Let’s consider the implications of yesterday’s explosive evidence at the children overboard cover up inquiry. This is Commander Stefan King’s opening statement:

I was the Australian Defence Force Liaison Officer in the International Division of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet from 13 July 2001 to 21 January 2002. I have structured my submission on the premise that the Senate select committee wants to know what information was passed to me with respect to the photographs relating to the SIEV4 incident, what I did with that information and the context in which this occurred. I hope to save the members of this committee their valuable time by taking this approach.

The Director of Operations, Navy Commander Piers Chatterton, has said before this committee that he advised me on 11 October 2001 that the pictures that had appeared in the media showing people in the water were not related to the claims that unauthorised arrivals had thrown their children in the water on 7 October but were in fact related to the rescue of unauthorised arrivals from their sinking boat which occurred on the following day, that is, 8 October.

I confirm that his statement in this regard is true. Commander Chatterton gave me this information face to face prior to us attending the daily strategic command briefing into the progress of Operation Slipper on 11 October.

I am very familiar with Commander Chatterton’s role in briefing the Chief of Navy daily on matters of operational significance. I was therefore prepared to afford a high degree of credibility to this information having regard to his close access to both the source of operational information, his immediate access to the Chief of Navy and the fact that this was obviously an extremely topical, sensitive, national issue.

By my standards, this was in no way gossip. It was a briefing by a relevant person for a relevant purpose. Commander Chatterton also made a comment to the effect that it was evident that somewhere along the way some clarifying captions accompanying the pictures had become removed. I treated that information as plausible conjecture and afforded it credibility as such. I briefly acknowledged the information he had given me and we never discussed it again, as was appropriate. In the time I had to reflect on this information before returning to my office that morning, I gave consideration as to how I should treat it.

Before discussing that, I would firstly like to give an outline to the committee of the way in which I conducted myself within the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. My job was clearly to provide a service of liaison, advice and military experience into the Defence section of the International Division.

There was a clear, spoken agreement that the liaison officer worked for PM&C and abided by their professional guidelines. These expectations included an absolute discretion about the things read, said and heard in doing business in that department, and about the general one-way flow of information; that is, into the department, not outwards. I wholeheartedly abided by those rules and hence I never gave Commander Chatterton any feedback as to what I had done with that information he had given me.

In considering the information I had received, it was very clear to me that my function was to provide this advice to my two senior officers in International Division, such that they could advise their seniors as appropriate. My logic for this was that, in my three months experience in that department, it was obvious that great care was taken to ensure that any public announcements by the Prime Minister and other ministers were consistent. As this issue was only a day or so old, I thought it could be corrected quickly.

Following the daily Strategic Command briefings, it was my practice to brief my supervisor, Senior Adviser, Defence Branch, Ms Harinder Sidhu, on anything noteworthy arising from the brief and, if warranted, to also brief the Assistant Secretary, Defence Branch, Dr Hammer, noting that he was an exceptionally busy man.

On this occasion, namely 11 October, I was able to brief the Senior Defence Adviser immediately on a few minor issues arising from the morning brief, and to pass to her the information that Commander Chatterton had given to me in respect to the pictures being erroneously reported in the media. The Senior Defence Adviser instantly agreed that this information warranted being passed to our Assistant Secretary and that she should join me in briefing him.

The Assistant Secretary was too busy to see us in the forenoon, but we made an agreement to come back later in the afternoon. Often, in such situations, information would lose value as time passed and the Senior Defence Adviser would make a decision as to whether there remained an imperative to brief the Assistant Secretary, Defence Branch, in the light of rapidly changing order of priorities and his extraordinarily large workload. On this occasion, we conferred and agreed it was still very relevant to brief Dr Hammer.

When the occasion presented that afternoon, the Senior Defence Adviser and I attended the Assistant Secretary’s office and I advised him that a fellow Navy officer, attending the Strategic Command brief that morning, had told me that the pictures in the media showing people in the water did not relate to the claims made by the Minister for Defence that unauthorised arrivals were throwing their children overboard but, in fact, related to an event the following day when those same people were being rescued by the Navy from their sinking vessel. I also said that it seemed that the captions accompanying the pictures appeared to have been removed, however I did not do so with the same gravity, noting the degree of conjecture I attributed to that information at that time.

I assessed that the Assistant Secretary acknowledged that the information was sensitive but he did not give any indication to me about what action he would take in response, or what he might want me to do. In any event, I was given no instructions to pursue confirmation of the matter.

As it was the nature of both Dr Hammer, and from my observations, the department, dealings on sensitive issue would often happen quickly at higher levels without the knowledge of the desk officers, therefore I could not conclude that nothing was being done about the issue. Indeed, as the matter was very sensitive, it did not surprise me at all that I was given no further instructions, as I believed that if the Assistant Secretary wanted to act on this advice, he would have done so at his own level in the first instance.

The subject was not raised in my presence again until, I believe, 8 November. On that date, the Senior Defence Adviser advised me that during the previous evening she had relayed to an officer of Social Policy Division the information that I had passed to her on 11 October. The Senior Defence Adviser had elected not to disclose the source of her information without the courtesy of discussing it with me first. The result of her discretion has been subsequent references to gossip being heard in a tea break. I maintain, however, that there has never been gossip at any level on my part associated with this issue. I was briefed and I briefed upwards appropriately. Thank you.

Three days after the election Howard, as promised under pressure during the campaign, asked his department head Max Moore-Wilton to “conduct a full examination of issues relating to the vessel known as SIEV 4.’ Moore-Wilton delegated the job to senior PM&C officer Jennifer Bryant. (Defence did a separate inquiry into their role in the matter.)

In her January 2002 report, she said key issues included “what efforts were made to correct any misinformation”. Since King was in PM&C to relay information from defence, he’d be the obvious person to interview. As would, of course, Dr Brendon Hammer, the head of the PM&C defence branch, and his senior defence adviser Harinder Sidhu. She did not interview King. She rang Sidhu in December to find out the date Sidhu had her chat with the social policy division officer, got no joy and left it at that. We don’t know if she contacted Hammer.

Bryant’s report said nothing about PM&C having any information about the fake overboard claim or the fake photos. She wrote only of attempts Defence made to get the then defence minister Peter Reith to correct the record.

Thus Moore-Wilton, for whatever reason, has presided over a grotesquely incomplete report which kept his department out of the frame.

On February 18, before the child overboard inquiry began, Moore-Wilton gave evidence to a Senate committee investigating the Department’s spending program. Under questioning from Labor Senator John Faulkner, he said:

Max Moore-Wilton: Senator, can I say to you again – and let me say it to you again categorically, which is why I take offence at the conclusion you have reached at this stage – that none of the information available within the Department of Defence which casts doubt on the photographs or the basic report was released outside the Department of Defence. It was not released to the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. When Mr Jordana (John Howard’s personal foreign policy adviser) asked for (situation reports) the department officials were entitled to give him the task force situation reports which were relevant. They could not give him information they had no knowledge about. And this constant effort to consistently say that the department was aware that the photographs were not of 7 October is not true.

…

We now know that evidence was false. There three possible reasons:

(1) Moore-Wilton did not ask his officers what they knew, in which case he is either incompetent or did not want to know the answer,

(2) He did ask and his officers lied. In that case, his stewardship of PM&C, for whatever reason, is in tatters and he should resign, or

(3) A possibility one would be loathe to contemplate.

Moore-Wilton now has many questions to answer at the cover-up inquiry. (One relates to evidence Sidhu gave yesterday. In preparation for the Department’s evidence to the February spending inquiry – where Moore-Wilton gave his cast iron guarantee PM&C knew nothing about the fake photos before the election – Jennifer Bryant, the author of the PM&C report – asked Sidhu about King briefing. Max wasn’t told, perhaps?)

We also learnt yesterday (for transcripts of the evidence go to transcript) that in March, Dr Hammer asked Sidhu and King to come to his home on the weekend for a meeting on the October briefing. But King was in Sydney, and the trio met instead at the Kurrajong Hotel on March 11. At that time, King thought he’d be contributing to a PM&C submission to the Senate inquiry (Later that very day, Cabinet decided that no department would make a submission.)

In crucial evidence yesterday afternoon, Sidhu said that when Hammer suggested the meeting, “I gained the impression, and I cannot be sure, that this had been suggested to Dr Hammer by someone else. I just gained the impression that it was not actually his idea…It was almost as if: ‘It has been suggested to me that it would be a good idea if we got together to refresh our memories’; it was in that vein.”

If Sidhu’s impression is correct, it would have to have been suggested by someone more senior, and there aren’t many people in PM&C more senior than Hammer, who will give evidence when the inquiry resumes on May 22.

Here’s extracts from King’s evidence of what happened at the Kurrajong:

Senator Cook: How was the discussion led? Who went first? Did you offer up your views or did someone take charge of the discussion? Did Dr Hammer say, for example, ‘Let’s just go through this?’

King: Dr Hammer always takes charge of the discussion…

Cook: So, how was it put to you – the purpose for being there?

King: It is a reconstruction that I make along the lines that: ‘It is a good opportunity for us to get together. It has been a while since we have seen each other, and this is just for us to put forward our recollections of the briefing and associated events such that we all understand where each other’s recollections lie.’ And, from there, the invitation was, ‘I will ask you a question as if I were the committee, and then you could answer it’ …

Cook: You were having put to you by Dr Hammer questions that it was anticipated may be questions this committee would ask you?

King: We got to one question, yes.

Cook: You got to one question? What was that question?

King: I truly do not recollect; I dismissed it…

Cook: So why was there only one question? If this was a ‘practice session’, why was there only one question? What caused it to stop at that point?

King: Because I said that I did not want to provide a detailed answer in that way and would speak in general terms…

King: Was there any further effort to encourage you to say what, broadly, you thought?

King: Yes, there were further broad questions … It was expressed to me that it was an opportunity for me to gain some experience in receiving a question and answering it … I would describe it as an opportunity for some gathering of information that perhaps was of interest to Dr Hammer just to see how we collectively review those collections. It was not for my benefit, I do not believe, but I am not saying that as a criticism.

…

King said he was concerned by the request for a meeting. “The concerns were, firstly, that it was slightly unusual to have a meeting about a sensitive issue in an area outside a public office, largely for the reason that other people may construe that in a particular way. The second concern was just a sense that you often felt overwhelmed by Dr Hammer’s own version of events because he is a very influential man and in an influential position and he is paid to be right and sometimes it is hard to be heard … Dr Hammer did not contribute too much of his recollections. He made some broad comments about, ‘That is not the form of words that I recall’ …

Cook: He did not put to you an alternative version?

King: There was a single instance when he said, and I can remember the words fairly clearly, ‘Another or a better way to describe that might be,’ and I think that was for the purposes of definition.

…

There the matter rested as between PM&C and King. In January, King went back to Defence. Then, as the Senate committee got rolling, he wrote his statement and told the Defence task force on the scandal about the Kurrajong meeting. “My preliminary discussions with the task force were that there was a sequence of events that included that contacts with me to meet at certain areas may be construed by others as unusual behaviour. I equally said that I never felt that it was Dr Hammer’s intention to influence me but that, as a naval officer appearing before this committee, there may be an outcome either in media reporting or in any other reporting where that perception may be given to that sequence of events.”

Last Sunday the cover-up’s intricate spider’s web began to unravel very quickly. After Defence’s caning, the focus was moving squarely to PM&C and some of those who have skulked in the dark as Defence burned. We are now at the pinnacle of the public service, the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet. After the defence department’s disgrace, it is now crystal clear that traditional public service culture – we are servants of the people not the government, we are apolitical, we give honest advice, we tell politicians the facts – has virtually collapsed under pressure from government and hand-picked department heads on short-term contracts and performance pay.

Last Sunday the Defence Department told defence minister Robert Hill, in writing (they’re learning) that an allegation of attempted witness tampering could emerge at the inquiry. Suggestions had been made that a defence officer “omit relevant facts from his evidence”. The allegation was “very sensitive”.

On May 1, after the PM&C heirarchy passed on the warning, Hammer sent a hand-delivered letter to King. The ultimate irony for Hammer,and perhaps for others as yet unknown, is that King had not intended to raise the Kurrajong meeting in his evidence. That was why he did not include it in his statement. Kurrajong “basically was not an issue until it turned up in that letter,” he said.

King agreed the letter was “pretty heavy”. As a man with due respect for his superiors, he noted that Hammer had copied the latter to Moore-Wilton, Australia’s most senior public servant. He noted the belaboured exhortations to tell the truth about the November briefing, and that Hammer “never in any way” tried to influence his evidence. That, thought, King, was “unnecessary’ – of course he’d tell the truth. Only now, he’d also tell about Kurrajong.

Senator Faulkner: You receive this very heavy letter the day before you give evidence to this inquiry. Isn’t that in itself an attempt to influence?

King: That is possibly for others to determine.

Faulkner: What do you think?

King: I was uncomfortable receiving the letter. It surprised me; it caught me off guard.

…

And then, only then – after King made Kurrajong public, NOT when PM&C found out about the problem – did Moore-Wilton announce that he’d conduct an urgent inquiry to be completed Monday. He had to – an attempt to influence a witness’s evidence is a contempt of the Senate, which the Senate can punish with 6 months jail or a $5,000 fine. Worse, it is a criminal offence carrying the same penalty.

It is nonsensical that Moore-Wilton conduct the inquiry. There are thunder clouds of suspicion over his department and his leadership of it. He will have to take the stand himself to explain his false evidence. The inquiry must be undertaken by someone independent or it is, quite simply, farce.

By the way, after that meeting on March 11, indeed “very recently”, Dr Hammer was transferred out of PM&C. We don’t know exactly when, but as of yesterday at the latest, he is head of the America’s branch of Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. It’s a much sought after post, as it can lead to a posting in Washington.

Who did Hammer tell about King’s shock revelation on October 11? What inquiries did he make? Did he inform his superiors, and if so, did they inform the Prime Minister?

If he did nothing, he will have to resign or be sacked. A much more junior PM&C officer resigned when she forgot to tell the Prime Minister’s office about a relevant (although not as explosive) piece of information during the travel rorts affair in Howard’s first term.

When did Moore-Wilton find out about the October 11 briefing and the cup of coffee at the Kurrajong. Did he know before Hammer’s transfer?

Thus far in the children overboard inquiry, despite the stench and the lies and the coverups, not one head has rolled. People have been looking after each other, locked in mutual embraces of self-interest and self-protection. But that embrace is loosening, and someone’s head will have to be chopped off soon. Will someone take the fall to stop the whole truth coming out?

The Senate committee is still yet to decide whether to subpoena Peter Reith. It is now certain that he will be called, unless the truth, all of it, comes out before that decision has to be made.

***

POSTSCRIPT: Today, the PM said something about the children overboard affair on Melbourne radio 3AW. Neil Mitchell asked: “The Chair of your Immigration Advisory Group, John Hodges, I noticed went to Papua New Guinea to apologise to the boat people accused of dumping their children overboard. Would you apologise as well?”

Howard: Well I apologise for misstatements that I have made about people, I apologise for mistakes I have personally made. As you know Neil the statements I originally made about SIEV 4 were based on advice I had at the time. That’s why I made them. I didn’t make them maliciously or carelessly and that remains my position.”