 |
Last Saturday I spoke at a forum in Canberra to mark the second anniversary of the death of 353 people on SIEV-X during the 2001 federal election campaign. About 200 people turned up. Why? Church and refugee action groups had just got together to design and fund a SIEV-X memorial in Canberra. Why? The Senate had just demanded for the second time that the government establish a judicial inquiry into SIEV-X. Why?
Here’s my speech – off the cuff, no notes, so forgive the looseness – and that of Jack Waterford, the editor in chief of The Canberra Times, which has followed the story consistently since it broke last year. There’s more on the sievx site, a unique volunteer-run archive so comprehensive the AFP used to trawl it nightly until it got sprung. To end, SIEV-X website manager Marg Hutton’s summary of the Senate action so far. Thanks to Tony Kevin for the transcripts of Jack’s and my remarks. Tony’s speech is at his new website www.tonykevin.com
***
Margo Kingston
I’d really like to work out why everyone is here, to survey why 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 Kevin, 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 knew. It is like the children overboard thing. What’s wrong with our system when there wasn’t one person – when so many people in Canberra knew that children overboard was a lie – not one person told the media?
I got a new theory listening to Tony. 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 the build up to an undeclared war. After the Tampa we effectively 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” 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 being 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”
So it might help, in trying to understand this and not drive ourselves crazy about it, to conceptualise 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 – a speech I put up on Webdiary without knowing the background to it until last night – about how part of the deal in 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 free the mind to think laterally.
One phrase that I have instructed Webdiarists to cease and desist from for some time now is this “Ashamed to be Australian” business, because that is 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’re also appealing to something apart from that. 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 here when Admiral Bonser gave some testimony that showed that Admiral Smith, the head of Operation 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. I think 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 Kevin 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 (because there was no information, nothing). That has since proved to be a massive lie, as has lots of other stuff.
So I went to John Howard’s Office and asked his press secretary Tony O’Leary: ‘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, Howard’s foreign affairs adviser and one of the people implicated in the children overboard lie. 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, alright, 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’. Why? ‘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.
***
PS: After the speeches there’s was an intense audience discussion about the line over which a public servant could not ethically cross. When does the “I was just obeying orders’ defence not wash? A former deputy secretary of the finance department, Steve Bartos, who’d gone into private practice when the system stunk too much for him to feel comfortable, said children overboard or SEIV-X hadn’t affected him or his department. There’s always a seat at the table for finance, the money men, but not at the boat people task force table. Money was no object to Howard on this one. Cost-benefit analyses weren’t relevant on this one. He had a war to win, and an election.
***
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 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 (applause).
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, 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 (applause).
And even now it is I think a significant factor in preventing all of the truth coming out, because while there have been 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, 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 to the “Tampa” affair and then subsequently to the SIEV-X affair.
Even before we got to the “Tampa” affair, indifference had been demonstrated by DIMIA (the immigration department) in particular, but also by other agencies, in relation to the safety of life at sea. This was not the first instance in which a boat sank with many people drowned. I recall about four or five years ago putting in an freedom of information 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 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 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?
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 after all of the consequences, whether those that took place in the immediate aftermath or after Tony Kevin 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.
***
Senate Renews Its Call For A Judicial Inquiry Into SIEVX
by Marg Hutton
18 October 2003
Full report, and references, at sievxarchives
Democrats Leader Senator Andrew Bartlett and Leader of the Greens, Senator Bob Brown turned up the heat on the Howard Government with the passage through the Senate of two new motions related to SIEV-X on the eve of the second anniversary of the SIEV-X tragedy. This makes a total of four Senate motions concerning SIEV-X that have now been passed during the last twelve months.
The significance of these resolutions is clear when they are viewed in the light of their history.
It is now almost a year since the Report of the Select Committee on A Certain Maritime Incident (CMI) was tabled in Parliament on 23 October 2002. The first recommendation of that report called for ‘a full independent inquiry’ into the People Smuggling ‘disruption activity’ of refugee vessels prior to their departure from Indonesia – by implication this included SIEVX under its umbrella.
In early December 2002, two months after the publication of this Report, the first SIEV-X related motion calling for a judicial inquiry was passed by the Senate. This resolution expressed ‘serious concern at the apparent inconsistencies in evidence provided to the [CMI] committee and estimates committees by Commonwealth agencies in relation to the People Smuggling Disruption Program and in relation to Suspected Illegal Entry Vessels (SIEVs), including the boat known as SIEV-X’ and called on the government to ‘immediately establish a comprehensive, independent judicial inquiry into all aspects of the People Smuggling Disruption Program operated by the Commonwealth government and agencies from 2000 to date, including… the circumstances and outcomes of all departures from Indonesia of all boats carrying asylum-seekers, including the circumstances of the sinking of SIEV X.’
The following day, a second SIEV-X related motion was passed addressing the issue of the impending release from prison of people smuggler and alleged organiser of the SIEV-X voyage Abu Quassey. Quassey had been serving a brief term in Jakarta’s Cipinang prison for passport related offences and was due to be released on New Year’s Day. This second Senate motion called on the governments of Australia and Indonesia ‘to undertake all actions necessary prior to 1 January 2003 to ensure that Abu Quessai [was] immediately brought to justice.’
Two months after the passage of these motions, the Government had made no response. SIEV-X was once again in the news when the infamous DFAT cable was finally released to the Senate nearly seven months after the CMI Committee had asked Jane Halton, the former head of the Prime Minister’s People Smuggling Taskforce, to provide it on notice.
The appearance of this cable so long after the Committee had finished its work, coupled with the new information it contained, caused the Chair of the CMI Committee Senator Cook to boldly speak out in Parliament in February regarding perceived contradictions in the evidence provided to the Committee.
During this speech Cook referred to a letter that had been received by the Deputy President of the Senate, John Hogg from Peter Slipper, Acting Parliamentary Secretary to the PM, responding to the first Senate motion in December calling for a judicial inquiry. In this letter Slipper stated:
The Prime Minister has asked the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet to examine the recommendations made by the Senate Committee and to coordinate for the government’s consideration a whole of government response in consultation with all relevant departments and agencies.
Fast forward to October this year and we find that the Senate is still waiting on the Government to formally respond to the Recommendations made in the CMI Report and the two Senate motions concerning SIEV-X. And Abu Quassey has been extradited to Egypt from Indonesia and appears to be out of reach of Australian authorities.
The Senate’s displeasure at the government’s lack of response to these matters is apparent in the wording of the two new motions passed this week.
The Greens’ motion, which was passed on Wednesday, refers to the ‘Government’s failure to respond to the two Senate orders of 10 December and 11 December 2002 concerning the People Smuggling Disruption Program and the ineffectual pursuit by Australian justice authorities of the alleged people smuggler Abu Quassey’ and goes on to demand that the list of the names of the dead who drowned on SIEV-X – which the AFP have admitted to having in their possession but which they have repeatedly refused to make public – be released immediately, along with the identity of the source who provided it.
This motion also corrected a major inaccuracy in the CMI Report concerning the sinking position of SIEV-X. Where the CMI Report was equivocal in regard to where the vessel sank, this new motion – passed by Labor, Democrats, Greens and Independent Senators – makes it clear that the Senate is now firmly of the view that SIEV-X sank ‘in international waters that were being closely monitored by Australian air and naval forces’.
The Democrats’ motion which was passed by the Senate on Thursday criticised the government for not ‘responding to the report of the Select Committee on a Certain Maritime Incident, which included an examination of the SIEV-X sinking’ and renewed the call for a ‘comprehensive, independent judicial inquiry into all aspects of the People Smuggling Disruption Program operated by the Commonwealth Government and agencies from 2000 to date, including Suspected Illegal Entry Vessels, and in particular the boat known as SIEV-X.’
Bartlett’s motion added an important new dimension to the Senate work on SIEV-X – it enabled the Senate to show its humanity by expressing ‘regret and sympathy’ for the huge loss of ‘innocent lives’ and also called on the Immigration Minister to grant permanent visas on humanitarian grounds to those Temporary Protection Visa holders who lost family members on SIEV-X.
Thanks to the tenacity and courage of Senators Bartlett, Brown, Collins, Cook and Faulkner, we now have four strong pillars on which to continue to campaign around SIEV-X. Continued pressure needs to be put on the Howard government to respond to the first recommendation of the CMI Report and the Senate motions. Nothing less than a full powers independent judicial inquiry can bring justice and accountability in this matter.