Party , Democrats, Greens and independent Senators.

It is very important politically that Faulkner – Labor’s Leader in the Senate and a national politician of immense political credibility and authority – now bluntly restates in his party’s newspaper the case for a judicial enquiry into the sinking of SIEV X.

Faulkner deserves congratulation for this act of political courage, because in 2004 the Federal Government and a powerful section of the national media are trying desperately to finally bury SIEV X as an Australian political story.

 

Thus according to Alexander Downer on the ABC "AM" on 29 December 2003, these Senate motions on SIEV X were nothing more than " just a political stunt" :

http://www.abc.net.au/am/content/2003/s1017292.htm ( Downer interview)

http://www.abc.net.au/am/content/2003/s1017288.htm ( Kevin interview)

And, according to a recent editorial in "The Australian", "Justice of a sort for a people smuggler" on 30 December 2003,

http://sievx.com/articles/psdp/2003/20031230Australian.html

there is nothing further that needs to be asked about the unmentioned-by-name SIEV X, because according to this editorial:

"Whatever the failings of the Howard Government, it has not tricked desperate people into risking their lives on the high seas on vessels of doubtful safety to travel illegally to Australia".

Of course, that is the very question Senator Faulkner and the Opposition parties in the Senate are asking be investigated by a judicial enquiry. "The Australian" has not yet told us what are the reliable sources of information on which it bases its confident claim that nothing untoward can be laid at Australian agencies’ doors in the tragedy of the sinking of SIEV X.

So Senator Faulkner is doing the cause of truth and justice in Australia a great service in now recalling in the "Labor Herald" the important unfinished national business that is

SIEV X. He deserves our heartfelt thanks.

Tony Kevin

Canberra

12 January 2004