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SIEV X Public Forum in Canberra (Kevin, Kingston, Waterford) -
This stimulating public forum was held in a packed ANU Haydon-Allen
Tank (estimated 180 participants). The meeting was well organised
by Refugee Action Committee Canberra
- Phil Griffiths chaired the meeting and Susan Kinley handled organisation
and publicity. My thanks to them.
Speakers were, in order:
·
Tony Kevin
·
Margo Kingston (Senior Journalist,
Sydney Morning Herald
·
Jack Waterford (Editor, Canberra
Times)
Following the
three main speakers, there was a lively public discussion focussing
mainly on questions: What should public servants do when faced with
unethical directions ? When
and how do they whistle-blow? Should they stay in their jobs and try
to do good from within ?
Following are
the three statements as delivered (transcribed by Tony Kevin from
tape).
For further
commentary on the meeting, by Margo Kingston, see her Webdiary piece on 22 October 21, 2003 “SIEV
X Second Anniversary Report” http://smh.com.au/articles/2003/10/21/1066631431923.html
The full paper
by Tony Kevin (with source endnotes) on which he based his talk below
is also on this website - see section
“Unpublished – SIEV X”.
With
grateful acknowledgements to Marg Hutton for her prior research that
underpins much of this paper, in her comprehensive paper of 20 May 2003 “SIEVX and the DFAT cable – The Conspiracy
of Silence” http://sievx.com/archives/2003_05-06/20030520.shtml
Tony Kevin:
I’m going to assume today that most of you have a fair idea of SIEV X in general terms, so I’m not going to give the whole basic story. I’m really going to try and do something fairly unusual today which is to deconstruct a cable – the Australian Embassy Jakarta’s reporting cable on SIEV X which was sent four days after the tragedy, O. JA.25691. It is “Restricted”, it “Contains Sensitive Information”, and it is “Priority First”. Here is the way the cable was released:
(or go to www.sievx.com, Documents)
It took six months to get this cable out. Opposition Senators kept asking for it. Somehow, their requests kept getting overlooked. And it will be an indispensable piece of evidence when the independent full powers judicial enquiry into SIEV X is eventually set up. Or if it is not set up, when the matter goes to the International Criminal Court.
Can I say this upfront, very clearly. Because we have now a situation where there is serious evidence that something went wrong. The Senate has now called on the Prime Minister three times – in a Senate motion last year and in two Senate motions over the last few days – to open this full powers independent judicial enquiry. Now if that doesn’t happen, there will be every reason for someone like Steve [Biddulph] or me or Jack Waterford or Margo [Kingston] to make a complaint to the International Criminal Court to say that the Australian government has failed in its obligation to investigate this properly. So that’s possibly down the track.
I hope we won’t get to that. I hope that it will be handled honourably within our own polity. But I want to say loud and clear today that that is what is coming at the end of the road, if there is to be no proper judicial process in this country about SIEV X.
Now this cable has become a focus of Senate enquiry. In the Questions on Notice process and in Estimates Committees, enquiries about SIEV X have continued long after the ending of the CMI enquiry. And the CMI enquiry was supposed to be the end of the SIEV X story. But it wasn’t. It became very clear that the Senate Committee was being systematically misled, not only by Ministers but also by a wide range of officials who appeared before it.
And what that meant was that basically the Senate, through no fault of its own, whitewashed the SIEV X story. The chapters of the CMI Children Overboard Report dealing with SIEV X are unhelpful, because they were based on inadequate misleading and incomplete information by official witnesses.
And I can say that quite safely because Senator Cook has already said it. He said it in the Senate in February of this year. He complained bitterly in the Senate that we had been led to believe we were being given the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth, and that turned out not to be the case, and that puts the results of our enquiry into question.
Then Senator Faulkner spoke very strongly at the Fabian Society in Melbourne a few months ago, making clear that he intends to continue his investigations into the People Smuggling Disruption Program.
So SIEV X is not over. There may be some people who think it is over, there may be many people who would like it to be over, but I am telling them now - it is not over.
And we are not approaching this in a spirit of vengefulness. We are not approaching this in the sense of trying to find someone to put the blame on. What we are trying to do is to give the victims – both the 353 dead and the many more living victims who mourn them – a sense that this has been recognised, a sense that somebody cares about this.
I was listening to a wonderful prayer this morning read out by Bishop Pat Power at the Memorial Service by the lake. He was talking about the need for people’s lives and deaths to be recognised. And that is what this is about. We have to show that we care about the human dignity of the people who died on SIEV X and of the people who are mourning them.
I don’t care about revenge, I don’t want to send anybody to prison, I don’t want to dishonour or embarrass anybody in government or in the public service. But I do want truth and honesty about one of the most terrible things that happened in our history. SIEV X is an Australian tragedy, it is not something that happened up there in Indonesian waters to a bunch of foreigners and nothing to do with us.
The people who died on SIEV X were the wives and children of men in Australia on Temporary Protection Visas. They were trying to reach their husbands and fathers and brothers. There was no legal way in which they could come here. A law had just been passed that made this impossible, and so they had no alternative but to use people smugglers. And that is one connection with Australia.
The second major connection with Australia is that SIEV X sunk in Australian-patrolled military border protection zone waters. John Howard tried very hard to put out a lie that the boat sank in Indonesian waters and that Australia is not responsible. Even this cable knows from the very beginning that that was a lie. Ric Smith who wrote this cable knew, when John Howard started lying on 23rd October that the boat sank in Indonesian waters and that we are not responsible. Ric Smith had just sent a cable. Look at the last sentence of paragraph 6:
“It is judged as no further south than 8 degrees south latitude on a direct line from Sunda Strait to Christmas Island”
.Now 8 degrees south latitude is 80 miles south of Java. Already, everybody who got this cable – and here are some of the people who got it –
OVERHEAD page 3 of cable http://sievx.com/documents/DFAT4.gif
Everybody who got this cable knew that that boat had sunk in the Indian Ocean south of Java outside Indonesian territorial waters on its way to Christmas Island, and that it had sank in the Australian Operation Relex border protection zone.
Everybody who would have got this cable – and here are the DFAT addressees -
Everybody who got this cable would have known that the Prime Minister was lying, and yet nobody squeaked. Nobody blew the whistle. Nobody rang up Jack anonymously at the ‘Canberra Times’ to say, the Prime Minister is lying about this.
That’s what I find so frightening about this. At that time we had been so desensitised that the public service, which I used to be proud to belong to, did not think it was necessary to correct the Prime Minister’s lie.
Well, those things are changing. It will be corrected.
Let’s do what I said I would do, which is to deconstruct this cable.
The first thing to note is that it was a media briefing cable. The low classification meant that Ministers could draw on it freely, basically to brief the press. The most important line is that third line in the Cable Summary:
“There has been close interest by the international media in the story”.
Basically, Smith was telling John Howard and six other Ministers to get ready for media enquiries, because this story was going to be a big one. And he was really giving them a brief to use that would keep them out of trouble.
Now the first part of that brief was to say that the boat sank in waters within the Indonesian maritime search and rescue area of responsibility – you can see that in the second sentence of the Summary. That was a very clever piece of verbal gymnastics by the Embassy, to say that:
“Well, we can’t say that it sank in Indonesian waters because that’s not true, so let’s say it sank in the Indonesian search and rescue zone. Somebody might think that meant Indonesian waters”.
Actually the Indonesian search and rescue zone extends to south of Christmas Island. It’s a meaningless concept . Indonesia had no military or surveillance resources in the area. Australia had two frigates and an RAAF Orion squadron in the area, surveying it daily, which gave us a safety of life at sea responsibility.
“But let’s try and say ‘Indonesian search and rescue zone’, and hope we get away with it”.
The Prime Minister cut right through that, he just went straight for the lie. He said: “It sank in Indonesian waters”. On 23 and 24 October, he said that on about six talk –show programs around Australia. That wasn’t true, but nobody denied it And PM and C obligingly wrote a report the next day which carried a sub-section headed “ Boat sunk in Indonesian waters”. So Howard could say he had been briefed accordingly. I think we’ve seen that before on other matters.
I don’t really mind about John Howard lying. You know some politicians lie, it happens. But what really disturbs me is that the whole system backed up the lie, right through the CMI inquiry.
And when we go on with this cable, we find what happened as a result of that lie being sustained. The lie was transmuted into a line – I“ll call it a “line”, politely – that “we don’t know where the boat sank, it’s speculative where it sank”. And that came through in the famous Defence Internal Review of Intelligence on SIEV X , and this was what was put forward, after some bureaucratic gobblygook: OVERHEAD – extract from Defence Internal Review of Intelligence on SIEV X http://sievx.com/documents/20020704AttachmentA.html
I won’t name the author of this report, but some people here will know who it was: “Defence can only speculate as to where the vessel foundered” .
There is the lie, in black and white. And of course the Committee bought this, and this is what the Committee said as a result of that lie:
“The exact location where the boat sank remains in doubt, with speculation that it might have gone down in the Sunda Strait within Indonesian waters.”
Now the Committee couldn’t possibly have reached that conclusion had they known of the Embassy cable, but the Embassy cable had been hidden from them . They were misled systematically by the bureaucracy.
Now in the cable we’ve got some blacked out lines at the beginning, and those blacked out lines are quite significant. Because we’ve been told in the Senate Committee that they contain the sources of the cable, and that would give us an opportunity if we could see those blacked out lines to know whether this really came from one survivor spoken to over the telephone with the help of an IOM interpreter by Australian policemen.
Because that is the lie we are being told. We are being told that most of the information in this cable came from an Australian police liaison officer at the Embassy talking through an IOM interpreter with one male survivor.
Can you imagine an ambassador of Ric Smith’s experience and seniority basing a cable to the Prime Minister and six Ministers on such a flimsy piece of information as that ? Of course not. The Embassy had access to an intelligence brief on the sinking. This is quite clear from the contents of this cable as we go through it.
But that is the cover story – that it was one survivor. Questioning in the Senate, Questions on Notice, have established that most of the cable was supposed to have come from this survivor, with two exceptions. There is supposed to have been a bit of work done in the Embassy on trying to approximate where the boat sank, and there is supposed to have been reference to IOM information.
Now I’m going to have to truncate this seriously, I’m afraid, but my whole paper will be going up on the website that I’m establishing soon, www.tonykevin.com – precisely to get this sort of information out into the public arena.
One of the things in this cable that is really striking, and which I do want to draw attention to, is this reference to the chipboard upper deck , in paragraph three:
“The vessel was waiting for them. The dimensions of the vessel were reported as 19.5 metres long with a beam of 4 metres. A makeshift upperdeck had been added, with the afterdecks enclosed by chipboard, presumably to enhance seaworthiness”.
Now that’s really important, because that points to the implication of the boat having been grossly overloaded to sink. Because you don’t put an extra deck on top of a boat to enhance stability. To everyone who would have read that cable in Canberra, that sentence would have leapt out at them. And yet nobody remembered it in the Enquiry at any point. The fact of that chipboard upper deck just wasn’t mentioned. And yet it was known to at least one hundred, possibly two or three hundred, officials in Canberra, from four days after the sinking.
And who added those puzzling four words “presumably to enhance seaworthiness” ? Is that some sort of an ironical in-joke? Is that the way people sort of nudge each other and say: “Hey, we really know all about this but we’re not going to say?” I don’t know, but I found those four words quite chilling.
There is a lot missing from this paragraph 3, the departure paragraph, Not a word about the thirty armed Indonesian police who helped Quassey load terrified women and children and men onto the boat at gunpoint. There are multi-source survivor accounts in the media that report just that, but there is not a word about it here.
OVERHEAD – page 2 of cable
When we go on to paragraphs 4 and 5, we’ve got a clear reference to the journey . We don’t see there a great deal of important information about the journey. We don’t see the information about the engines failing. And of course the engines governed the pumps – that was crucial, Once the engines failed, the boat which had actually been leaking from the start – we’ve got media reporting of that too – the powerful pumps linked to the engines could no longer keep up with the water flowing in through the cracks in the hull. And so the boat quickly filled up with water, capsized and sank.
None of that is told. We get this sanitised account of how the boat sank. Why didn’t this survivor tell them that ? His story, whatever it was, has been sanitised and doctored for the people who were reading this cable in Canberra. Remember - it was a media brief. It wasn’t telling the story of what had happened on SIEV X It was telling Ministers: “Here are the things you can say about what happened on SIEV X”
As we go on with this cable, we come back to this question of the sinking location. And we are told that the information in paragraph 6 is coming partly from the survivor. His information was supposed to be analysed by a RAN representative at the Embassy. Now the RAN is supposed to have tried to do a rough calculation of where the boat sank, leading to that final sentence in paragraph 6.
When I analyse that, I find that is completely spurious too. Because nobody knows how fast that boat was going. I believe it was going at 4 knots – 4 nautical miles per hour. For two reasons – firstly, if you’ve got 400 people on board a boat the size of three quarters of one side of a singles tennis court, you go slowly. You don’t go fast.
Secondly, it fits with what I know of the starting time, the finishing time, and the time elapsed between them. So I can measure the distance from embarkation point to sinking point. I can measure the time elapsed. And it comes out at 4 knots, which makes sense.
The AFP were talking about a probable speed between 8 knots and 12 knots. That is crazy. At 8 knots, in 37 ½ hours travelling time which is what this cable says, the boat would have already been at Christmas Island. At 4 knots it would have got to the point where it sank. So how can they, not knowing what the speed was, say that they calculated at the Embassy where the boat sank and produced that final sentence in para 6 ?
The reality is, of course, that they knew where the boat sank, exactly, from information provided by somebody. Which brings us back to Senator Faulkner’s questions about this possibly being a people smuggling disruption operation.
Somebody told the Embassy where the boat sank, and then they basically wrapped that up a bit, and put it out to the media.
How would they have found out where the boat sank ? I can think of five possibilities.
Firstly, a radio intercept by DSD of the captain’s
final distress message by radio. There is some puzzlement as to whether
this distress message was sent or not –there is an initial report
from CNN in Geneva that the IOM spokesman Jean-Philippe Chauzy who
reported the accident for the first time to the world, said the captain
sent a final radio distress message. But we never heard any more about
it, it disappeared from all subsequent records
The second method might have been monitoring transmissions from a tracking device fitted to the boat, and of course when it stopped beeping, they would know that is where the boat went down. And Senator Faulkner has been assiduous in asking questions about tracking devices, and has had no satisfactory answers.
Thirdly, there could be unadmitted Australian air surveillance detections of SIEV X. We’ve discovered that much of the material in the Defence charts, the maps of where the RAAF Orion aircraft are supposed to have flown and what they are supposed to have seen., are nothing more than indicative of what the planes actually did. There is something gone very wrong there, that has now been admitted in some of the Replies to Questions on Notice that have recently come in.
Fourthly, it could be long-distance (JORN) Australian radar detections of SIEV X. We have these unadmitted top secret radar capacities that can see what is coming in in those waters, and quite possibly SIEV X could have been monitored very clearly through that.
And finally, it could have been American defence satellite surveillance.
So you’ve got five possibilities. But it certainly wasn’t a naval officer at the Embassy doing back-of-the-envelope calculations based on what a survivor had said. I think we can rule that out safely.
Now we go on with this cable and we find on the last page :
information that is supposed to have come from the International Organisation for Migration, very precise passenger information. Once again, it beggars possibility to think that one survivor would have known that there were 353 people who sank, he wouldn’t have a clue.
If you were on the train that crashed at Wollongong a few months ago, would you have known how many people were on the train ? Of course you wouldn’t. If you were in the lodge that got swept away in the Thredbo avalanche, would you know how many people were sleeping in the lodge ? No, not if you were in your room and did not know what was happening.
Survivors don’t know these things. They had to have come from people who had the passenger manifest. And who had the passenger manifest ? The people smuggler.
How did the Embassy get hold of it within six hours of the boat getting back to Jakarta ? We don’t know. The reasonable hypothesis is that it came from people who were in close contact with the people smuggler. (or go to sievx.com/archives/
, 17 July: “New Maps Expose
Further Holes in Govt's
SIEVX Story
”
Now I just want to show you before I get to my overall conclusions a map that sievx.com has put out, it was a map constructed a few months ago. It has had virtually no analysis or media coverage or parliamentary interest. It is a crucial map because it is drawn on a template of the RAAF charts.
The red line is the baseline of the Indonesian coastline for Law of the Sea calculations. The blue dotted line is 24 miles out from that, which is the northern limit of Australian air surveillance. The brown rectangle is the north-western sector of the Operation Relex air surveillance zone.
Point EC is the 8 degrees south latitude where it intersects with the direct line from Sunda Strait, which is the Admiralty buoys marking the entrance to Sunda Strait, to Christmas Island . So this point EC is the Embassy cable point.
Point JH, which I haven’t mentioned at all. is the Jakarta Harbormaster’s official report of what the fishing boat told him where survivors had been picked up by another fishing boat. They are the rescue coordinates, JH.
Point DI which I also haven’t mentioned is the DIMIA Intelligence Note 83/2001 of 23 October , a document of the Committee, and that said quite clearly that the boat sank “approximately 60 NM south of Sunda Strait “ . So we measure down from S to DI these 60 nautical miles.
Look how close those points are. DI, JH and EC are all within 20 NM of each other. They are all unambiguously inside the Operation Relex zone.
And yet- and here is the incredible thing – Defence and Senator Hill are still saying that it is speculative where the boat sank, and that position seems to be accepted by the Parliament. The Opposition have not yet come out and said formally: “That is a lie”. I look forward to them doing that.
Finally I would like to set out my overall conclusions. But just before that I want to draw your attention to the missing section of the cable – there is a missing heading and about ten lines of text missing. Now this will be the ambassador’s summary, this will be conclusions or implications or something like that. We don’t know what it is. It would be very interesting for the full powers judicial inquiry to find out what those last ten lines say. Or if they don’t find it out, for the International Criminal Court to find out.
I’ll conclude as follows:
· This was a media briefing cable for Ministers, in a situation the Ambassador knew was already generating intense media interest and would therefore require careful information management.
· It tells the SIEV X story in a way that only tells the elements the Australian authorities wanted told – an overloaded boat, with no safety equipment. It hides unwanted elements – that the boat sank in international waters and the Australian border protection zone, that Indonesian police had assisted the people smuggler, that passengers had been forced aboard at police gunpoint, that the boat had leaked from the start, that the engines and pumps had finally stopped, leading to rapid water entry and capsize. All those things that go to people smuggling disruption in my view were carefully left out of the cable.
· The Ambassador would not have approved a briefing cable of this importance, to the Prime Minister and six other Ministers, on the basis only of one claimed telephone conversation with one survivor through an interpreter. Much of the precise information in the cable could not have come from any survivor. The Embassy must have had access to precise intelligence reporting on the story, which can only have come from people who were close to the named people smuggler Abu Quassey. This highlights Senator Faulkner’s unanswered question - what was the AFP’s people smuggling disruption program really doing in Indonesia?
· The suppression for 16 months of knowledge of the cable and its contents, by most witnesses and providers of official information to the CMI enquiry, is a public scandal. I am saddened to see how so many Ministers and senior officials are failing in their duty to the Australian community to uphold the laws of this country, at a time when the Australian Senate is trying to investigate the deaths of 353 people.
I have also I think mentioned my new website – www.tonykevin.com – it is just in construction , I have had the name registered, but I haven’t yet worked out how to set it up. So please, in about a week’s time, check it out and there should be a few interesting things to read on it.
The reason I’ve set up this site - I should say this publicly and for the record – is not in any sense indicative of any problems in relation to sievx.com. Sievx.com is a wonderful site and a wonderful archival site for all the information record on SIEV X.
What I wanted to do was to have a place where I could put out some personal advocacy of my own, which wouldn’t necessarily fit within the purposes of sievx.com.
Not only on SIEV X, by the way - www.tonykevin.com will also carry some of the things I am writing on other subjects, like Iraq and foreign policy and so on. So for better or worse it will be there.
What does all this tell us ? I want to finish up with just a few moral propositions. You may have seen those seven points that were distributed here.
I think we really need to return to a morally accountable basis for our foreign and national security policies (and of course Iraq is the big one here). National security policies that undermine Australians’ personal security or other people’s personal security are wrong policies. Finally, as SIEV X and the Bali tragedy so sadly proved - “what goes around comes around”.
Tony Kevin, Canberra 18 October 2003
Margo Kingston:
I’d really like to work out why everyone is here, to make a survey of why do people care enough to come out on a Saturday to listen to all this stuff about SIEV X ? Why did I drive to Canberra to talk about SIEV X ?
Listening to Tony, the thing that really strikes me about this is the number of people and the number of organisations that just don’t want to be honest about what they know. It is like the children overboard thing - what’s wrong with our system, when there wasn’t one person - so many people in Canberra knew that children overboard was a lie - not one person told the media ?
I got a new theory just then which is - I remember when the SAS boarded the Tampa and I wrote a piece which said “Now we’ve invaded Norway”, but the piece was about how the build-up of the detention policy was really such that there was an undeclared war. We had actually declared war on boat people, and when you declare war all the rules change, everything becomes a matter of national security. “Criminal activity to win the war ?” - I mean, it does not make sense, war is about beating the enemy no matter what the circumstances.
I went to a conference last night where Julian Burnside spoke, probably the leading pro bono barrister trying to obtain justice for the boat people. He said he was arguing in Court for Iranian reffos who had been found not to be genuine asylum-seekers. He was trying to stop them getting sent back to Iran because they were certain to be tortured. He actually had a video that he spoke about in flat terms, which did not make it any easier to hear – a video of a man lying on a table with his family beside him and a group of officials reading in a bureaucratic manner a long document, in the process of which the man on the table’s eyes were taken out and they were put on a towel.
He said that the government’s response in the Court was: “Let’s assume that it’s true that the Iranian people we will send back to Iran will be tortured in this way, under the Migration Act we still have the right to do it - and we will do it” (Solicitor-general, arguing in Court on behalf of the government).
So it might help, in trying to understand this and not drive ourselves crazy about it, to conceptualise it that Australia is at war with the boat people and that public opinion is in favour of that war. Another anecdote Julian gave last night was that he gave a speech at Victoria’s Parliament House a few months ago – it was a speech I put up on Webdiary, but I didn’t know the background to it until last night – he had given a talk about how part of the deal of us joining the International Criminal Court was that we had put into Australian domestic law laws against genocide and crimes against humanity. And under our domestic law of crimes against humanity, the government was guilty of that, because they had put a specific cohort of people in detention etc etc.
A journalist from The Age had come up and asked for that speech. The journo had apologetically rung Julian a few days later, and said: “Sorry, the Editor doesn’t think that is interesting”. Don’t laugh : I think this is really important to know: in a war, there is censorship. There is massive censorship.
I know that in the short period I was involved in SIEV X, I was very careful not to make accusations . All anyone asked me at work and in interviews was: “Well, what happened, Margo ? What do you think happened?” And I always said” “ I don’t know” I was just trying to ask questions, to see what happened. And almost immediately I was accused of scandalous behaviour and scandalising the Australian people with allegations that John Howard is a mass murderer etc etc. There was a concerted attack by Albrechtson, Akerman, and all of them really, just saying “Well, she should be sacked”.
Again, in a war, most journalists act as propagandists. If we are in a war, that does explain why the system won’t tell the truth, seeks to hide the truth, because nasty things have to be done to win a war as we all know.
So where does that leave us ? Us people that turn up on a Saturday to worry ourselves senseless about the state of morality of Australia and its government? Well, that leaves us as traitors, terrorists, an extreme minority, and people who are in danger.
I think it’s actually a liberation to realise that, because you stop worrying about why no one wants to hear, why no one wants the truth, and you get strength from each other about standing up for what you believe Australia is about in the long term , and what Australia stands for in the long term.
It’s a time to look after each other and to be careful, and also I think if you are in a minority, a persecuted minority, then it is really important to stop, to free the mind to think laterally.
One phrase that I have instructed my Webdiarists to cease and desist from for some time now is this “ashamed to be Australian” business, because that is not only not going to convince anyone over to our side - and let’s be frank, our side is a dangerous place to be. You say “come over to here, you’ll have a lot of fun and everyone will really like you”.
You know, you’re appealing to something apart from that. It is to think laterally. I believe that the people in my terrorist cell – you people – have got more brains than the other lot. The other lot has got the power, and we’ve got the brains. We have got to free our minds to use the brains, because what we have got on our side is hope and optimism and faith.
So that is my contribution, except one other thing – the way I got involved with SIEV X was, I came down to Canberra to have a go at children overboard – I thought children overboard was a really important story – and I just happened to be in Canberra when Admiral Bonser gave some testimony that said that Admiral Smith the head of Relex had lied under oath to the Senate enquiry when he said that the Defence Force had known nothing about SIEV X until after it sank. And that is when the whole thing started to unravel and we started to work out that that wasn’t the case at all, far from it – far from it
And then I thought that I’d better sort out this business of whether it sank in Indonesian waters or not, and the reason for that is that – I think that the biggest lie Howard told until he lied to us about the reasons for the war in Iraq was not the lie about the children overboard. That pales into insignificance compared to the lie he told on October 23 2001, when he lied over the bodies of 353 people and said “that boat sank in Indonesian waters”.
He said that five or six times, he said it as part of his immigration policy launch, the context in which he said it was that Looselips Beazley had said in response to news of the sinking was that it was the fault of government policy . And John Howard said: “No, it’s nothing to do with us, that boat sank in Indonesian waters, that boat sank in Indonesian waters, that is the cruellest slur on the integrity of our Australian Defence Force, the cruellest slur” He won votes on that for 3 or 4 days.
First I went to Robert Hill and asked a series of questions, because as a result of Tony approaching Simon Crean, Crean had written to Hill and said “Look, I’ve got these pretty wild allegations from a constituent, what is the evidence for me to say that it sank in Indonesian waters?” And Hill wrote back and said: “Well, that is what Defence tells me”.
So I just thought, well what is the basis for this evidence? I went through a week of rigmarole - so frustrating - and at the end of the day the answer came back that after Tony had raised these allegations, the Defence Force had done a rough calculation on the back of an envelope basically. That has since proved to be a massive lie, there has been lots of other stuff.
So I them went to John Howard’s Office in search of Tony O’Leary and said: “Well, could you please tell me the basis for Mr Howard’s cast-iron statements on Oct 23 and 24 that the boat sank in Indonesian waters? “
He rang back and said: “Oh well, it was media and other advice”, and he reeled off all these media statements by talkshow people, which was not really evidence at all. I put it in writing, and then he said he’d get back to me and he passed it on to Miles Jordana who was Howard’s foreign affairs adviser and one of the people implicated in the children overboard lie and that went on for days. I rang practically every day and Tony said “Look , I don’t know what’s happening, Miles has been onto it”.
So finally I thought, allright, I‘ll take the plunge. Howard was giving an airport press conference on his way out of the country in Sydney and I went out to Sydney Airport and I threw the question. I said; “Well Mr Howard, the time’s come, what’s your evidence?“ And he said: “I’m not going to tell you “. And I said : “I’m not going to tell you”. “Why?” “I’m not going to tell you”. And that’s when I started to know that, whether or not Australia sunk that boat or connived in sinking that boat, there is no doubt that Howard lied over 353 dead bodies. I just don’t respect that guy at all – thanks.
Jack Waterford:
Some media colleagues might say that Tony Kevin, and maybe the people in this room, are starting to become obsessive and nutty, and really it ( SIEV X ) is not an issue out there. I have perhaps a little bit more leeway in this, because I’ve never seen any sign other than that the people of Canberra, our readers, have been, in a large majority way , quite interested in, quite concerned about, and quite appalled about, the whole context of our refugee policy.
I recognise that Letters to the Editor are not necessarily an infallible guide to public opinion. But I am flat out getting a single letter which will support government policy in the area. And it still figures largely as a central issue in Letters to the Editor which come in to the “Canberra Times”.
It fits also into a broader context of things. Even before the question of the fate of the SIEV X had become an issue because of the activities of Tony Kevin, it was amazing and bemusing to me that the activities of the Liberal government were amazing and astounding enough, but the shameful moral surrender of the Labor Party is something for which we have yet to have an accounting.
And even now it is I think a significant factor in preventing all of the truth coming out, because while there have been some Senators and some brave Senators who have somewhat against their better judgement followed the issue through, at all stages they have felt: “Look, I’m not getting anything out of this, I’m probably doing the wrong thing, maybe I’m caught up in one of Tony Kevin’s mad conspiracy theories, I shouldn’t follow it too far, I should leave myself room to manoeuvre, or to get out”.
Now almost anyone who has gone in – backwards, as it were - into the situation, has ended up at every stage along the track finding yet more clues and yet more signs, if only from the defensiveness, from the evasiveness, and from the way in which the layers have been pulled back and back, but still indicating that somewhere deep behind it all there is a great secret and a shameful secret. These people have got to the point where, two years on, the Senate is passing resolutions which are in effect self-invitations to do the job that they should have done better last year.
When Tony first came to me with this material, I must confess that I was reasonably sceptical about it, even though I had a whole lot of incredibly sceptical ideas about the motivation and the factual basis behind refugee policy. The reason why is that essentially as a journalist, I’m a bit of a “presumption of regularity” person. I believe that most public servants like their jobs, believe that they’re acting in the public interest, would not consciously assist in or connive in something that was clearly morally wrong, let alone criminal.
If I look at the list of names of addressees on the cable that Tony was referring to, like Tony I suppose I know personally at least three-quarters of them, and I regard them essentially as honourable and capable Australian public servants. And I cannot believe for a second that they were party to a conspiracy to actually sink these people.
I think that still, and yet I more and more wonder whether there is an inner secret there that only a small few of them know about, which is still being concealed, and this is why I’m still anxious to see the story reported and followed through.
What is the context of this? Well, the first is the general background of refugee policy and the deliberate political use that was being made of fear of refugees, of boat invasions, of terror coming here, that was a part of the lead-up if you like to the “Tampa” affair and then subsequently to the SIEV X affair.
There was even before we got to the “Tampa” affair, the previous indifference which had been demonstrated by DIMIA in particular but also by other agencies, in relation to the safety of life at sea. We might all remember that this was not the first instance in which a boat sank with many people being drowned. I recall about four or five years ago putting in an FOI request about the information that was available to the Australian authorities on that, and received back about three or four pages of essentially press material.
Further to Margo’s theory of our being at war, I think a very important thing that we must remember occurred on the evening of the “Tampa” incident. John Howard himself strode around the press galleries of Parliament House, talking about how important it was, and insisting that (JW pounding the table for emphasis) “these people will never be allowed to land in Australia”. And when we think of this as a military operation, this was the primary political imperative of the government: that come what may, no landing was to be allowed or permitted.
I don’t know exactly how that political directive, strategic objective, fed its way into the military operation that took place. But one of the things which still bemuses me most in the lead-up to the SIEV X affair is that when we had massively increased Australian surveillance over the area, ships at sea there to intercept any boats that were travelling, clear intelligence operations taking place, the full details of which we have not yet been told about, in Indonesia designed to identify likely shipments, gatherings of refugees, and various things like that - this boat is allowed to sail off with some knowledge by the Australian authorities, and yet at all of the crucial times mysteriously it escapes all of the surveillance operations that we have, and our ships are in fact well away and are not in the places where one would think that they ought to be if they were designing to intercept anything.
But even that, one could accept to some extent as a cock-up, one of those things that happened or something like that, were it not for the pattern of cover-up, evasion, defensiveness, the serial pulling-apart of the layers of the onion, the hints that go further and further about undercover operations going on in Indonesia, so that it’s quite clear that at some stage a lot more truth is going to be revealed about it.
Margo Kingston – Why, Jack ?
JW - I just don’t believe at the end of the day that it can be concealed.
The other thing that I find absolutely astounding, if we have a government, or a military, which is actually working in the public interest in this matter, is why in all of the consequences, whether those that took place in the immediate aftermath, or those that took place after Tony Kevin in particular blew the whistle, we’ve seen no sign of any effort by the authorities to say: “Well, let’s suppose that we buggered it up. Let’s suppose it was a cock-up: what have we learnt from this episode? What are we going to do in future to make sure that we don’t miss such people, that 353 people don’t die on our watch ? What have we shown by way of an institutional response, which is to be a memorial to this appalling tragedy?”
The answer is – nothing.
I even now don’t pretend that I know anything like all of the facts of this thing. Even now, my major suspicion that there is a great secret about it comes less from any direct evidence which has emerged, although there is some such evidence, so much as from the pattern of cover-up, defensiveness and indifference from government.
But still I think the critical thing before we get a full accounting is in fact that the shameful moral surrender of the Labor Party on the issue has made the Labor Party to some degree complicit in what was done institutionally by government. When Labor shakes itself out of this moral torpor that it is in, I don’t believe that it is possible that within an adversary democratic system,. this secret can remain hidden too long.. |
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