“There is indeed a case to be made that the water has been muddied somewhere between the realms of the public and the private and that the central problem is the confusion of value sets. The businessman who aggrandises public responsibility to himself is likely to offend the ordinary person eventually, as will the public servant who wishes to play businessman. Perhaps the core problem is that all the developments described above have been driven by self-serving top dogs – those who have ascended to the commanding heights of both the public and the private sectors and who may now enjoy an unconsciously collusive relationship. In the end, it is always the ordinary person, and that includes the taxpayer, who foots the bill – and smells a rat.” Alistair Mant

G’Day. Here is a sensational paper on the changing role of government by leadership consultant Alistair Mant, the author of ‘Intelligent Leadership (Allen and Unwin) and chairman of the United Kingdom’s Socio-Technical Strategy Group, which studies system function and dysfunction. Mr Mant spends a third of his time in Australia working with government and private sectors on leadership, government modernisation and organisational structure. Sounds heavy, I know, but the speech is super accessible and extremely thought provoking.

“Muddying the waters?” was distributed at this year’s annual conference of the Australian Institute of Company Directors, and is the best analysis I’ve read on the different roles of the government and corporate sectors, and the terrible dangers we face with the adoption of corporate values by Government and the emergence of private-public ‘partnerships’ for public infrastructure. As you know, I believe that redefining the role of government – national and global – is a pressing issue in our neo-liberal world, and that the key to Labor’s present policy paralysis is its unwillingness to properly address this matter. The Liberals have enthusiastically adopted the private sector model for the public sector with sometimes disastrous results, such as as its now halted attempt to outsource all its information technology to the private sector (see HIH: Will Costello be nailed?)

After I recently decided that the role of government would be the Webdiary’s theme for a while, Webdiarist Richard Moss detailed the recent wholesale government sell-offs of its building to the private sector, with the result that quite soon, it will be captive to landlords charging monopoly rents (see Sacrificing humanity on the altar of cheap ideology). Richard calls the rush to privatisation and outsourcing “a national scandal that the media have somehow missed”.

He wrote: “In many instances, the government agency becomes virtually the captive of the provider, especially if it is a large multinational, because after a few years the agency has no basis on which to judge the relative quality, effectiveness or price competitiveness of the services it is getting. Game over.”

Richard’s comments followed my piece wondering how on earth it came to be that a private company manages our detention centres ( Woomera: Reducing Australian values to private profit.)

Thank you to Sue Jackson of the Australian Institute of Company Directors for finding a copy of the paper and sending it to me in electronic form. I’d love to receive your comments and recommendations of other cutting edge work in this area. I’m hoping that Simon Crean, or whoever leads the ALP, will pick up the ball and give a detailed speech on the role of government under “new” Labor sometime soon.

The private/public boundary: Muddying the water?

by Alistair Mant

This is a paper supporting the forum of the same name at the Australian Institute of Company Directors conference; Canberra 14-16th May, 2003.

The best business people and the best public servants are very like each other – public-spirited entrepreneurs and businesslike public servants – but their roles are fundamentally different.

In the Beginning…

There was a time when the distinction between public service and private business was much clearer than it is now. For example, just at the level of vocational choice, persons of a cautious or dutiful disposition could always hope to find some kind of long-term career in the public sector. The presumption was that the pay would not be enormous but the risks would be minimal – probably a job for life and a relatively generous pension in return for loyalty and discretion. In the British civil service, given a following wind, there might even be a gong at the end. The other, less tangible, satisfaction was the sense of having contributed directly to the common good.

By contrast, entrants to the private sector have always walked in through two quite separate doors. The “workers” expected to earn a bit more than lowly public servants and tended to rely on organised unions to fight for any security of employment. They traded absolute security of employment for the chance of better money, often earned spasmodically from shift-work, overtime and occasional bonuses. In the smaller private firms it could be a relatively hand-to-mouth existence but at least you probably knew the owners personally and could hope for some kind of reciprocal loyalty.

The other door was for middle-class and probably graduate entrants to the ranks of “management”, most of whom looked forward to a long-term “career” in one of the main banks, or a pastoral house – rising eventually to the senior echelons. Although in more recent years those managerial types have been increasingly exposed to occupational uncertainty, it has never occurred to them to unionise themselves. They just didn’t see themselves as “workers” – more as members of the owner “family”.

After the second world war, nobody much questioned an enhanced role for the State in the citizen’s private affairs – it was pervasive and paternalistic – after all, everybody needed a bit of looking after at the end of a long hard war. That was an understandable development but it certainly wasn’t “natural” for members of our human species. After all, it is only in relatively recent time that our ancestors emerged from Africa to eke out an existence in the “fertile crescent” in the middle east. We survived then, if we survived at all, in smallish family or tribal bands and our personal “welfare” was much less important than the collective needs of the group. Really large employment organisations, within which people anticipated orderly “careers”, were a very recent creation of the 19th and 20th centuries.

After the second world war, the biggest private businesses were still almost as paternalistic as the public sector. They expected not only to provide lifelong “careers” for the better workers but also to continue to provide traditional goods and services to their long-standing customers in time-honoured ways. They expected continuity in their relationships with both employees and customers and they assumed that government would ensure a level commercial playing field. Big firms such as banks and oil companies, riding the wave of post-war prosperity, actually behaved quite like major government departments-until the oil price shocks of the 1970s. From then on, it was 19th century tooth-and-claw business as usual.

The Guardians and the Traders

The distinguished American scholar Jane Jacobs (1) reminds us that the distinction between our public and our private selves is deeply rooted in our human nature. She points out that those early human beings had really only two ways of surviving and of apprehending their world. The hunter-gatherer existence meant foraging for whatever sustenance the locality provided. Most lives were brutish and short. But once we began to cluster in towns and to domesticate grains for agriculture – just a few thousand years ago – that more stable and predictable mode of life lent itself to the emergence of guardians -natural leaders who took it upon themselves to protect territory and look after people – an early instance of “government”.

The other mode of existence she called the commercial or trader mode which provided the means for exchange and trading across more-or-less stable geographical boundaries. Traders emerged as soon as there were predictable surpluses. Traders are good at trading but you ought not to rely on them for guardianship of traditional beliefs and standards. Jacobs makes the crucial point that the trader modality relies just as much on trust between human beings as the guardian or governing modality. Business grinds to a halt without mutual trust. That is why the financial engineers at Enron in the USA, Equitable in the UK and One.Tel and HIH in Australia were so damaging for mainstream business.

So for Jacobs, the guardian’s precepts are all about continuity, discipline, rules, hierarchy, loyalty, patronage, civic pride, social cohesion, mature dependence on authority and. in the best sense of the word, conservatism. That, traditionally, has been the realm of government and, by extension of public service.

The trader’s precepts, on the other hand, are all about creative discontinuity, initiative, competition, innovation, co-operation across boundaries, risk, negotiation, thriftiness and a freedom from immediate or narrow loyalties – the realm of business.

The important point is that both modes are deeply embedded in our human nature and both are necessary for our collective welfare. We need good strong government for the protection of our possessions and for the disciplined regulation of our personal and commercial behaviour. We also need to survive in a fiercely-competitive world of international markets. What’s more, Jacobs argues, our repertoire is limited to these two modes – our choice as a species has always been to take from nature what we can, peacefully or otherwise, (so long as nature’s bounty lasts) or to trade what we can glean or manufacture.

Our best hope is that our guardians and our traders can work in parallel for the common good without demonising each other or fudging the natural boundary between them. All too often, business nowadays sees government as a sea of anti-progress “Sir Humphreys” who generate red tape, obfuscate at every turn and aggrandise unaccountable power to themselves behind closed doors. Government, on the other hand, is now beginning to see much of the business world as in the grip of greedy, inefficient (and equally unaccountable) fraudsters, charlatans and the occasional megalomaniac.

Russia in the 1930s fell totally to its guardians. The result was an almost complete disappearance of true markets and of legitimate entrepreneurial activity. Now the pendulum has swung the other way, all that bottled-up illegitimate entrepreneurship is in danger of swamping the body politic. Our traders need to be strong but so too do our guardians. As in most things, it’s a matter of balance.

The Need for Global Guardians

As some have argued, the guardian/trader relationship has been much complicated by the phenomenon of globalisation. There was a time when the separate governments of major countries could regulate the behaviour of major multinational firms, especially as to the movement of money across geographical boundaries. No longer. If we wish for a workable international relationship between the guardians and the traders then the guardians are going to have to go global as well as the corporations. Such global guardians as we have (including the UN) can hardly be said to have fulfilled our needs.

The World Bank, currently under Australian leadership, is doing its best to redress the balance between rich country global firms and poor country village economies.

In a seminal HBR paper in 1996, Henry Mintzberg (2) drew attention to what he referred to as the newly fashionable idea of “virtual government” which contains the belief that the best government is no government at all. This model, he argued “represents the great experiment of economists who have never had to manage anything”. It is certainly true to say that underlying the fashion for public service outsourcing was a defensible belief that government had traditionally taken on too much and that a better public/private balance had to be struck. The question always is: what should that balance be?

Keeping an eye on the Future

At the practical level, many of our present discontents about public service and private profit come down to the issue of time-scales. If we rely on our guardians for anything, it is the long-term view. As we live longer and longer, it is reasonable that we expect government to ensure that we are looked after in a civilised way in our declining years. That means carefully-planned long-term financial provision. If that personal provision is underwritten by a private supplier such as AMP or (in the UK) Equitable Life, then we must hope that some guardian ensures that prudence and the long view dictate strategy in that firm.

What happened at Equitable was that energetic youngish people, in the endeavour to compete successfully in a short-term marketplace, took a punt on likely interest rates thirty or more years into the future. Nobody can see that far head and intelligent people know that nobody can do so. The punt on the markets broke the firm when another set of guardians (the judiciary) forced the company to honour its fixed-rate return products as interest rates fell. What were the senior management up to? Well, they too were being “incentivised” by very short-term targets designed to impress other young men in and around stock markets. They were trading but their time-scales were all wrong. Australian readers don’t need reminding about the AMP case.

HIH and Enron were similar stories, with the same mix of executive short-sightedness and optimism that everything will be all right (please God) at some time in the future. In theory, there are regulators to keep an eye on corporate mischief – in practice, no regulator or guardian can hope to penetrate the complexity of modern financial accounts. Enron used to be a modestly-sized pipeline company. Pipes are useful objects but the marketplace for shifting fluids and gases from one place to another is a mature one and the profits no more than steady, though reliable. So an inflated Enron invented a new “market” whose principal virtue was that no guardian could hope to understand it.

Enron also demonstrated the weaknesses of internal regulation by non-executive company directors. The non-execs are meant to be “guardians” of a sort but the sensible reforms to corporate governance proposed by Sir Adrian Cadbury (3) and his imitators were meant to be taken up by consensus and collegiality amongst business people – a form of self-interested trading. Enron reminded us that there is still a role for the external guardians – those guardians with the authority to put people in jail if need be.

Jim Collins did us all a favour by pointing out in Built to Last and Good to Great (4) that long-term profitability in the private sector always flows from the energies of low- key, uncharismatic (but clever) executives who spend years and years building up the steady momentum of market domination. These are the kinds of traders who are older and wiser and dedicated to creating admirable firms as the vehicle for successful trading way into the future. As one corporate head put it – “my aim is indeed shareholder value -but shareholder value in perpetuity!”

At one time, the West Australian Treasury had a good guardian’s rule – a principle of “intergenerational equity”. The idea was that no government would be allowed to buy popularity today by mortgaging the next generation’s prospects. Does that rule still hold?

Valuing the Sir Humphreys

If we can’t rely on more than a handful of private companies to keep an eye on long-term viability, can we trust government to keep its head? Well, a number of things have changed in public service in recent years. Firstly, the terms and conditions of public service employment have changed markedly in many countries. Almost gone in Australia is the old principle of tenure – the idea that a “permanent” head of department, trained over thirty years to be a reliable guardian, could and should stand up to short-termist government ministers so as to offer “frank and fearless” policy advice in the national interest without risk of summary removal or marginalisation.

This means that public servants have become much more like private sector managers -subject to “performance management” (whatever that means in a policy role) and to a private sector-like risk/reward package. Government ministers too have become more like businessmen in the maintenance of their private offices, staffed by non-elected and non-accountable (to the public service) policy wonks, spin doctors and business and special interest representatives. The creation of semi-autonomous government departments, modelled on mini-corporations, may improve management control and responsiveness but it fatally ties public servants to particular departments and therefore dilutes their loyalty to a broad public service ethos. Once isolated, they can be bullied.

As a frequent visitor to Australia during the first run of “Yes Minister” on local TV, I found myself worried by the unholy glee with which Australian public servants were tarred with the “Sir Humphrey” brush. Nobody in Whitehall or Westminster talks about the “Westminster system” because it is taken for granted. Of course the Sir Humphreys can be smug and devious but most people in the UK understand that they still represent the least worst way of ensuring the separation of powers upon which democracy depends. In Australia, it looked to me as though public service itself was being demonised and scapegoated, and a humble TV series was being misused to that end.

If we think we need guardians to preserve thoughtful long-term strategy, then we have to ask what kinds of rules and safeguards those guardians require in order to do that work on our behalf. If we turn them into businessmen then in due course they will begin to behave like businessmen (Throughout this paper, whenever I use the term businessman it is used deliberately and pejoratively to indicate behaviour which, thankfully, one is much less likely to find amongst businesswomen.). Is that really what we want? Of course, we need to reform public service continuously but we dare not emasculate our guardians. We need them more than ever in a world dominated by business short-termism.

The Third Way

In the 1990s, a significant new idea emerged in the UK with great importance for the private/public boundary – the “third way”. This is a Blairite “new Labour” idea, though it appears to have originated in Clintonian think tanks. The “third way” played some part in the overwhelming electoral success of the rebadged Labour Party in the late 1990s. The idea helped Labour to throw off its image as a union-dominated and fundamentally Luddite party of opposition to big business and old privilege. “New” Labour would be ideologically neutral- neither pro-business nor slavishly statist. The guardians (government) would work flexibly with the traders (private business) in a new kind of “partnership”. “Partnership” quickly became the buzz-word of this new world.

Superficially, this was an attractive idea. It meant accepting finally that central states cannot control complex modern societies from the seat of government. The guardians can establish the correct boundary conditions for the operation of institutions but they cannot run everything in the way that the Soviet Union attempted in the 20th century. On the other hand, it also meant an acceptance that the “hidden hand” of the market could not be relied upon to regulate the affairs of men – the guardians still have a duty to regulate and when necessary to intervene directly when imbalances and inequities occur.

It is not really a new idea. Something like this animated the great Sir William Hudson (5) in his stewardship of the Snowy Mountains Scheme over nearly half a century. The Snowy Mountains Authority (a public institution) sat at the heart of the enterprise and preserved the corporate intelligence, but whenever the unions became especially cantankerous Hudson was happy to farm out major works to an array of private sector contractors with whom he maintained good relations. He was always happy to threaten to call in the private sector – a tactic that the unions understood and respected. Hudson really was a “third way” operator.

Fudging the Boundary – “PFIs and PPPs”

The idea of public/private “partnership” enshrined in the “third way” spawned a new kind of relationship between the public and private sectors, mainly in the outsourcing of public

sector services. In fact, it assisted the successful export of a new product from the UK -the private/public partnership (“PPP”) or the private finance initiative (“PFI”) business model. (It is a British export in the sense that a large proportion of the public sector work outsourced has gone to British companies around the world). This is an idea which is as popular with parts of the public sector as it with the private – a true “win/win”. Politicians and businessmen love it. Does this mean that it serves our interests in the long-term? Read on.

At the simplest level, a PFI scheme is a device for accelerating necessary public expenditure by entering into a partnership relationship with the private sector. The idea is that short-term public expenditure will diminish because the private sector is bearing a substantial burden of short-term cost – and assuming some of the burden of risk. The payoff to the private sector lies in the long-term revenue stream (up to and beyond thirty years) written into the contract. Government likes this because present expenditures are shifted “off the books” and there has been a notional transfer of financial risk to the private sector. As a general rule, government ministers also love to open shiny new facilities now – even if the costs are borne by others, later on.

But we have noted already that nobody can see thirty years into the future. The cautious citizen may wonder whether a revenue stream of public (taxpayers’) money really ought to be based on an inflexible and binding, legal contract. If the deal turns out to be profitable to the private sector, well and good – the issue is how profitable? It takes a mighty clever government procurement department to devise a contract capable of clawing back a reasonable return on the public contribution as circumstances change over time – over thirty years maybe – and private companies are showing an alarming tendency to disappear overnight. Some of them use “special purpose vehicles” to finance PFI projects – a means of separating PFI money from the main accounts – not a practice calculated to instil confidence post-Enron.

More to the point, if something goes wrong, that transfer of risk to the private sector may turn out to be illusory. If the deregulated supplier of an essential public service goes broke, which government is going to sanction a closedown of the railways or the electricity generators or the jails? The good citizens of California discovered that private firms given control of the upstream electricity generation market may abuse that power. If that, in turn, breaks the distributors then capitalist theory says those distributors should go to the wall. The Governor of California, as anybody could have predicted, stepped in to bailout the private sector distributors with public funds. No politician likes blackouts.

So the PPP or PFI idea represents a hugely important development in the private/public relationship. Government has embraced the idea of “fly now pay later” on a massive scale. The government of the day can reduce present public expenditure and thus reduce present taxes. In the short term, that is a win/win for everybody. The problem is that all the private contractors must take their cut from every deal struck – after all, they have private shareholders to satisfy. That cut has to reflect the generally higher costs of borrowing by the private sector.

In the end, it all has to be paid for by the next generation, by which time the power of the guardians to regulate anything at all may have diminished to the point of powerlessness. All this is happening at a time when government is advising citizens to start saving seriously for their retirement in their twenties because they may well live for another seventy years. Effectively, government is saying “pay now fly later” to the individual citizen whilst doing exactly the opposite in the public policy sphere. Until we are clearer about long term costs and benefits of the PFI experiment, the risk is that the citizen will pay both now and later.

Whatever happened to Capitalism?

The economic historian Nathan Rosenberg argued that capitalism in its purest sense is an experimental, risk-taking system within which learning is inevitable:

” … one of the most distinctive features of capitalist economies has been the practice of decentralizing authority over investments to substantial numbers of individuals who stand to make large personal gains if their decisions are right, who stand to lose heavily if their decisions are wrong, and who lack the economic or political power to prevent at least some others from proving them wrong. Indeed, this particular cluster of features constitutes an excellent candidate for the definition of capitalism”. (6)

Consider this in the light of the PFI experiment, for it is an experiment. In the PFI case, government and the private sector come together to share costs and (notionally) risks. If the private/public “partnership” concerns an essential service (the kind that cannot be allowed to cease as a result of temporary financial embarrassment on the part of the provider) then both the costs and the risks (the traditional preserve of capitalist enterprise) are likely to end up in the public domain – but not the profits. Jane Jacobs’ “traders” were true entrepreneurs – running real risks in the hope of great reward – and learning all the time. When we fudge the private/public boundary, we run the risk of creating a monstrous public/private hybrid – neither risk-taking nor accountable. It certainly isn’t capitalism.

None of this means that partnerships between the private and the public are necessarily wrong. There are well-proven examples of such partnerships working just as they are supposed to. Also, the contract-making skills of public servants are, perforce, improving by the day. The point is that it would be quite wrong to blame business – the traders – for filling a yawning gap left by government’s decision to hand over to others some of its key powers. J. K. Galbraith pointed out a long time ago that the smartest businesspeople abhor true competition – it’s much too expensive and chancy – far better to monopolise the market for public services and pocket all the profits. One clever politician put it well – that privatisation can be a marvellous means of privatising profit and socialising loss.

Values, “Marketisation” and God

It won’t have escaped the reader’s attention that any reference to long-term outcomes takes us into the realm of values. “Marketised solutions” may deliver short-term gains to society but if their cumulative effect is to destroy the planet, our children will not have gained (a point made as long ago as 1973 by the great E. F. Schumacher (7) in the seminal book Small is Beautiful). If we save money now on prisons by sub-contracting to cynical experts in the low-level warehousing of human beings, then we may cut costs now but we will certainly ensure a high level of recidivism and greater danger and cost downstream. But more important, we will also eventually offend ourselves by the inhumanity of our actions.

During the Prime Ministership of John Major in the UK, government published what it called a “Citizen’s Charter”. This was designed to ensure that people should not be ripped-off by avaricious traders or arrogant public sector service suppliers. In truth, it was a customers’ charter. We can interpret this in two ways – either government was cynically over-selling the idea in order to deflect attention from real market abuses – or (more worrying still) government no longer understood the difference between the rights of consumers and the rights of citizens.

Mintzberg (2) points out that this over-simple view of the world neglects the many forms of hybridised ownership to be found in western society – including co-operatives and not–for-profit organisations. Even in the USA, the not-for-profit sector is growing fast. He reminds us that we are not merely “customers” of government; we are also subjects (with obligations), citizens (with rights) and clients (with much more complex needs than straightforward commercial customers). We have to remember that in the temple of greedy capitalism – the USA – there has always been a good deal of formal regulation (look at the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890), as well as many implicit rules governing corporate reputation and community collaboration.

The guardians used to reflect and embody some of our deepest human values. Those values evolved in the context of local community life, reciprocal trust and the generational continuity of extended families. Government existed, above all, to preserve that “natural” order. Once the public sector begins to be “marketised” we have to look elsewhere for the sustenance of those deeper values. It may be no coincidence that as government retreats, religions of all kinds advance. Religion at least offers a view of humankind beyond the market trader.

Where to from Here?

There is indeed a case to be made that the water has been muddied somewhere between the realms of the public and the private and that the central problem is the confusion of value sets. The businessman who aggrandises public responsibility to himself is likely to offend the ordinary person eventually, as will the public servant who wishes to play businessman. Perhaps the core problem is that all the developments described above have been driven by self-serving top dogs – those who have ascended to the commanding heights of both the public and the private sectors and who may now enjoy an unconsciously collusive relationship. In the end, it is always the ordinary person, and that includes the taxpayer, who foots the bill – and smells a rat.

That is why the most exciting developments in both public and private spheres now centre on local community – local business – local administration – and shared local values. The new buzz-phrase is “joined-up solutions to joined-up problems” Of, simply, ‘joined-up government”. The Australian Social Entrepreneurs’ Network (8) – seeking out and connecting local enterprise and local social responsibility – is more likely to show the way forward in the public/private debate than any “partnership” between the Sir Humphreys and the big money men. The same applies to “place management” (9) – an Australian idea with the potential to reinvigorate local government through focussed delivery effectiveness and greater transparency. The job of central government is to listen and learn from these natural developments on the ground.

At the personal level, the best business people and the best public servants are very like each other – public-spirited business people and entrepreneurial public servants. But that only works well when their different roles are clearly distinguished. We need our guardians and we need our traders and we need to be clear about the difference.

Key Institutions

There are a number of Australian institutions which might play a part in rethinking the proper balance between the public and the private sphere. To offer just two examples, the Australian Institute of Company Directors itself has devoted a great deal of attention to issues of corporate governance -especially in relation to the guardian role of non-executive business directors. So long as the public/private water is muddied, AICD is well-positioned to offer some guidance as to public sector governance too. It is certainly in a position to investigate in a frank and fearless way the self-serving part played by the big international management consultancies in both driving the PFI experiment and picking up the proceeds from it.

We can assume that the new Australia/New Zealand School of Government (based in the University of Melbourne) will adopt an equally uncompromising approach to studying the impact of the new and emerging public/private balance. The School will certainly be in a position to examine the long term costs and benefits of existing public/private “partnerships” in a systematic and critical way. It could also help to provide hard empirical evidence about those core activities which must be the prerogative of government and those less central activities which may, with appropriate safeguards, be placed in the private domain. All over Australia, centres for the study and promotion of good corporate governance are now focussing on the public domain. The new, internationally-networked Centre for Corporate Governance at UTS is a good example.

There is no reason at all why Australian and New Zealand scholarship and scepticism should not lead the world in the understanding of what has become a problematic global issue. Nobody else has cracked the problems.

alistairmant@hotmail.com

Footnotes

1. Jacobs, Jane; Systems of Survival, Vintage (NY) 1994

2. Mintzberg, Henry; Managing Government, Governing Management, HBR May 1996

3. Cadbury, Sir Adrian; The Cadbury Committee – Report of the Committee on the Financial Aspects of Corporate Governance, Gee (London) 1992; see ccg

4. Collins, Jim; Built to Last (with J. Porras), HarperBusiness 1997 and Good to Great, HarperCollins 2001 Mant, Alistair; Intelligent Leadership. Allen & Unwin 1999 (chapter 4)

5. Rosenberg, Nathan; Exploring the Black Box: Technology, Economics & History, CUP 1994, p 98 Schumacher, E. F; Small is Beautiful. Abacus (UK) 1974

6. Social Entrepreneurs’ Network; see social entrepreneur’s network

7. Mant, John H; Place Management as an Inherent Part of Change: a Rejoinder to Walsh, Australian Journal of Public Administration 61 (3) September 2002; pp 111-116

 

The John Howard years. Image by Webdiary artist Martin Davies. www.daviesart.com

Today more of your many comments on Howard’s road to absolute power. Don’t get depressed, get motivated!

For a run down on Bush’s attempt to concentrate media ownership in the United States, Webdiarist Sue Bushell recommends makethemaccountable for a piece called ‘Kickback’. David Podvin writes:

Democracy is dependent on having a well-informed electorate, but the American people will now have even less contact with a diversity of information. The vast majority of citizens get their news from television. Their access to the data on which they form their views will be controlled by an ever-smaller number of media executives, all of whom are allied with the Republican Party. This concentration of power will further skew the political debate on all major issues in the direction of the corporate bottom line, and in favor of those candidates who are corporate functionaries. The interests of common people will be further marginalized. The inevitable result will be a diminished standard of living and inferior quality of life for the average American.

The debasement of journalism is a perversion of the very essence of the United States. Thomas Jefferson wrote that the American system could not survive without an independent press. He knew that the influence of the economic elite had to be counterbalanced by journalists who were free to expose the truth about even the wealthiest predators. Throughout this nation’s history, the independence of the press has been protected as a necessity for a free republic. With the advent of the electronic media, the executive branch of the federal government assumed responsibility for preventing powerful interests from effectively monopolizing public access to information.

Now, the executive branch is controlled by someone who is in league with those seeking to attain such a monopoly. By granting to his media allies the ability to eliminate competition in the marketplace of ideas, Bush is furthering his own career at the expense of the country he has sworn to protect and defend. His endless series of corporate tax cuts is creating huge budget deficits that will ultimately be repaid by the middle class. The flood of red ink that flows from this larceny is being used as justification for slashing spending on health care, child abuse clinics, and other safety net programs that have existed to protect the most vulnerable citizens. With the active support of the journalistic establishment, Bush is bankrupting America in order to enrich his campaign contributors, including the companies that own the mainstream media. In return, the mainstream media protects Bush and marginalizes his critics. It is a win-win situation, with the only losers being the American people.

See any parallels with John Howard’s attempt to hand control of our mainstream media to Rupert Murdoch and Kerry Packer, or to Murdoch and one of the mega-US media companies? As I’ve written over the last week, this issue isn’t about whether you vote Liberal, Labor, Green, Democrats or One Nation. It’s about your right to know, and your right to have the people you vote for represent YOU.

Jozef Imrich sent me Media Monopolies Still Can’t Unearth the Truth by Edward Wasserman, first published in the Miami Herald. Remember, there are many newspaper owners in the USA, so this sort of thing can still be published in the mainstream press over there. And it wouldn’t be written if the paper was part of a big TV network, now would it? It begins:

The affair of Jessica Lynch, the U.S. Army private who was injured in Iraq and rescued in a commando raid, seems unrelated to monopoly control of the media. But the handling of her story offers good reason to cheer Senate elders for moving to reverse the ideologically besotted Federal Communications Commission decision to trash safeguards against deepening concentration of media ownership.

I’ll begin your remarks with a favourite webdiarist, Peter Gellatly in Canada.

Peter Gellatly

It’s admittedly difficult to keep the emotions cool during the present increasingly vicious struggle over values, but keep cool we must if we are to turn the tide.

First, many on the left (among whom I am bemused to find myself in contemporary consort) need to recognise that the neoconservative agenda is EARNESTLY held by many of its proponents. They fervently believe they are correct and that dissenters are nitwits, thus they are not amenable to our arguments. And the more strident we become, the greater the degree to which our arguments shall be buried beneath our rhetoric in public debate.

Margo, assuming – for I simply don’t know – that your assessment of Howard’s larger purpose is insightful, opponents of that purpose need to recognise that remaking Australia either as a neocon US carbon copy, or even as the actual 51st state, is a legitimate aspiration within our democracy, with the latter alternative promising additional economic and defence dividends.

Those determined to move Australia in an alternative direction – ie towards a more independent, more liberal and plural democracy – need to supplement their anti-neocon putdowns by cogent arguments in favour of their own goals.

Moreover, talk alone is cheap. The bull needs to be taken by the horns. There is only one way to halt the present trend towards outright nastiness: that is by throwing the Coalition out at the first opportunity. To achieve this, Greens, Democrats, disaffected Coalition supporters (like me) and sundry others need to hold our noses and support and advocate for Labor (I never thought I’d say this – I’ve always championed voting for the best local member, but the times call for cohesive action.) In doing so, we shall hopefully also beneficially impact and broaden that parity’s policy outlook, thereby improving its subsequent competence in government.

Rather than being merely negatively vocal towards “the man WHO ALLOWS… to write … without being hurled in jail” (…!?!?!????) – see Tom Shanahan in Reaction to Howard’s roads to absolute power – we must ACT, positively. The next election campaign has already begun.

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George Hirst, editor of The Magnetic Times newspaper in North Queensland

Thanks so much for your work on keeping democracy alive. As one of the tiny independents the issues are particularly relevant.

Even on our modest scale we are under a constant gag from our own Townsville City Council, which has refused us press releases for about 2 years now. They know all to well how to avoid an independent minded press, and either don’t get back when we seek a comment on any issue at all or take so long, ie weeks, that any deadline is well and truly gone. Great stuff – and our rates pay for it too!

It’s all part of the same game, just down to the micro level, and reading your columns of late I would like to do whatever we can to give them a push. We have already linked to your page but I’d like to go further if possible and run some of your stuff straight off the front page. (MARGO: Yes, please!!)

We no longer print our hard copy Magnetic Times anymore. It just got too expensive so we are now a totally on-line paper. We average around 220 visits a day and I’m sure your stuff would be very welcome by our readers. Keep up the great work.

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Noel Hadjimichael in Camden

Disclosure: small town conservative with liberal leanings on some issues

I was surprised and somewhat alarmed that you should fall into the trap of hyperbole and propaganda with your piece on Howard’s road to absolute power. The Webdiary has generally achieved its objective of ensuring lively and informed debate on often neglected public policy issues.

Your analysis about the personalities and the hidden agendas is as always spot on. However, I must question whether the doomsday scenario painted by you and some fellow diarists is at all credible.

Certain facts get in the way of a good story on “power gone mad”:

1. The rule of law is still entrenched,

2. The Senate is powerful because, not despite, its majority of non-government Senators,

3. This year’s rooster is invariably next year’s featherduster,

4. The policy dominance you recognise may well be the emergence of a new majority opinion (on border protection, security, taxes or even Telstra) rather than some evil conspiracy,

5. Leadership is always conditional upon success and perceptions of success,

6. Our pollies are operating in a post-ideological era when most big-picture issues are common ground (remember the petty drama between Labor’s desire for a UN mandate for war versus the Coalition’s preparedness to back bilateral interests),

7. Media diversity exists due to technology more so than ownership of traditional media,

8. Australians have happily accepted the ascendancy of Labor at State and Territory level with the preservation of a strong focused non-Labor Commonwealth government,

9. The saga of Dr Peter Hollingworth is an example of where the jackals of public opinion have hunted and removed someone at the very pinnacle of the traditional power elite,

10. When Labor want to do something radical it is often termed “progressive”, when Liberals wish to promote substantive change to current policy settings it is termed “nightmare or bombshell” right wing thuggery.

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Rod Owens

Congratulations on an prescient article, and one which engenders feelings of impotence and anger. I think that it is about time the alarm bells where rung before they can be rung no more!

I have been reading Arthur MacEwan’s Neo-Liberalism or Democracy and Rifkin’s The End of Work, and have been alarmed by the speed with which Howard is achieving the goals of the neo-liberal agenda.

Perhaps one hopeful outcome is the creation of a ‘virtual organisation’ where the agenda can be thwarted!

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Brian Long

I found your recent article on Howard terribly frightening. I then read in Tom Engelhardt’s daily dispatch in the USA a somewhat similar but more extreme version of the same reality in the United States (seenationinstitutetomdispatch, and scroll down to ‘It’s a wonderful life’).

At the heart of both pieces is a media unwilling to confront issues of truth. This is not to say that no journalists are taking up the issues – I wouldn’t be writing this if that were the case. Keep up the good work. Both Howard and Bush are creating and trading on people’s fears and insecurities. Both are slamming the poorest and blaming international terrorism.

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Kate Cherry in Tamworth

Margo, I hope so much that many more Australians are hearing what you are saying regarding this issue. Go girl! I for one don’t want Murdoch and Packer to run Australia, which I believe would be the case. The influence they could exert with more media concentration is unthinkable. You have another supporter here.

I don’t want to imagine Australians influenced by the likes of media moguls with such bias and prejudice that the truth goes begging. I feel I want to go tell it on the mountain…..Please Australians, speak out/write letters against increased media concentration.

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Andy Gray

The possibility that we are on the road to the creation of a fascist state ruled by both state and corporate with the public agenda set by the media that they control scares me to my soul.

Back in April you took a few weeks off and said that you were going to have a think about where the Webdiary might go from here. I doubt whether you were considering the removal of cross-media ownership and the ramifications for the free press in Australia when you made these comments, but the consequences of what you discuss certainly will have an impact upon the medium to long term future of Webdiary.

It has often been said that a person should hope for the best, but plan for the worst. I hope that you already have contingency plans to continue an independent voice of the press in Australia should all our worst fears be realised in the next year or two.

It may be that you simply get the infrastructure and domain names set up now. It may also mean that you have to take that extra step, setting up the charter for the new Australian Independent Press website and starting to get contributions to the site. I hope that I am simply being paranoid, but I would hate to think that the new owners of Fairfax would be able to silence your voice a year from now without you having already provided a forwarding address.

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Aaron Dibdin

It’s amazing, someone who works for a major media player with a dissenting voice. It’s nice to see, particularly given the current climate. but there’s a little bit of a problem. We are already seeing that there is no ‘freedom of speech’ and your writing proves it. Whereas Piers “the hutt” Akerman gets column inches every second day in a mass circulation advertisement with smatterings of propaganda in which he simply quotes vast tracts of liberal press releases, you are stuck in a (practically) hidden page in the smh website. The voices of dissent are hidden.

It’s like nobody wants to know. People, as John Howard very astutely said, want to feel ‘relaxed and comfortable’. They don’t want to have to agitate for something better, they want to think this is better. Hence the proliferation of mindless TV like the block, the rush to buy investment properties … People like to think they’re in control, they don’t have to worry, and maybe soon they won’t have to vote…

The world is a far scarier place than people want to believe. It’s funny to think that in ‘The Matrix’, the illusion is provided by computers. People are suffering but they’ve been tricked by a cartesian ‘evil demon’ to believe that they’re ok. Perhaps this is what the Wachowski brothers initially based their ideas upon – but $300 million later, maybe not.

Margo: I’m proud to write for the SMH online. It’s a privilege for which I’m very grateful to my employer. In my view, Fairfax stands for a diversity of voices and a thirst for breaking stories. The Fairfax journalism culture is to be skeptical of all governments and other sites of power and to strive to keep them accountable. This is a major reason why both Labor and Liberal governments have despised our work and sought to reduce our influence. Our culture is also based on ethical reporting, accountability to our readers, and editorial independence. As a company owning only media assets, there are few conflicts of interest to worry about when deciding what the news is. Fairfax is worth saving.

***

Andrew Halliday in St Lucia, Brisbane

I found your article very interesting and I am sad to say I am completely in agreement with you. First and foremost, democracy in this country has failed us, whereas in the UK it still appears to be working. Apart from the ALP remaining completely unable to make any impact, the real art of democracy has failed because the people INSIDE the Liberal party are unable to stop him.

Where are all the leaders from within? Why isn’t Costello standing up and stopping Howard’s bizarre and worrying agenda? Can’t the “faithful” see the wood for the trees?

And the Media! Why is Howard allowed to get away with lying to us? Why is this government allowed to do as it wishes? Are Rupert and Kerry’s so powerful that only Fairfax can say anything negative about the government? How did this happen? (By the way why doesn’t Fairfax have a paper in Brisbane where I live?)

I feel completely powerless to do anything about where our formerly great country is heading. I read people like you and Peter Fitzsimon’s provocative articles in the paper and watch the ABC try their hardest. And yet nothing happens.

Howard didn’t even turn a hair when a million people marched against the war, and yet the majority of Australians still support him. What can we do?

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Martin Williams

It seems to me that one element not highlighted here thus far is the thorough neutering of the church as a moral authority in Australian public life. There may be significant implications resulting from this.

Hollingworth’s downfall might have irked Howard in one way, yet it must have been very convenient to have yet another high-profile champion of the poor and the marginalised removed so disgracefully from a pedestal of credibility. Forget about weekend Christians and the secular remainder; even your average Australian of active faith is probably rather cynical and exhausted

from the relentless discrediting of various denominational structures and cultures (primarily over child sexual abuse but there are other reasons). Being the local minister of religion just doesn’t have the halo of pastoral entitlement and ethical command that it used to.

There was a time perhaps when criticism by politicians of senior church leaders for issuing manifestly non-partisan but rigorously moral opinion was considered impolite. Now, along with anyone else who dares speak out, it is perfectly acceptable to attack religious figures for intervening on moral issues – Howard and Ruddock rip in to meddling priests regularly – but only if they disagree with you.

More conservative groups such as the Salvation Army have of course been silenced by accepting government money (the amount was roughly thirty pieces of silver as I recall) and being appointed to various positions of prestige and repute, and so naturally they barely object when misanthropic policy and rhetoric emerge.

When you look back and consider all of the things that have happened under Howard, it is hard to come to any conclusion other than that the churches in this country have buckled. Buckled under the weight of both their own corporate and legal obsessions as well as under the weight of knowing that any attempt at mobilisation might result in rejection by their rather listless, self-absorbed and – dare I say it? – well-to-do flocks.

It is a truly mystifying thing – as a public voice the church has rendered itself quite ineffectual on championing things that really mattered to Jesus Christ – poverty, the sick, social justice. Whenever there is a sustained effort to change something, where is the most concentrated promotional energy directed?

Judging by the press at least, superficial squabbles on gay communion or consecration, opening or closing injection rooms, banning films that nobody watches, setting up factions in ugly power plays (the Jensen clique, anyone?). The usual tedious list.

The point of all this? If, as you fear, Australia and other Western countries are heading anywhere near a new structure of cryptofascist (there’s that word again), populist right wing government, you can be reasonably sure that on current form it is unlikely you will receive much comfort from a coalition of churches.

You might get some sexy copy from a few Uniting Church ratbags and Peter Costello’s evil other half Tim, but largely the motivation will be limp, the campaign impotent and the end result best not thought about.

In this respect, interestingly, the US differs in that a dominant coalition of churches wields enormous power and that power usually translates into hard line Republican votes.

Effective counter-measures, you ask? How about this: if you’re a journalist, go straight to the top. Start by targeting those holier-than-thou MPs who form cross-party faith caucuses. Get them on the record on any issue of import, then ask the local minister of religion for each individual for a response on their celebrity parishioners’ Christian values. Then compare. Then publish.

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Jaan Ranniko in Newtown, Sydney

What to do in a situation where not only does it appear that the Liberal party would be delighted to concentrate power amongst obvious cronies and sneer at criticism, but where the alterative Labor party is so shallow it’s only “credible alternative” has been Kim Beazley, an incoherent bedwetter with the vision of a used car salesman? (If you think that sounds harsh then ask the Tampa detainees for their opinion.)

When we see both ends of the political spectrum fragmenting into Greens and One Nation parties while the preferential system of vote counting still leads to an unrepresentative choice between two “centrist” corporate-fed of career politicians out of touch with and indifferent to the wishes of their constituents, should we call the ACCC?

Maybe we could look across the Tasman at the proportional representation arrangements established there. Maybe such an arrangement would better represent what is happening in Australia amongst the body politic? If most of us can only be thankful for the existence of the Senate for providing a check against the will of the government elected by the preferential system, we should consider extending such an influence into the lower house.

I am no expert on the machinations of proportional representation, but from what I can see they now have a stronger voice for their smaller parties, that kind of result here could go a long way towards forcing the major parties away from the bidding of their corporate pay masters and towards the will of the people.

The energies that have to date been devoted to a republic would be better channelled into improving the brass tacks of how our system of democratic representation functions. Someone needs to get our Jefferson off the beach, off the spliff and in front of a desk.

What would be required? A petition to force a referendum? How could the people force a referendum on such an issue? I’m game, what should we do?

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Meagan Phillipson

In the midst of chastising you for an opinion expressed about Australia’s relationship with the U.N, Tom Shanahan admonished that you should be “a little positive about the man who allows you to write this rubbish without being hurled in jail”.

Neither you nor I, Margo, have anything to be grateful to Howard for. He does not wave a magic wand and grant the public the privilege to speak without being thrown into gaol. Rather, it is Howard who should be grateful to the citizens of Australia for giving him the power he has.

That power, thank goodness, is a transitory power lasting only until the next government is entrusted to lead this country through the process of democratic election.

As for Howard wanting to withdraw from the United Nations, while he has not said so in such explicit terms, it would be fair to say the actions of the Howard government have spoken on many occasions louder than words. Even though it would be foolhardy in the extreme to divorce the United Nations and a move Howard would never consider, there is a observable shift away from the kind of multilateral action the U.N represents and towards the kind of unilateralism championed by the Bush administration.

This is clear from the reticent attitude towards the UNHCR and its report into mandatory detention, the alliance with America in the War on Terror, the more recent decision to send peacekeepers to the Solomon Islands and last week’s Alexander Downer speech, where he waxed lyrical about coalitions of the willing to deal with regional issues quickly rather going through the UN.

And I don’t think the U.N failed over Iraq. Indeed, the organisation’s darkest hour in terms of diplomacy was paradoxically also its finest. The U.N acted as a truly multilateral entity. It did not bend to the demands of two of the biggest member states, but stood firmly by the position that the inspectors needed more time before any decisions were made on military intervention. Many, including myself, have criticised the U.N in the past for being overly influenced by the passing interests of U.S foreign policy. Not so much anymore.

Considering the continued ascendancy of sovereignty, the decision to intervene militarily is not one to be taken lightly or without the full facts. The Security Council sensed this and acted accordingly. History, as they say, has thus far proven the best judge of the rightness of this tactic. Questions about the accuracy of intelligence used to justify the Iraqi war, a continued abject failure to find any WMDs and the realisation that rebuilding Iraq will be a long and more arduous task than first anticipated, all continue to condemn the actions of the coalition of the willing.

 

Image by Webdiary artist Martin Davies. www.davies.com

At what moment does a citizenry get sick of a leader and want him out? I’m out on a limb here, especially on the eve of the latest opinion poll results, but I reckon that moment might have come for John Howard.

I took holidays last week to be with a sick friend, so I read the papers and watched the TV news during a momentous week in federal politics without the need to form a snap judgement. For mine, the Hollingworth matter has put John Howard in a tight spot. Very tight.

Remember, it was Howard and Tony Abbott who elevated the status of the Governor General in the leadup to the Republic referendum. They cut down the Republican’s catchcry – that Australia should have its own head of state – by saying we already had one, the GG. This argument was run while the GG was Sir William Deane, a man of firm convictions who ran the dual themes of care for the poor and reconciliation with indigenous Australians throughout his tenure. He spoke at an abstract, general level of these matters while being photographed with the poor and Aborigines. In addition, he rose to the occasion in moving ways, in Switzerland and after the Childers fires, finding ways to express the essence of the feelings of most Australians as Australians.

Howard’s rhetorical ploy and Deane’s performance have combined to produce high expectations among Australians of their Governor-General, a person who, through Howard’s own arguments, has come to represent Australians at a symbolic level. The potential of this expectation was shown before the Olympics, when public opinion forced Howard to comply with the imperatives of his own rhetoric by reversing his decision to open the games when the games charter required the host nation’s head of state to do so.

Lurking behind this development are the reasons for the failure of the Republic referendum. I was opposed to the Republic as offered, on the grounds that if we were to simply change our head of state from the Queen to the Governor-General, without more, it was a waste of time, mere empty symbolism. More importantly, I couldn’t see how we could present ourselves to ourselves and the world as a Republic when we had no idea what we stood for as a nation. The culture wars have proved that Australians are still deeply divided about our core values and ideals, and the Hanson phenomenon showed we had grave difficulty understanding each other, yet alone agreeing on the basics of our identity. I thought that when we could agree on a bill of rights, or a statement of ideals to strive for, we’d be ready to proclaim ourselves a Republic, and that when that happened, a Republic would merely reflect where we’d got to, not vault us to where some of us wanted to be. The abject failure of both the Republic question and Howard’s preamble proved the point.

The republic debate strangely united traditionalists who wanted to preserve the monarchy and those who wanted a directly elected president. I think traditionalists are attracted to the idea of a person in politics who is “above” politics, who can look at and verbalise deeper national themes and concerns. I don’t think it’s correct to argue that they are happy with politics as it is, and therefore wanted no change. Rather, they had reservations about the state of politics, and wanted to keep a potential check on it.

In this, they were as one with the direct electionists. Being unhappy with the state of politics and their powerlessness under the current system, they saw no purpose in a mere symbolic changeover of power. They wanted a direct say in how the president was elected to give them another chance to influence politics.

In other words, the argument run by the republican movement – that nothing would change bar the symbols – was deeply unattractive to both traditionalists and radicals. It was the insider’s republic, the Republic for those who were happy they ways things were because the present system suited their interests, as distinct from their conceits, very well.

As fate would have it, Howard’s choice to replace the man his party detested blew up in his face. He wanted to appeal to the conservatism of his constituency, so who better than an authority figure in the Anglican Church? It was at once a slap in the face to a multicultural Australia, and an assertion that traditional values were well and truly back in style.

Yet post Deane, he also wanted the role downgraded to a merely ceremonial one. Hollingworth said absolutely nothing of interest during his tenure. He had no theme but to walk tall and behave politely until scandal broke, when he spoke often and loudly, proving himself utterly insensitive to the issue of child sexual abuse which finally engulfed him. Funnily enough, he saw no issue of moral integrity in his actions as Archbishop on a matter supposedly at the core of Christianity – protection of the weak from exploitation by the powerful. His tenure served not to entrench and enhance traditional values, but to focus attention on the collapse of those values within traditional institutions.

And in proving that he lacked grace, the public were reinforced in their preference for a Governor General who exhibited that rare quality.

Commentators now opine that Howard will opt for a super-safe appointment of someone worthy but without profile who will walk and talk with dignity and say nothing of substance.

Perhaps Howard agrees, but I think such an appointment would damage the monarchist cause. The appointment of someone like Tim Fischer, who wouldn’t be able to help himself in speaking publicly on matters of moment, would greatly assist Howard’s cause because it would meet public expectations of a wise elder as GG. Tim Fischer, respected across the political and geographic divide, would be, despite his Republican sentiments, an asset to the monarchist cause.

I also think it’s self-defeating for Howard to refuse any change to the procedure for appointment. The Republican model put to the people had only one change of substance – that the GG would be selected by a two thirds majority of a joint sitting of Parliament. This was minor indeed – in practice, the Prime Minister would decide on a person the opposition could accept, and the vote would be a formality. Tim Fischer would be readily accepted by Simon Crean, both on merit and to set a precedent for a Labor government to get acceptance for the appointment of a Labor politician like Bill Hayden.

If Howard agreed to change the procedure, he would establish the basis for a convention (a common political understanding) to develop that this procedure would be followed by future governments. In that case, the only matter of substance in the Republican model would be redundant. What chance then of a successful Republic referendum, given that the establishment forces supporting a Republic do so on the basis that they want no rupture in the status quo? Howard could even suggest a constitutional amendment to reflect the changed practice to be put to the people at the next election, thus proving that he was sensitive to the public’s desires, and forcing the republican movement to back his proposal.

Such a decision by Howard would therefore paralyse the republican movement for the forseeable future.

Sure, this move would give the GG some sort of mandate from the people through the Parliament, and the appointee could cause flutters among the political power elite if he or she was outspoken on sensitive issues. But so what? What on earth is John Howard afraid of? Another Deane? It’s his appointment now.

I think a dull appointment would be considered cowardly by the Australian people. Not only that, they would resent the lack of a voice above politics. The yearning for the voice of an institutional elder which flowered under William Deane would not be quieted. Instead, the lack of that elder, by Howard’s choice, would be keenly felt, and resented.

As if on cue, late last week Deane made a speech which, for the first time, directly criticised John Howard’s approach to governance.

“There is one challenge for the future leaders of our nation which I would particularly emphasise,” he told graduating students at the University of Queensland, ” the challenge of justice and truth, the challenge never to be indifferent in the face of injustice or falsehood.”

“It encompasses the challenge to advance truth and human dignity rather than to seek advantage by inflaming ugly prejudice and intolerance.

“Who of us will easily forget the untruth about children overboard? Or the abuse of the basic rights of innocent children by incarceration behind Woomera’s razor wire? Or the denial of the fundamental responsibility of a democratic government to seek to safeguard the human rights of all its citizens, including the unpopular and the alleged wrongdoer, in the case of the two Australians indefinitely caged, without legal charge or process, in a Guantanamo Bay jail?”

“Some may think that these and other similar unpleasant things should be left unmentioned. But if our coming generation of leaders refuses to honestly confront the denial of truth or responsibility which they reflect, our nation will surely be in peril of losing its way in the years ahead.”

Now most Australians professed not to care about the children overboard lie. They approve of the razor wire, and they don’t give a damn about the Guantanamo Bay detentions without charge. But they do like and respect Bill Deane, and I can’t imagine them agreeing with John Anderson that as a former Governor General he should button his lip. Bill Hayden certainly didn’t, and an 83 year old Sir Zelman Cowan expressed his support for appointment reform last week. I can also imagine some Australians not of Deane’s mind on the matters he raised giving at least a passing thought to his views.

It took two years for Bill Deane to wade into partisan controversy after he left the GG’s job, and his timing was spectacular. I think it’s an omen for Howard, a sign that he’d be wise to get out before the tide turns against him for good.

In the end, Hollingworth was Howard’s choice alone. He made a bad one, then backed him throughout his travails to the detriment of Hollingworth and himself. His insistence that Hollingworth’s decision to protect a pedophile priest was an “error of judgment” rather than a betrayal of his church and his duty as head of that church in Brisbane has left a sour taste in many mouths. His insistence that “community standards” in 1993 explained Hollingworth’s behaviour was an insult to many. The parroting by his media mates of the idea that the campaign against Hollingworth was really aimed at Howard, not Hollingworth, cemented a feeling among many that Howard has no real feel for the decent thing, but is merely paranoid.

And the vicious response to his humiliation last week – Government pressure on and encouragement of colleagues in Queensland and NSW to smear State Labor governments – could tarnish Howard’s reputation among his new true believers. To use this tactic to take pressure off Howard trivialises an issue of great concern to Australians at a time when they need their trust restored that governments take the matter seriously. The last thing they need is the Federal Government convincing them by foul means that everyone in politics is as bad as the other when it comes to covering up child abuse instead of trying to protect children from it.

I think Howard has come to believe, as Paul Keating did by 1996, that HIS is the voice above politics, and that the Australian people think he’s right. I think he’s wrong. I think people are starting to realise that he is a weak man, not a strong one, who cannot engage with dissent and instead seeks to muzzle it. I think his star is on the wane. I think Australians are on the verge of wanting to see the back of him, if they could only be even a little inspired by the alternative.

Simon Crean’s budget reply speech gave them a glimpse of an acceptable alternative. Stand by for tomorrow’s opinion poll.

 

The media predator. Image by Webdiary artist Martin Davies. www.daviesart.com

My piece yesterday, Howard’s roads to absolute power, has struck a chord, and some have pointed to overseas musings on whether the western world might be heading towards a form of fascism.

 

I’ll put off my piece on the risks of Howard’s game plan and how it might be countered for a couple of days until we’ve digested your comments. Please feel free to send me your thoughts on the risks of Howard’s grand plan, and the possible counter-strategies. And have a think about this thought from Peter Burton in Tamworth: “Murdoch, following the complete privatisation of Telstra takes a controlling interest. This isn’t a bad dream is it?”

There are two articles on the media ownership debate at onlineopinion. They are Let’s not throw in the towel on media diversity – it’s too important by Jock Given andProposed media ownership changes are out of step with world experience by Democrats Senator John Cherry.

To begin, a reader sent me this June 27 piece by New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, which reflects on a similar game plan for total power by Howard’s Republican soulmate George Bush.

Toward One-Party Rule

by Paul Krugman

June 27, 2003, The New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/27/opinion/27KRUG.html

In principle, Mexico’s 1917 Constitution established a democratic political system. In practice, until very recently Mexico was a one-party state. While the ruling party employed intimidation and electoral fraud when necessary, mainly it kept control through patronage, cronyism and corruption. All powerful interest groups, including the media, were effectively part of the party’s political machine.

Such systems aren’t unknown here – think of Richard J. Daley’s Chicago. But can it happen to the United States as a whole? A forthcoming article in The Washington Monthly (Welcome to the Machine) shows that the foundations for one-party rule are being laid right now.

In “Welcome to the Machine,” Nicholas Confessore draws together stories usually reported in isolation – from the drive to privatize Medicare, to the pro-tax-cut fliers General Motors and Verizon recently included with the dividend checks mailed to shareholders, to the pro-war rallies organized by Clear Channel radio stations. As he points out, these are symptoms of the emergence of an unprecedented national political machine, one that is well on track to establishing one-party rule in America.

Mr. Confessore starts by describing the weekly meetings in which Senator Rick Santorum vets the hiring decisions of major lobbyists. These meetings are the culmination of Grover Norquist’s “K Street Project,” which places Republican activists in high-level corporate and industry lobbyist jobs – and excludes Democrats. According to yesterday’s Washington Post, a Republican National Committee official recently boasted that “33 of 36 top-level Washington positions he is monitoring went to Republicans.”

Of course, interest groups want to curry favor with the party that controls Congress and the White House; but as The Washington Post explains, Mr. Santorum’s colleagues have also used “intimidation and private threats” to bully lobbyists who try to maintain good relations with both

parties. “If you want to play in our revolution,” Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, once declared, “you have to live by our rules”.

Lobbying jobs are a major source of patronage – a reward for the loyal. More important, however, many lobbyists now owe their primary loyalty to the party, rather than to the industries they represent. So corporate cash, once split more or less evenly between the parties, increasingly flows in only one direction.

And corporations themselves are also increasingly part of the party machine. They are rewarded with policies that increase their profits: deregulation, privatization of government services, elimination of environmental rules. In return, like G.M. and Verizon, they use their influence to support the ruling party’s agenda.

As a result, campaign finance is only the tip of the iceberg. Next year, George W. Bush will spend two or three times as much money as his opponent; but he will also benefit hugely from the indirect support that corporate interests – very much including media companies – will provide for his political message.

Naturally, Republican politicians deny the existence of their burgeoning machine. “It never ceases to amaze me that people are so cynical they want to tie money to issues, money to bills, money to amendments,” says Mr. DeLay. And Ari Fleischer says that “I think that the amount of money that candidates raise in our democracy is a reflection of the amount of support they have around the country.” Enough said.

Mr. Confessore suggests that we may be heading for a replay of the McKinley era, in which the nation was governed by and for big business. I think he’s actually understating his case: like Mr. DeLay, Republican leaders often talk of “revolution,” and we should take them at their word.

Why isn’t the ongoing transformation of U.S. politics – which may well put an end to serious two-party competition – getting more attention? Most pundits, to the extent they acknowledge that anything is happening, downplay its importance. For example, last year an article in Business Week titled “The GOP’s Wacky War on Dem Lobbyists” dismissed the K Street Project as “silly – and downright futile.” In fact, the project is well on the way to achieving its goals.

Whatever the reason, there’s a strange disconnect between most political commentary and the reality of the 2004 election. As in 2000, pundits focus mainly on images – John Kerry’s furrowed brow, Mr. Bush in a flight suit – or on supposed personality traits. But it’s the nexus of money and patronage that may well make the election a foregone conclusion.

***

Caroline Thomas, Oxfam Community Aid Abroad, Sydney

Following ‘Howard’s roads to absolute power’, I thought you’d be interested in this talk by George Monbiot. George is a UK columnist for The Guardian, and a fervent writer on life, democracy and society. He’s in Australia to launch his new book as part of the “Adelaide Festival of Ideas” and has agreed to talk to supporters of Oxfam Community Aid Abroad. This is an excellent opportunity to pull together those who are concerned with recent events. We’d be delighted if you can come, and please send this invite to those you think should be there too.

…

FUTURE IMPLICATIONS OF WORLD DEMOCRACY

The existing global system is in trouble. Increased prosperity for some goes hand in hand with increased poverty for others. The UN has been bypassed by the war with Iraq. Global institutions such as the WTO and World Bank are undemocratic and unaccountable. Everywhere, people are asking what comes next.

If Naomi Klein’s No Logo tells us what’s wrong, George Monbiot’s The Age of Consent shows us how to put it right. We’re delighted that controversial Guardian columnist, George Monbiot, has agreed to talk to supporters of Oxfam Community Aid Abroad and the Make Trade Fair campaign about his views on the future of world democracy.

“Our task is not to overthrow globalisation but to capture it and to use it as a vehicle for humanity’s first global democratic revolution,” he says.

“All over our planet, the rich get richer while the poor are overtaken by debt and disaster. The world is run not by its people but by a handful of unelected or underelected executives who make the decisions on which everyone else depends: concerning war, peace, debt, development and the balance of trade. Without democracy at the global level, the rest of us are left with no means of influencing these men but to shout abuse and hurl ourselves at the lines of police defending their gatherings and decisions. Does it have to be this way?

When: Tuesday 15th July, 6:30pm sharp

Where: The Valhalla – 166 Glebe Point Rd, Glebe

Price: $8 / $5 conc & gleeclub

RSVP: Contact GleeBooks on Tel: 02 9660 2333 or email books@gleebooks.com.au

***

Daniel Maurice

Wow Margo, the ol’ conspiracy paranoia is running hot today!! Rupert, Kerry and John Howard’s secret agenda to rule Australia unchallenged via a change to media laws. Who would have thought? I’m surprised you forget to include that they also intend to legislate to force everyone to consume genetically modified food, thereby ending bio-diversity and generally life as we know it on Earth. Maybe that’s for tomorrow’s article.

By the way does it occur to you that it’s just a little strange that your otherwise ideological foes One Nation is happily on board with the Greens, Dems etc on this issue? When it comes to blind and unthinking prejudice masquerading as nationalism you can always rely on the lunar right to see eye to eye with the loopy left.

MARGO: Regarding GM food, Jozef Imrich sent me Power comes to those who own our media in the New Zealand Herald. Academic Paul Norris wrote:

Consider this example. Two reporters for an American television station were working on a story critical of the giant chemical firm Monsanto. They were asked by their bosses to soften their report. They refused and were fired. The station had recently been bought by a company owned by Rupert Murdoch. Defending their firing of the reporters, the station executives explained: “We paid $3 billion for these stations. We will decide what the news is. The news is what we tell you it is.”

This example is unusual only in that the incident was so transparent and the justification so candid. It is certainly not atypical of Murdoch’s style. When the BBC’s reporting offended the Chinese, Murdoch promptly removed the BBC service from his Star satellite beaming into China because the issue threatened his delicate negotiations to break into the vast Chinese media market.

Thus the free flow of information falls victim to the commercial priorities of a media mogul. Indeed, governments have been made or broken by the deliberate actions of media owners.

Regarding One Nation, it’s not strange at all. This is issue about all voices being heard in the mainstream media.

***

Greg Weilo in Adelaide, One Nation member

I am still a One Nation member, and I have already started some agitating regarding the cross media laws. I have emailed Len Harris myself, as well as encouraging other members to make their views known.

Although I agree with your opposition to the proposed changes to media ownership laws, I have to say that not all ON members are as interested in this issue, and many of them need to be persuaded to take an interest.

You might find it difficult to believe, but I can honestly say that I have never heard any “hateful” comments at ON meetings against Aborigines, Asians, Jews, Muslims or any other racial group. When “hatred” does arise, it is inevitably targetted against journalists and the Big Media. The fact is that Bob Brown, Natasha Stott-Despoja, John Howard & Simon Crean would be more welcome than most journalists at ON meetings.

The feeling is that the politicians mentioned above are “honest” about their opposition to us in that they have declared their colours, whilst journalists pretend to be impartial but are usually even more biased than the other political players.

One Nation members never expected any favouritism from the media, just a fair go. We received undiluted hatred, and it didn’t take long before the hatred became mutual.

The point of all this is that there is a widespread opinion amongst ON members of: “Who cares about Big Media ownership laws – how can the Big Media treatment of ON get any worse, and anyway why should we try to help all those journalists who hate us?”.

Personally, I think that it can get worse. Maybe not One Nation related reporting, but certainly with other issues such as Middle Eastern politics, globalisation, environmental issues and the developing police state. There are issues where ON policy is much closer to Democrats & Greens rather than Liberal & Labor.

Murdoch & Packer want to marginalise all the political parties that they can’t control, and they certainly don’t want any allegiance (even temporary) between the “loose cannons”. They just want the best “democracy” that (their) money can buy.

Anyway, even if we can build a temporary alliance on media ownership, there is still a good chance that the ALP will fold. They are already underdogs, and having Murdoch & Packer offside might write them off altogether. In both major parties, pragmatism will win out over principle every time.

I will do my best to oppose the cross media ownership proposals amongst my part of the political spectrum, but I can’t say that it will be smooth sailing.

***

Tom Shanahan in Fairlight, NSW

I’m so glad you’re restricted to the web. To print your views would be outrageous. Have you gone completely mad???

You say: “And he wants Australia to divorce itself from the multilateral system of international relations AND become part of the American world…But Australia would be a different place from America. We do not have a bill of rights, which in the United States keeps the Government and its powers in check. Howard would be much freer than the American president to trample our human and civil rights.”

Where oh where has PM Howard EVER made any minute possible iota of a sound that we would divorce ourselves from the UN??

Yes, the UN failed this time. Do you walk away from a problem when you’ve failed once? Or do you stick around and try to fix it. Howard is committed to international relations, which is a school of thought I feel you may know little about.

Formed in Wales, The School of International Relations (IR) has a primary aim being to avoid conflict. In Bougainville, we sent PEACE keeping troops. In East Timor we went in to restore PEACE. Only in Iraq have we invaded, and even then it was both legal and justified. (Oh, and I have a clear conscience about Iraq. There is no blood on my hands, nor will there be, because we freed a people from subjugation by an armed minority).

I am but a 20 year old Arts student, but for goodness sake, have some sense please and be at least a little positive about the man who allows you to write this rubbish without being hurled in jail. Please recognise the excellent state of the economy and the intensely positive view of Australia around the Globe. (Given I just worked a year in England, along with stints with Elected Representatives in the UK and Brussels don’t try to tell me the world thinks bad things of Australia. Left wing think tanks don’t count.)

You are an excellent writer, but I feel a person lacking in journalistic ethics.

***

Patricia Murphy in Sydney

Thanks must go to Brian Harradine for putting up the amendment to the proposed cross media bill and thereby stopping what would have been the total media dominance of Packer and Murdoch. May they never succeed – John Howard’s Australia is a scary enough place as it is.

***

Sue McDonald in Concord West, NSW

What is the best course of action? Can you organise an action group to get supporters to send e-mails to all Senators? I have seen my uncle influenced by the power of the “shock jocks”. He believes everything he is told and does not question anything that is said. Most people just accept what is said or printed and do not question the news reports.

***

Andrew Armstrong in Melbourne

I have just read your series of articles regarding changes to media ownership law and am rather perturbed (to say the least) by the implications, particularly in light of recent government undermining of the ABC. Thank you for informing me! I have sent copies to all persons on my email list, but what next? The common response from my friends is, “What can I do to voice my opposition?” What do you suggest, Margo? How can I stay in control of the future of my nation? How can I keep my right to know and my right to be heard? I’m feeling frustrated and powerless.

Margo: Me too. I’m thinking about it. Webdiarist David Hannaford sent me the link to this petitiononline (for US citizens only), demanding that Bush provide the evidence for Iraqi WMDs. Maybe that’s a way to go?

***

Denise Parkinson

The father of Fascism, Benito Mussolini once said: “Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate.”

Great piece yesterday, though I’m still reeling from it. A lot of people I know who can see what’s going on are switching off as they can’t take anymore. As I see it this could be our last stand. I have been screaming since 98 that we have to get rid of Howard – as an artist I had been on the front line of what was coming down. Of course nobody took any notice and people just write you off as being over the top. People don’t see things until their little island of freedom is completely sunk and then they are willing to swap their “bit part in the war for a lead role in a cage”.

***

Sandy Johnson

Please, please, please keep the media “reform” issue as alive as you can. I despair for my children when this legislation gets passed, as they will never know democracy, and it will eventually lead to violence, either revolution, war or social breakdown, sometime in the next 30 – 150 years.

***

Andrew Byrne in Chiswick, Sydney

It is a daring action for any mainstream journalist to write words such as “Australia’s democracy is in grave danger and the people of Australia have three months to save it” (Governing for the big two: Can people power stop them?)

Due to the psychology and mechanics of our society (i.e. a pair of horses blinkers and a nose bag of Received Opinion) your statement is open to heavy howls and catch-cries from the majority of government, media, academia and society in general.

Yet the mere rarity in the media of such a view as you expressed speaks volumes about the state of democracy here and in general. Consider this: It is a rare you will see the view expressed in mainstream press that democracy is in a very bad state. Try being a journalist and actually stating how it really is.

So who are the owners? Corporations run by people who like running corporations and want to stay running corporations. This is not leftist dribble, this is economic fact. Even a United States founding father Benjamin Franklin wrote a warning about these corporations vying for control of the government for their own desires, which in his view were the antithesis of the nations.

So how do the corporations ensure increased power and profit? The Media Moguls want control of the market (and the money would be handy too). The government want the public’s flag-waving, rabid ANZAC-digger-true-blue-mateship support. Failing that, beige ambivalence will do nicely thank you.

In general, the media has behaved exceptionally well. The government is happy and now the media is waiting for its back-scratching. As you correctly reminded us such media change is also going on in the US and the UK right now. (Well, what a coincidence!) The big winner will be Murdoch and AOL Time Warner.

Then we’ll be in a world of mono view – a one world view. It will be doled out by Murdoch and his fellow Media Deities of the same theology. The crowds will watch as the government answers the pleas of salivating corporations eyeing public assets. The government will then be very busy putting price tags on everything while the media gush about how wonderful life will be once your water costs 300% more than yesterday.

Could this happen to this democracy? It’s already started with the invasion of Iraq.

Yet, heads shakes and brows frown at all this nasty cynicism still. This could never happen in Australia – we love freedom, we care, we’re friendly, we don’t invade or attack, we have free press, we can argue and disagree.

On February 28 1933, Hitler was assigned Emergency Powers by the Reichstag (German Parliament) following the burning-down of the Reichstag building. Within months, the Gestapo were given freedom from the law. The press was mauled until the only real national media remained in the form of the Der V*lkischer Beobachter (The People’s Observer). Puppeteered by Propaganda Minister Dr. Joseph Goebbels, Der V*lkischer became the mouthpiece for the Nazi Party and the government.

And what of the government? The parliamentarians became, as the American journalist Bill Shirer said at the time, the robots of Reichstag. Hitler had control.

As for Hitler, there’s a little understood aspect to his rise. People forget that he was a clever operator of the German industrialists who were at the time screaming for the repayments from WWI to be ended. Hitler needed their power and support.

Corporate donations, arm twisting and promises played a hugely vital role in Hitler’s path to 1933. It certainly helped the rise of a mentally unstable, broke and failed artists rise to running a major world power.

Hitler also scratched the industrialists back by re-arming the Ruhr industrial zone, abolishing independent labour unions and controlling the market. With his increased powers and media silence new laws allowed for the arrest of suspicious persons.

Although it’s never simple using an example to demonstrate such a complex point, the fact remains that the Nazi/Industrial model shares similar methodological characteristics with the current issues (eg Media Ownership, ASIO’s free hands, pre-emptive invasion, bald excuses for war being accepted by most of the people).

If you can fool the people via the media you can get away with anything. Orwell knew it. Goebbels used it. Murdoch wants it and so does the government. If we lose the slim media diversity we have we will find you correct. Democracy in this nation was in grave danger.

But we’re still here in the present and they don’t control that enough yet to control our past so we’ve still got a chance to control our future.

But what do we do? Pound the government with pleas? They only sneer at the camera and say they’re acting in the public interest. Protest in marches bigger than before the war? Refuse to pay taxes? Civil disobedience? Civil disturbance? Riot? Phone John Laws?

I think whatever we do, it has to be big and loud enough to get past the kaleidoscope of big media editorial censorship and outgun the guffaws from Howard. We need those in the media that actually care enough and can see the truth enough to take a stand.

What happens if we get more Wilkie characters willing to stand out of the crowd and say what they know? If the government and their corporate friends are exposed from as many angles by as many people as possible would that tip the scales? If we could get the people interested again in having a say in their nation’s future, how would the government handle that?

Your warning will seem luridly out of place to many out there. Some will blink from behind heavily medicated views. Some of their fellow-patients will react with shrugs. Some will react violently, as if they’d been personally insulted by such a concept. Others will nod sadly, long since worn down by shouting compassion at a wall of ignorance.

The question is will this medicated hospital ward of a society fall quiet once the hubbub is over and democracy is smothered in its bed? Will the patients slip into the haze, into the numb glow of TV hiss? I can say for myself at least – I’m not going to sit back quietly and watch. Time to pull the plug, folks CLICK!

***

Mark Carey in Sydney

I think you are right on target with what Howard is about. It’s particularly galling how far a society appears to allow itself to be mesmerised by the “leaders” with a strange personal psychology, often one dominated by a sense of personal inadequacy or just plain fear. History show how this is particularly so on the radical authoritarian side of politics like Howard, Bush, Thatcher, Reagan, Hitler, Stalin, Napoleon …

Howard is just so driven by his own need to take all power unto himself, just like these people. While of course I don’t suggest that Howard is as bad as the latter, I can’t help but find the similarities. The connection is of course the desire for accumulating power. And no-one who feels good in themselves needs to accumulate power like Howard does – yet people seem naturally follow people like him rather than follow someone who is driven by values of participation, democracy and genuine service – like maybe Crean is?

The mesmerising power of “evil” and authoritarianism never ceases to amaze me. They are evil, these people; they do not really believe in democracy and freedom and do not act consistently with such a belief, even though they dress it up in language that seems to suggest that they do. In the short term, their evil always seems stronger than the power of honesty, of participation, of inclusion, and human values. For some current popular insight into this, try the apparent power of Voldemort in Harry Potter or Sauron in The Lord of the Rings. I’ve been reading these with my kids and I can’t help but see the reflections.

You are right about the power of the media. Education is also on his agenda, as he struggles to take ideological control of the society. Militarisation too. Go back to the marxists of the 70s for insight into Howard’s blueprint for accumulating power.

***

Nick Smith

Have you and Alan Ramsey and a few others considered that your voices may not be heard in the near future through the usual press, and that it will be hard to find your voices unless the source has your name for the search engine? Maybe I am being pessimistic, but I’ve just finished reading Martin Gilbert’s “Descent into Barbarism” 1933-1951, and it is uncanny how the laws passed on early Nazi Germany are similar to those being passed now.

I now empathise with the German people who had no idea because of media control what their government was really doing. How long will we have the net? This little loop-hole of information must be plugged for Goebbel’s like propaganda to control.

I confess, as a professional and well paid, I have travelled from being a capital L Liberal party person – because I believed in what they were doing – to a questioning person disillusioned with them as their corruption has become more apparent and their aims clearer.

Australia desperately needs a statesman/woman to get through the very difficult times ahead, someone with integrity and spine. It is time we moved form the dirty ethics of economics as our guiding principles and back to truer Australian principles of justice and equality and fairness for all. No more favours for corporate buddies, no more stacking committees, no more “self-regulation” of the self interested, no more refusing to attend senate enquiries, no more gagging debates, no more corrupting our Intelligence via the PM office, no more appointees who are already compromised.

***

Trudy Bray

What you have also done in Howard’s roads to absolute power is give an almost text-book description of a sociopath (socialised psychopath). Of course, sociopaths are very common in the higher echelons of business and politics, but Howard stands above them all.

Howard is a conman of the highest order. He has no conscience and will say whatever it takes to convince people to think and do what he wants, e.g. ‘I am working in the interests of the country’, ‘I have to do what is best for the Australian people’. Of course, if you then look at his actions, he does no such thing.

His appeal to patriotism puts people in his pocket because they have no way out.

People point to his ‘support’ of people in Bali and in Tasmania. He has the role of playing a caring human being down pat. He knows all the moves to elicit maximum admiration. When you look at his policies however, there is no caring human being there. I believe Brian Deegan has seen through the ruse.

Peter Foster could only dream to be this good! Howard has conned at least half the Australian people, most of the media and all of his own party. One cannot blame apathy for this. All people respond to an accomplished conman and feel they have been done a favour by giving him what he wants.

Our country is in extreme danger.

***

Martin Whetton in the UK

That is a very scary assessment of the new landscape for Australia. I left for the UK because I couldn’t stand the way things were turning out under John Howard and I am saddened whenever I am back how the country has become. The materialistic culture has overtaken Australia and I don’t see it as somewhere that is as kind and thoughtful as I feel it once was.

I think you are completely correct in suggesting Howard will dismantle the Senate’s power- I see Blair doing a similar thing in stripping the Lords of meaning. The destruction of Lord Chancellor’s office 2 weeks ago- being one example of absolute power (I do however agree on some watering down of hereditary peers).

What I find amazing with Howard, is that the electorate- and the press at large due to concentration and strong media relationships at PBL/NCP – don’t attack the Government more over its failures. The Peter Reith affair/Tampa/Bali/Iraq (and soldiers operating there pre-war) are examples that come to mind, where I see no public lynch mobs.

I hope it doesn’t turn out as you suggest, but at this stage I can’t see a change!

***

Gary Ralph

Thank you for your regularly informative and balanced observations in SMH. They deserve even wider reading by the sadly mis and uninformed Australian community at large.

It is suggested that the American public can in no way bring themselves to confront the thought that they may have been misled by their illustrious leaders (described by musician Jackson Browne as a semi-literate unelected pretender surrounded by a band of his father’s cronies and established corporate criminals, heavily financially supported by the oil and arms industries).

[You’ve probably come across it, but if not, the first 20 pages of Michael Moore’s book Stupid White Men could be interesting].

I share your concern for the direction matters are moving in this country – the massive over-reaction to the dreaded illegal immigrant terrorist threat at the last election was horrifying – as was the under-response to the subsequent exposure of the manufactured framework of lies and duplicity. Modern-day lotus eaters?

Remember the good old days? Remember ‘Honest John’?

Recent criticism of the failure to more widely publicise the intelligence regarding potential dangers of travel in Indonesia up to 12 months before the Bali bombings has frequently resulted in John Howard asserting the folly of rushing to action based on ‘speculation’. Yet no-one appears to have questioned that basically he alone determined (months before acknowledgement and certainly without the counsel of the electorate) that this country would be thrown into some other megalomaniac’s war in which thousands of people, mostly innocent civilians, have been killed, and the country thrown into total chaos, based essentially on speculation and little else. Maybe it’s different.

Then we saw all the exploit-the-media pantomime of welcome-home and thanks-to-heroes parades. To treat the people as such morons is little short of contempt, but appears not to be resented. It seems that the dumbing-down is well on the way to being a fait accompli. The real brain drain?

G’Day. Today is the first anniversary of Admiral Marcus Bonser’s sensational testimony to the unthrown children inquiry disputing the accuracy of defence force claims that it knew nothing about SIEV-X until after it sank, and that it sank in Indonesian waters beyond the boundaries of Australia’s intensive surveillance operation. It is also one year today that SBS reporter Geoff Parish aired the first TV story on the drowning of 353 people when SIEV-X sank, and the first proof that it sank in international waters, not Indonesian waters as John Howard claimed to great political effect during the 2001 Tampa election. Looking back, this lie – not the children overboard claim – was the big lie of the 2001 election campaign.

 

I played a small part in this story by prising open the cover-up by the defence minister Robert Hill and the defence force on where SIEV-X sank. The trail went cold after John Howard refused point blank at a press conference to reveal the source of his categorical assurances to the Australian people that SIEV-X sank in Indonesian waters, thus relieving Australian authorities of any responsibility for the worst maritime disaster in the region’s history. Not only that – he used the false claim to knock Kim Beazley for six, pleading hurt and disgust, day after day, that the opposition leader would suggest that the Australian government might bear some responsibility for the tragedy.

For more than a year now, a Melbourne woman called Marg Hutton has run the SIEV-X site, a breakthrough in internet journalism. Its comprehensive archive makes it THE resource for everyone involved in the issue, including government officials. Without the site, I doubt whether this story – which the government has consistently tried to hide, deride and derail – would still be on foot.

Last year I compared the story to peeling an onion, and the sievx site’s archive and analysis have greatly helped the efforts of Labor Senators John Faulkner and Jacinta Collins in questioning officials at biannual Senate Estimates hearings since the inquiry wound up. Four committed and persistent journalists – Ross Coulthart from the Sunday program, Geoff Parish from Dateline, Cameron Stewart from the Australian, and Kirsten Lawson from the Canberra Times, were also vital in keeping the story alive. Former Australian diplomat Tony Kevin first raised the SIEVX matter, and pursues it to this day.

The SIEV-X saga is labyrinthine, complex and tortuous, a case study in how a government’s determination to hide the truth can, except for the most hardy players, wear everyone down to the point where it’s tempting to give up and move on. Marg and her team have shown tremendous staying power.

I first wrote about SIEV-X after Bonser’s shock testimony transformed the unthrown children inquiry. (See Cover-up or stuff-up?) A summary of my efforts at pinning down Defence, Hill and Howard on where SIEV-X sank is in SIEV-X: Another bombshell.

I’ve been at Marg for ages to write a piece about the site and the supporters it has attracted. She had started a site called Zarook, intended as an older women’s online network. SIEV-X started as an outcrop of Zarook: now several older women she’s never met have become stalwart SIEV-X researchers and activists.

She’s been too shy to agree, but she has now written a comprehensive piece on the cover-up of where the boat sank in the light of a crucial memo released in February after months of official prevarication. It’s a forensic detective story first published on the siev-x site this week with footnotes. Warning – it’s a long piece.

It’s worth remembering that Iraqi refugeees were on that boat, just as Iraqi refugees were in Woomera. Our shared history with the Iraqi people is a complicated one, isn’t it.

PS: I attended the launch of Mark Latham’s latest book by Gough Whitlam today, and the video report is on the right hand column. Darren Connell filmed and edited the video.

***

SIEV-X and the DFAT cable: The conspiracy of silence

by Marg Hutton

On 23 October 2001, the day Australians first became aware of the horrific sinking of the asylum seeker vessel we now know as SIEVX with the loss of over 350 lives, an official government cable was read out in the Prime Minister’s People Smuggling Taskforce (PST), causing the high level group to conclude that ‘the vessel [was] likely to have been in international waters’ when it foundered, placing the tragedy firmly in the Australian Operation Relex border protection surveillance and interception zone.

One would reasonably expect that there would have been an immediate call for an inquiry into an incident of this magnitude, the largest Australian-related civilian catastrophe in the history of this country. This did not occur. In contrast, a ‘state of play’ brief was prepared for the Prime Minister by his Department on the next day, 24 October, confirming what he had already been erroneously claiming that the boat had sunk in Indonesian waters, and therefore was not Australia’s responsibility.

So began a pattern of withholding and misrepresenting vital evidence that spanned the life of the Select Committee on A Certain Maritime Incident (CMI) and continues to the time of writing. This paper traces the disturbing history of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) cable 3 of 23 October 2001, how it was suppressed for an inordinate period and how it eventually came to light.

The release in February this year of this long sought after key item of evidence pertaining to SIEVX reveals that the Howard Government and its agencies knew much more about the doomed asylum-seeker vessel and its sinking in October 2001 than ever was revealed to the CMI Inquiry. The cable therefore raises significant questions about what other evidence has been withheld and whether Australian agencies may have been directly or indirectly complicit in the tragic sinking.

1. What is the DFAT cable?

The cable was a high-priority, authoritative report on the sinking from the Australian Embassy in Jakarta, prepared under the direction of the Ambassador Ric Smith, to a by-name distribution list of more than 40 high-level recipients including the Prime Minister, six other Government Ministers, five Government Departmental Secretaries (including the then Secretary of Prime Minister and Cabinet, Max Moore-Wilton), Chief of the Defence Force (CDF) and Commissioner of Australian Federal Police. Although the cable does not list details of by-name internal distributions within government departments, except in DFAT, it may be assumed that staff officers of the CDF would have circulated the cable appropriately to senior officers within Defence, for example to Rear Admiral Geoff Smith, head of Operation Relex.

Dated 23 October 2001, the day that the sinking of the boat became world wide news and classified ‘restricted’ and ‘contains sensitive information’, the cable includes information that casts doubt on the veracity of the testimony of many of the witnesses who tendered evidence or appeared before the CMI Committee, and challenges key findings of the CMI Report.

The significance of this document cannot be overstated. This four page, richly-detailed cable represents most of Australia’s knowledge about the SIEVX sinking sixteen hours after the survivors arrived back in Jakarta and contains a synthesis of the initial information obtained by the joint AFP-INP investigative team that the Embassy considered appropriate to report to Canberra at this time in cable format.

Despite very careful wording, the cable reveals the politically sensitive and potentially extremely electorally damaging information that SIEVX did not sink in Indonesian waters as John Howard had repeatedly and emphatically claimed on Perth radio that morning (and continued to claim throughout the 2001 Federal election campaign). Rather it shows that the boat went down in international waters, out of sight of land perhaps as far south as 8 degrees latitude, that is, up to some ninety miles south of the Sunda Strait. This is well inside the Operation Relex zone where the Prime Minister and Mr Ruddock had proudly boasted a few weeks earlier that Australia would be conducting saturation surveillance. This fact is of critical importance to questions about whether Australian authorities could have monitored the sinking emergency or rescued the survivors.

This paper will argue that the public release of this cable so late in the day – nearly four months after the CMI Committee had finished its work and tabled its report – was not an ‘administrative oversight’, as claimed by one officer of the Deprtment of Prime Minister and Cabinet (PM & C) at a recent Senate Estimates hearing. Rather it appears to be part of a calculated strategy by several Australian Government agencies to conceal for as long as possible key evidence about the SIEVX tragedy in order to minimise the perception that Australia bore any responsibility for the deaths of the 146 children, 142 women and 65 men who drowned when SIEVX foundered and sunk on 19 October 2001.

The cable contains other sensitive information pertaining to the seaworthiness of the boat and radio communications which contradicts or demonstrates serious omissions in previous testimony and evidence provided to the CMI Committee. But this paper will concern itself primarily with

information in the cable regarding the sinking position.

2. What does the cable reveal about where SIEVX sank?

The cable makes several references to the sinking position in statements that range from very broad to more precise estimates. However, even the most general statement directly contradicts the claim that SIEVX sank in the Sunda Strait as was still being claimed by Defence Minister Hill as late as June 2002.

The broadest estimate is contained in the summary which includes the line: “The SIEV is believed to have foundered in rough seas to the south of Sunda St[rait] within the Indonesian Maritime Search and Rescue Area of Responsibility.” The Indonesian Maritime Search and Rescue Area of Responsibility (IDSRR) includes waters further south than Christmas Island so the cable is stating the obvious – that the boat went down somewhere along the route to Christmas Island after exiting the Sunda Strait. This is virtually meaningless in terms of suggesting a precise position where SIEVX may have sunk but importantly, it does rule out the Sunda Strait.

It is interesting to note that Howard uses the term Indonesian Search and Rescue Area when he wants to deny or evade Australian responsibility for anything that occurs in the waters north of Christmas Island, for example during the Tampa crisis. When it suits his purposes – for example, discussing Australias maritime surveillance – he refers to this same expanse of ocean as international waters. It is likely that the same factors are at work here in the DFAT cable; describing the sinking position as within the Indonesian Maritime Search and Rescue Area of Responsibility appears to be a weak attempt to blur any Australian liability.

If any evidence had been found that the boat had sunk within the Sunda Strait or the Indonesian territorial seas, ie within twelve nautical miles of the Indonesian coast, it is reasonable to assume that this would have been clearly stated in the summary section of the cable, given that it was in the Government’s interests for SIEVX to have sunk as far north as possible. So use of the term within the Indonesian Maritime Search and Rescue Area of Responsibility indicates Australian knowledge of a sinking position in international waters.

Paragraph 5 of the DFAT cable includes the information that at the time the vessel began taking water it “was out of sight of land”. This is further corroboration that the boat did not sink close to Indonesia.

Paragraph 6 gives the most detailed and important information: “The exact position of vessel at the time of sinking is unknown, but it is judged as no further south than 8 degrees south latitude on a direct line from Sunda St[rait] to Christmas Is[land].”

So first the cable puts the sinking position anywhere between Sunda Strait and Christmas Island. Then it narrows the area in which the sinking could have occurred by putting it out of sight of land.

Finally it allows that the sinking could have occurred more than one third of the way from Indonesia to Christmas Island, well inside Australia’s Operation Relex surveillance area.

If there was evidence that SIEVX sank before it reached the Australian Operation Relex surveillance area then this would have been clearly stated. The only logical inference from what the cable does and does not say about the sinking position is that it went down in international waters, within our border protection surveillance area. As will be shown later, this conclusion is also reached by other readers of the cable including the People Smuggling Taskforce and the Chair of the CMI Committee, Senator Cook. It is also corroborated by most of the other contemporaneous documentary evidence.

The cable is one of only five publicly available official primary source documents 17 produced between 23 and 24 October 2001 that provide authoritative information regarding the sinking of SIEVX. In chronological order of their production, these are:

* ADF Strategic Command Daily Situation Report 8am 23 October (AEST)

* DFAT Cable 1.49pm 23 October (AEST)

* DIMA Intelligence Note 83/2001 2pm 23 October (AEST)19

* People Smuggling Taskforce Minute for the afternoon of 23 October (after 3.15pm AEST)20

* Jakarta Harbour Master Report 6.30pm 24 October (AEST)21

The sinking position suggested in the DFAT cable is consistent with all but the first document listed above, ie that the vessel sank in international waters south of Sunda Strait. Only the first document (the ADF Sit. Rep.) places the sinking in Indonesian territorial waters. This report was produced early on the morning of 23 October, before more precise information was available from the AFP-INP joint team investigating the tragedy.22 The other four documents, produced over the next thirty-six hours while intelligence information was still fresh but after it had been tested and corroborated, are consistent in the information that they provide about the sinking position of SIEVX. It is important to note that there were no later contemporaneously produced documents released to the CMI Committee during its hearings that contradicted this evidence.

Of particular interest is the DIMA Intelligence note that is dated just eleven minutes after the DFAT cable was despatched from the Australian embassy in Jakarta.23 This document undoubtedly draws on the same sources as the cable yet it is more exact in its estimation of the sinking position, placing it clearly in Australias border protection surveillance zone:

At about 1400 hours on Friday, when approximately 60NM south of the Sunda Strait, the boat began taking water and finally capsized and sank at about 1500 hours. [emphasis added]

Despite receiving this relatively precise estimation, the CMI Inquiry was unable to conclude where SIEVX sank. Tabled in Parliament on 23 October 2002, the CMI Report was written without consideration of two key pieces of evidence concerning the sinking the DFAT cable and the Jakarta Harbour Masters Report.

The most authoritative document regarding the sinking position is the Jakarta Harbour Masters

Report of 24 October 2001 which contains the coordinates of the rescue of the SIEVX survivors by Indonesian fishing boats. Yet it was never tabled at the CMI Committee despite being provided to Defence. As will be discussed later, this document came to light as a result of the investigative journalism of Geoff Parish, who produced two programs for the SBS television current affairs program Dateline on the SIEVX Affair in May and July 2002. The Harbour Masters Report 26 and the rescue coordinates it contains were broadcast (televised but not read out) in both these programs. A copy of the document was also faxed to Defence Public Relations at their request in June by Parish who understood that it would be included in the CMI Report. It never was.

Given the absence of this vital evidence to the Committee it is perhaps understandable 28 that the Report could not make a definite statement about the sinking position of SIEVX, and appeared to support the sinking occurring in Indonesian waters rather than international waters:

“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. One report received by DIMIA [sic] indicated that the vessel capsized between Java and Sumatra. A DIMA Intelligence Note issued on 23 October, however, suggested that the boat had capsized and sunk approximately 60 nautical miles (NM) south of the Sunda Strait. Advice provided to the Prime Minister, Mr Howard on 24 October referred to the vessel sinking in Indonesian waters and stated that the boat capsized and sank quickly south of the western end of Java

“One point to note is that the [report received by DIMIA mentioned above] says that SIEVX capsized on 19 October between Java and Sumatra, which seems to contradict the previous day’s [sic] DIMA Intelligence Note which suggested that the vessel sank 60nm south of Java.”

The perception that SIEVX sank close to the Sunda Strait has gained such currency since the publication of the CMI Report that even a strong and perceptive critic of the Government position on SIEVX, Phillip Adams, recently referred to the sinking as having occurred just outside Indonesias Sunda Strait. So the emergence of the DFAT cable is indeed a significant development in the difficult process of uncovering the truth about the sinking of SIEVX.

3. How was the DFAT cable revealed?

Given the importance of the information contained in the cable it is difficult to understand how this document failed to be provided to the Senate until more than three months after the CMI Report was tabled. How it was suppressed will be examined in the next section. First we will show the slow and painful process by which it came to light. We need to go back to June 2002 when the high level People Smuggling Taskforce (PST) minutes were first tendered as evidence to the CMI Committee.

The PST met on the afternoon of 23 October 2001, the day that the world first heard the news that an asylum-seeker vessel had foundered and sunk with the loss of 353 lives. Several months later in mid 2002, during the CMI hearings we learned that the minutes of this crucial meeting included the information that the boat was likely to have gone down in international waters south of Java.

The release of the PST minutes in June 2002 caused great excitement in the media. For the first time the government was forced to publicly respond to the allegations and suspicions swirling around SIEVX. During June and July, three Ministers and the Defence Secretary (Howard, Hill, Ruddock and Hawke) went on the record to clarify their knowledge and understanding of the

sinking position of SIEVX and to refute any Australian involvement in the tragedy. (And as will be shown later, they continued to dissemble and mislead regarding where the boat sank.)

It was the release of these damaging minutes more than anything else that led the CMI Committee to recall Jane Halton, the head of the PST at the time of the sinking, in order to question her about the source of the information contained in the minutes that SIEVX had most likely foundered in international waters.

Halton’s examination at the CMI Committee was the most intense of any witness. She appeared twice and her total testimony ran to more than 260 pages. This is more than Commander Banks and Rear Admiral Smith, both of whom appeared on three separate occasions.

Halton appeared before the CMI Committee for the second time on 30 July, the last day of hearings. Virtually the whole of the morning session was taken up with examination of the evidence regarding the SIEV4 Overboard incident. The Labor Senators raking over this ground again appeared to wrong-foot Halton who had prepared herself for intense scrutiny regarding the People Smuggling Taskforce and the SIEVX Affair. The Committee broke for lunch with the questions about SIEVX still not raised.

Around mid-afternoon, Senator Faulkner finally asked Ms Halton about how she first became aware of the sinking of SIEVX. She replied:

“I received a phone call from Shane Castles at 2 a.m. It woke me up. I missed the call, went out and looked to see who it was and returned his call. He told me the barest bones-that he understood there was a report but that a cable would be coming later in the day that a vessel had sunk. That was it.”

This was the first time that the DFAT cable had been mentioned by any witness in testimony. The Committee grilled Halton intensively about the cable and the Taskforce meeting that was held on the afternoon that the cable was received. Halton claimed never to have seen the cable,39 but it is hard to believe that in her role as Chair of the Prime Ministers People Smuggling Taskforce, she would not have received a copy of this vitally important document. Indeed, in a recent Senate Estimates hearing on 10 February 2003, Andrew Metcalfe of PM & C was questioned about which members of his Department would have received it. He stated:

“There was no address to the task force as an entity, but the key people on the task force would have received the cable Ms Halton was the relevant executive coordinator and chair of the Taskforce at the time. Similarly, her executive assistant would have received a copy, and I imagine that she would have seen it. The officers within the Social Policy Division who were supporting the Taskforce I imagine would have seen it.”

Despite her denial of sighting the cable, Halton informed the CMI Committee that it was the primary source of information about the sinking contained in the PST minute of 23 October 2001. She claimed that the cable was read out at the Taskforce meeting and that she took detailed notes in her ‘daybook’ as it was read. She maintained that in places her daybook is ‘word for word’ and ‘completely consistent’ with what is recorded in the Taskforce minute of the day by the note taker.

Interestingly, she informed the Committee that she believed the line recorded in the PST minute – vessel likely to have been in international waters south of Java – was also in the cable. As discussed above, this conclusion is not spelt out in the cable, although it is clearly implied. These words appearing in the PST minutes suggest that the meeting discussed the sinking position and reached agreement that SIEVX sank in international waters. Two of the participants at this meeting had access to expert nautical knowledge due to their positions Commodore Warwick Gately (Navy Strategic Policy and Futures) and Ian Errington from Coastwatch so the conclusion was based on informed opinion. Halton’s memory of these words appearing in the cable

suggests there was no dissent.

Also of note is Halton’s comment that ‘my understanding is that you cannot actually see the land unless you are inside the territorial waters of Indonesia’. This comment, although incorrect, is pertinent given the reference in the cable to the vessel being out of sight of land when it first got into difficulties. This further indicates that a discussion ensued during the meeting as to whether or not it was possible that SIEVX was within Indonesian territorial waters when it foundered and the opinion of the Taskforce members was that this was unlikely to have been the case.

It is very curious then, given the PST minute noting the vessel was likely to have sunk in international waters, that advice went to the Prime Minister late in the afternoon of 24 October (Margo: the day AFTER he repeatedly gave the Austraplian people categorical assurances that SIEVX sank in Indonesian waters, and therefore not within our surveilance zone) and therefore that the boat had sunk in Indonesian waters. Halton told the CMI Committee of her decision on the day after the PST meeting discussed above, that a ‘state of play’ briefing be provided to the Prime Minister by PM & C. Halton informed the Committee that she had thought it ‘prudent’ to bring Howard up to date on a range of issues including the sinking of the asylum seeker boat. This brief included a nine line section under a heading ‘Boat sunk in Indonesian waters’ which stated that the ‘boat capsized and sank quickly south of the western end of Java with loss of possibly 352 lives’.

In endeavouring to explain how a brief could go to the PM with a heading such as this when the PST had noted the previous day that the vessel was likely to have sunk in international waters, Halton made the remarkable statement that throughout the life of the Taskforce there had been some ‘confusion’ and ‘lack of precision’ about the terms ‘[Indonesian] territorial waters,’ ‘[Indonesian] contiguous zone’ and ‘Indonesian Search and Rescue zone’. She claimed unconvincingly that there was a ‘vast interchangeability’ between these three terms. It is hard to resist the conclusion that Halton was in damage control mode here and doing her best to protect the Prime Minister who had been claiming that the boat had sunk in Indonesian waters. It would seem she was willing to put at risk her own credibility and that of her colleagues on the PST in the process.

The Committee was perplexed by Halton’s SIEVX testimony and asked her on notice to provide:

* a copy of the advice that went to the PM on the afternoon of 24 October’

* the details of the agencies that provided the information that was contained in the brief that SIEVX sank in Indonesian water, and

* a copy of the DFAT cable.

Three weeks later Halton replied in writing to the Committee. She conveniently overlooked the first question entirely. In reply to the second question she informed the Committee that details of the agencies could not be provided as the author of the Prime Ministerial brief was ‘overseas on long term leave’ and unable to be contacted. She concluded by stating that PM & C in conjunction with DFAT were considering the Committees request for the cable.

When the CMI Report was tabled in Parliament two months later, these matters were still outstanding; neither document had been provided to the Committee and the question regarding the agencies had still not been satisfactorily answered. It would appear that Halton and the Department of PM & C were hoping that these stalling tactics would suffice and that the CMI Report would be written without these questions being further pursued.

To a certain extent this strategy was successful; the CMI Report was written without the Committee seeing either the DFAT cable or the Prime Ministerial brief. However, prior to the November 2002 round of Senate Estimates hearings, the CMI Secretariat noted that the DFAT cable had not been provided to the Committee by PM & C and contacted the Department to request that it be tabled at the coming round of Senate Estimates.

The cable almost became public at this time, but not quite. A declassified copy of the cable was brought to the 20 November Senate Finance and Public Administration Legislation Committee but was not tabled. According to Barbara Belcher, one of the PM & C officers who appeared at the November Estimates hearing, the cable was not presented to the Senators that day because there was a difference of opinion between officers regarding the blacking out of some information. In what appears to be a further attempt to shield the Prime Minister, the version of the cable that was taken to Estimates in November had the entire recipient list blacked out. Belcher pointed out to Andrew Metcalfe and other officers in PM & C that she believed there was no justification for suppressing this information.

So rather than tabling this version of the DFAT cable, PM & C decided to negotiate with DFAT as the originating department, to supply a more complete version. These negotiations took an inordinately long time.

Finally, on 4 February 2003, more than six months after the initial request to Ms Halton, the DFAT cable was received by Senator Peter Cook in his capacity as the former chair of the defunct CMI Committee. The next day a shocked and angry Senator Cook told the Senate how, in his opinion, the cable raised very serious questions about the honesty of key CMI witnesses:

“[W]e may now be in a situation in which this cable, which was before all of those officers who appeared before our inquiry before they fronted to give evidence – and they gave evidence to our inquiry after swearing an oath before the inquiry to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing else but the truth – reveals information which is not entirely consistent with the evidence that was given by some public servants…

“A key issue in our inquiry was to try and establish what Australia knew about where SIEVX went down. The consistent refrain to that question was, ‘In Indonesian territorial [sic] waters’. We now know that it went down in international waters.

“This is a significant piece [of] information because it goes to whether Australian search and rescue capability could have intruded into the area concerned to rescue people who were on that ill-fated ship.”

On 10 February 2003, just a few days after Senator Cook finally received the cable in the post, PM & C appeared again before Senate Estimates. Not surprisingly, one of the main lines of questioning by Opposition Senators was why it had taken so long for the cable to be produced to the Senate.

PM & C tried unsuccessfully to explain away the long delay as an ‘administrative oversight’ which was rectified by the Department as soon as they discovered it. The Labor Senators did not accept this implausible explanation and probed and questioned the officers until they eventually revealed that the CMI Secretariat had identified the ‘oversight’, not PM & C.

Senator Collins asked PM & C if they were aware of any other oversights with regard to Halton’s Answers to Questions on Notice. When they replied in the negative, Collins twisted the blade by pointing out that the briefing paper of 24 October 2001 that informed the Prime Minister that SIEVX had sunk in Indonesian waters was still outstanding and again requested that it be provided to the Committee on notice along with an explanation as to why it had also been overlooked.

At the time of writing, this brief has still not been received by the Senate. (Margo: It was finally released this week – see postscript.)

During this same round of Senate Estimates hearings, Senator Collins tabled a print out of a news article that included long verbatim extracts from the DFAT cable that appeared on an Indonesian website, ibonweb.com, on 23 October 2001, the same day that the cable was sent. Collins asked DFAT officers how it could be that this crucial document could be leaked to ibonweb.com back in October 2001 and yet “remain … an illusion to this parliament for 16 months”. DFAT could provide no explanation.

As will be demonstrated in the next section, there were many opportunities during the CMI Committee hearings for witnesses to answer questions in such a way as to bring the existence of the DFAT cable to the attention of the Senators. The cable was the key item of official evidence from the day that the SIEVX tragedy first became known. It synthesized the investigations into the tragedy in the first sixteen hours and was cabled to six Government Ministers including the Prime Minister and the Secretaries of five different Government departments. Yet the first time it is mentioned at the CMI Committee is on the fifteenth and last day of hearing by the second last witness.

To put it another way, in the entire 2181 pages of transcript of evidence heard by the CMI Committee, the first mention of the DFAT cable occurs on page 2115.

Given the evidentiary significance of the DFAT cable it is remarkable that despite a direct request on notice to Jane Halton, it took 6 months for it to be tabled. In the end it was only received by the Senate because the CMI Secretariat was prepared to pursue the matter beyond the life of the Committee. But what is even more disturbing is the apparent suppression of any mention of the cable in testimony to the Committee by the many CMI witnesses who had received or sighted it back in October 2001.

4. How was the DFAT cable concealed?

The Howard Government was trying hard over many months to sustain a false public position that the boat sank north of the Operation Relex surveillance zone and so Australian authorities could not have known of the sinking emergency or been in a position to rescue survivors.

In the days and weeks following the sinking, in the middle of the federal election campaign, John Howard made many references to the SIEVX tragedy, all seemingly aimed at putting as much distance between Australia and the 353 drowned asylum-seekers as possible. In late October and early November he is on the record more than half a dozen times saying that the boat sank in Indonesian waters, with the implication that the vessel sunk within twelve nautical miles of the Indonesian coastline inside Indonesia’s territorial waters and outside Australias border protection surveillance zone and so was not Australias responsibility.

And yet the Prime Minister was a named recipient of the DFAT cable of 23 October 2001, which strongly implied that SIEVX was outside Indonesian territorial waters when it went down. So the first concealment occurred at the most senior level of government.

Howard may have succeeded with this deceit had it not been for an article by Vanessa Walker that appeared in the Australian in late December 2001 which claimed that survivors of the SIEVX tragedy had asserted that ‘two boats, which their rescuers told them were Australian border patrol vessels, shone floodlights on them but did not help’. Walker also reported that she had contacted the Defence Department about these allegations and was informed that the closest ship was HMAS Arunta, which was 230 nautical miles south of the spot.

It was this article that was the catalyst for Tony Kevin to begin publicly raising questions about the circumstances surrounding the sinking of SIEVX. Kevin, a retired diplomat and visiting fellow in the school of Pacific and Asian studies at the Australian National University, had harboured suspicions from the time of the sinking that this maritime disaster was ‘too conveniently timed’ and ‘benefited the government’s border protection agenda’ too greatly to be simply an accident.

On 18 February 2002 Kevin wrote to Simon Crean and the leaders of all Opposition Parties in the Senate requesting that the Senate, in the context of the CMI Committee which was about to begin its hearings, investigate the claims by a survivor that ‘Australian naval patrol ships witnessed a sinking refugee vessel on 19 October 2001 but failed to rescue survivors’.

Due to a request by Liberal Senator Brett Mason to expand the terms of Reference of the CMI Committee beyond the ‘children overboard’ incident, the Committee was able to address Kevin’s questions about the sinking of SIEVX.

By March 2002 Kevin’s concerns about this incident had significantly strengthened, due in part to Ross Coulthart’s pathbreaking investigation into Kevin John Ennis’s people-smuggling activities in Indonesia which had gone to air on the Sunday program in mid-February. Kevin’s first submission to the CMI Inquiry puts forward the disturbing hypothesis that the sinking of SIEVX was not an accident but may have been a planned operation to deter further asylum seeker voyages to Australia.

This was the deadly grenade that Kevin lobbed into the CMI Committee and followed up with two equally incendiary newspaper articles published in the Age and the Canberra Times on 25 March 2002, the day that the CMI Committee began its hearings. So, from the first day of hearings the spectre of the stricken vessel SIEVX haunted the Inquiry.

And from day one of the hearings Defence misrepresented its state of knowledge, particularly in regard to the sinking position of the vessel and intelligence about the voyage.

Defence & DFAT Keep Silent

Vice Admiral David Shackleton, then Chief of the Navy, was the first witness to give evidence to the CMI Committee about the sinking position of SIEVX. During Shackleton’s testimony, Senator Mason tabled a letter from Simon Crean to Senator Hill which included Tony Kevin’s letter of 18 February where he first publicly stated his concerns about SIEVX. This prompted Senator Bartlett to ask Shackleton if he had prior knowledge of the claim made by a survivor, outlined in Kevin’s letter, that a Navy ship had witnessed the sinking. Shackleton replied:

When this allegation was made we checked all of our available information. There is nothing that indicates that we were closer than about 230 miles away.

This was essentially the same information that Defence had provided to Vanessa Walker in December 2001. The response to Walker by Defence and reiterated at the CMI Committee byShackleton seems calculated to maximise the distance between the sunken vessel and Australia’s nearest naval assets. The distance between Christmas Island and the southern entrance to the Sunda Strait is approximately 240 nautical miles. In essence Defence was claiming that the boat sank in, or just outside, the Sunda Strait and that the nearest Australian ship (which we would later learn was HMAS Arunta) was down at Christmas Island.

The following day Defence Minister Senator Robert Hill substantially modified this position in a letter to Opposition Leader Simon Crean (responding to Tony Kevins letter of 18 February which Crean had forwarded on to him requesting comment). Hill claimed to Crean that Defence had reviewed its information on SIEVX . This assessment put the the nearest ship 80 nautical miles closer than claimed by Shackleton and the Defence spokesperson quoted by Vanessa Walker:

“Reconstruction of HMAS Aruntas track for the period between 1000 (AEST) on 18 October 2001 and 1600 (AEST) on 20 October 2001 confirms that the ship was at no time closer than 150 nautical miles from the Sunda Strait where it is believed the refugee vessel sank.”

It is noteworthy that Shackleton claimed that Defence had ‘reviewed all … available information’ and that Hill stated that Defence had assessed the sinking position, yet neither gives any indication of the information that was contained in the DFAT cable and which senior Defence personnel had received on 23 October the previous year which stated quite categorically that the boat had sunk ‘south of Sunda St[rait]’.

The next Defence official to answer questions about where SIEVX sank was the then head of Operation Relex, Maritime Commander Admiral Geoffrey Smith. Smith appeared before the CMI Committee on three separate days (4, 5 and 11 April). During his first appearance he fielded questions about SIEVX and virtually repeated verbatim the information that Hill had provided to Simon Crean that the boat had foundered close to the Sunda Strait and that the nearest vessel was about 150 miles away:

“[T]he first time that the Navy knew that this vessel had sailed was when we were advised through the search and rescue organisation in Canberra that this vessel may have foundered in the vicinity of Sunda Strait. At that time our nearest ship was about 150 miles away.”

On 11 April he again gave specific information about the sinking position, reiterating the modified line that Hill had first used in the letter to Simon Crean:

“[O]ur nearest ship to where that boat sank was 150 miles away. We had no knowledge of the boat having sailed. The first that we were aware that this vessel had sailed from Indonesia was when we were contacted by the search and rescue organisation here in Canberra, on 22 October, when they advised us that this vessel was overdue and it was feared it had foundered in the Sunda Strait area.”

Less than a week later, Smith again repeated this position (in what was quickly becoming a

mantra as he used almost exactly the same words as in his 4 April testimony) but this time in a

letter to the Canberra Times:

“[T]he first that Navy knew that this vessel had sailed was when advised through the search and rescue organisation in Canberra on October 22 that this vessel might have foundered in the vicinity of Sunda Strait. At that time our nearest ship was about 150 miles away.”

It is interesting to reflect on public statements by Hill and Smith regarding the sinking position of SIEVX. Neither Hill nor Smith were named recipients of the DFAT cable, however the former Defence Minister (Reith) was on the initial DFAT distribution, and Operation Relex Commander (Smith) would have certainly been included on Defence’s internal by-name distribution for such an important cable that was clearly relevant to Operation Relex’s responsibilities at the time. Reith’s copy would have been on file in the Ministry and available for briefing the incoming Minister, Hill.

So in December 2001, when Defence ‘checked all available information’ about SIEVX in response to Vanessa Walker’s enquiry, and again in March 2002 when a further review was conducted in order for Hill to respond accurately to Simon Crean’s letter asking him to comment on Tony Kevin’s allegations, the cable would have been sighted. Yet neither Hill nor Smith acknowledge the advice in the cable that SIEVX could have sunk well south of Sunda Strait in the Operation Relex zone.

What caused Defence to discount the information contained in the DFAT cable of 23 October? What new information had been unearthed that caused Defence to assess the likely sinking position as Sunda Strait?

Some insight into Defence’s thinking was provided the following day, 17 April when Commander Chatterton, Director of Operations (Navy) appeared before the CMI Committee and was questioned briefly about SIEVX:

Senator Bartlett: Are you aware of any reports that were done, after the event, into the particular incident of the vessel that sank?

Cmdr Chatterton: I remember that, after it, I was asked where the nearest Navy ship was and I knew that there was one ship in the vicinity of Christmas Island. I found out from Maritime Headquarters that – I cannot remember the exact figure – it was something along the lines of 164 miles at least from the position. Looking at the chart and the way the seabed is there, a grossly overloaded vessel would have gone out into the Sunda Strait and, as it reached the main water mass, as the water comes up from the Indian Ocean, it probably would have sunk around that areabeing overloaded. That was well inside the Indonesian area, so I would not have expected one of our ships to be in that area anyway, and I knew that our ship was actually patrolling around the Christmas Island area. So it was just a matter of working out how far away it was.

Senator Bartlett: And you are not aware of any specific report or investigation that

was done by any Australian authorities into the circumstances surrounding that incident?

Cmdr Chatterton: No, there is no specific item that I know of.

Essentially Chatterton’s evidence repeated that of Hill and Smith. He is more specific about the position of Arunta, stating that the nearest ship was down near Christmas Island 164 miles at least from the position. The figure ‘164 miles’ suggests that Chatterton, Hill and Smith are all referring to the same data but Hill and Smith have rounded down to the neater – and as will be shown later, politically expedient – figure of 150 miles.

Chatterton’s speculation on how the boat would have come to sink close to the Sunda Strait is new. However, he does not reveal any hard evidence to counter the information in the cable which put the sinking south of the Sunda Strait and by implication outside the Indonesian area. It is clear that Bartletts questioning of Chatterton left opportunity for Chatterton to mention the DFAT cable, which he did not take up.

Written evidence from Colonel Day (Acting Chief of Staff for Chief of the Defence Force, Admiral Chris Barrie) added significantly to this misrepresentation and concealment and indicates again that Defence was deliberately withholding the cable from the Committee.

On the same day that Chatterton gave evidence, Senator Bartlett asked Colonel Day on notice “What type of reports were provided to CDF or CDFs Office after [SIEVX] sank and where did they come from?’

It took nearly two months for Days written reply to be received by the Committee. In it he stated:

“There was a reference to the vessel having departed Indonesia and that it was overcrowded, in the daily Defence Intelligence Summary (produced by the Defence Intelligence Organisation) on 22 October 2001. The following day, the summary reported that the vessel had sunk on 19 October.”

Given that Admiral Barrie, then Chief of the Defence Force, was a named recipient of the DFAT cable and Day was his Acting Chief of Staff, this response is less than comprehensive as a reply to Bartletts question. If Day was being fully open and frank with the Committee his answer should have included reference to the cable. Having taken the question on notice, it was beholden on him to investigate Defence holdings on this matter and to report back to the Senate with thorough and complete information.

It appears that evidence tendered by Defence on the sinking position of SIEVX was given in the expectation that it would not be challenged by contradictory evidence such as that contained in the DFAT cable.

So at the end of April, seven months after senior Defence personnel had been notified by cable that SIEVX could have sunk up to 90 nautical miles south of Sunda Strait inside the Australian border protection surveillance zone and after nine days of CMI testimony, Defence still claimed that SIEVX had foundered within or very close to the Sunda Strait and that the nearest naval vessel, HMAS Arunta, was about 150 nautical miles away

Tony Kevin appeared before the CMI Committee on 1 May and was the first witness to directly challenge evidence tendered to the Committee concerning intelligence and the sinking position of the boat. Kevin pointed out among other things that an article by Don Greenlees in the Australian on 24 October 2001 included a map that showed the boat had sunk about 80km (or 43nm) from land. This was the first intimation that false or incomplete evidence was being presented to the CMI Committee concerning the sinking position.

Dr Geoff Raby, then First Assistant Secretary, International Organisations and Legal Division of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT), appeared soon after Tony Kevin and fielded questions about the sinking.His deftly evasive answers indicate that Defence was not the only agency concealing the existence of the cable.

It should be pointed out that Raby is a unique witness – he was the only person to give evidence to the CMI Inquiry who was both a named recipient of the DFAT cable and an attendee of the crucial People Smuggling Taskforce meeting of 23 October where the cable was read out. So we can examine his CMI testimony in the sure knowledge that he had read the cable and had been party to the discussions in the PST meeting that concluded that SIEVX was likely to have been in international waters when it foundered.

Dr Raby appeared before the Committee on the same day that Tony Kevin gave evidence directly challenging the Sunda Strait as the likely sinking position. Kevin’s evidence spurred Senator Cook to question Dr Raby regarding his knowledge of where the stricken vessel may have foundered. Cook asked Raby on notice if his ‘understanding of the circumstances’ matched the information provided in the letter from Senator Hill to Simon Crean as there was some concern about where th[e] vessel may have actually gone down.82

When this question was formally answered by DFAT on 19 June 2002, the sense of the original query by Senator Cook regarding the sinking position was obscured and the answer failed to address even the remnants of the original question:

[Q] Do the contents of Senator Hills letter to Mr Crean (tabled in the Committee on 1 May) match DFATs understanding of events?

[A] DFAT does not have access to sources of information on Defence and Coastwatch operational issues other than the Department of Defence and Coastwatch.

In February this year, soon after the release of the DFAT cable to the Senate, Dr Raby appeared before Senate Estimates and was called on by Senator Collins to explain why he had failed to provide details of the cable in this answer:

“This question relates back to the evidence that you provided to the CMI committee in May of last year when the committee was asking about the letter that Minister Hill had written to Mr Crean in relation to SIEVX and, amongst other things, the vicinity in which it may have sunk. At the time you indicated that you did not know of that letter, and a copy of the letter had been tabled and was then provided to the department. A question on notice was then provided…The question was framed, ‘Do the contents of Senator Hill’s letter to Mr Crean tabled in the committee on 1 May match DFAT’s understanding of events?’ The answer that was received was, ‘DFAT does not have access to sources of information on Defence and Coastwatch operational issues other than the Department of Defence and Coastwatch.’

We now know the content of this DFAT cable, which provides a fairly significant level of detail leading to the vicinity of the sinking of the SIEVX – although it may still not be fully clear as to where this vessel sank. Why was the detail of this cable not provided on that issue to the committee in response to that question?”

Raby’s reply is another lesson in artful evasion:

“Senator Hill’s letter refuted unsubtantiated claims that Royal Australian Navy ships witnessed a sinking vessel on 19 October 2001 and did not provide assistance. Information in the cable from the Jakarta Embassy of 23 October 2001 did not address this issue and therefore was not relevant in responding to the question on notice.”

Once again Raby ignored the context of the original question asked by Cook and reiterated by Collins concerning queries about the sinking position of SIEVX. Raby’s answer neatly slides away from the real question and does not comment on Senator Hill’s claims in the letter that SIEVX sank in the Sunda Strait.

Towards the end of May 2002, the tide began to turn dramatically in favour of the critics of the

Government position on SIEVX. Within a two week period, four things occurred that indicated that

witnesses to the CMI Committee had been less than forthright in their testimony:

* Rear Admiral Bonser’s testimony contradicted that of Smith with regard to SIEVX,

* Smith wrote to the Committee clarifying his evidence,

* The first SBS Dateline program went to air broadcasting the Jakarta Harbour Master’s Report which contained the coordinates of the rescue postion of SIEVX survivors, and

* The People Smuggling Taskforce Minutes noting that SIEVX had likely been in international waters when it foundered were received by the CMI Committee.

Bonser & Smith

On 22 May, the head of Coastwatch, Rear Admiral Marcus Bonser appeared before the CMI Committee and gave evidence dramatically at odds with that of the Maritime Commander. This was the first corroboration from an official witnesses of some of Tony Kevin’s suspicions concerning the SIEVX tragedy.

In April, soon after reading Smith’s letter concerning SIEVX in the Canberra Times, Bonser contacted the Martime Commander to inform him that he would be appearing as a witness at the CMI Committee and that there ‘were some inconsistencies’ between his understanding and Smith’s evidence, particularly in regard to the ‘flow of information’ concerning SIEVX. Bonser took this step in order to provide Smith with an opportunity to ‘clarify’ his evidence to the Committee prior to Bonsers appearance. Notably Bonser also informed Rear Admiral Raydon Gates, the man tasked to review SIEVX intelligence, and Vice Admiral David Shackleton, Chief of the Navy that his testimony concerning SIEVX would vary from that of the Maritime Commander.

A number of commentators writing about the SIEVX Affair have made much of Bonser’s main challenge to Smiths testimony, regarding intelligence about the vessel. However, few have noted that Bonser’s evidence also sharply contradicted Smith’s concerning the likely sinking position of the boat.

Bonser was a recipient of the DFAT cable which stated that SIEVX may have travelled as far south as 8 degrees before it foundered, that is up to ninety nautical miles from the Sunda Strait, well inside the Operation Relex surveillance zone. When questioned about the sinking position of the stricken vessel, Bonser did not corroborate Hill and Smith; rather Bonser’s evidence matched the information in the cable:

“[I]t was somewhere between the Sunda Strait and perhaps 80 miles south of Sunda Strait, or 80 miles south of Java We have plotted estimated times of departure, possible speeds, different diversions and where the vessel may have gone but it is very difficult to reconstruct. The best we have been able to work out is that it was somewhere between the Sunda Strait and perhaps about 80 miles south of it that this vessel unfortunately sank, but we have not been able to determine exactly where.”

A few weeks after Bonser contacted him, Smith wrote to the CMI Committee to clarify his evidence. Smith’s letter corrected his evidence regarding Defences knowledge of SIEVX prior to the voyage. However, it did not modify his testimony concerning the sinking position of the vessel.

On the contrary, in a flurry of repetition reminiscent of the PM’s multiple references to SIEVX having sunk in Indonesian waters Smith’s letter refers four times to the boat having foundered in the Sunda Strait.

Curiously, although tabled at the CMI Committee, Smith’s letter was subsequently withdrawn from evidence by Defence on the same day that Bonser testified.

Smith’s letter of clarification does provide one new and very useful piece of information in regard to Defence’s claims about the sinking position of SIEVX – it gives precise positional data about HMAS Arunta on the day that SIEVX sank. According to Smith’s letter, Arunta intercepted SIEV6 at a point 67 nautical miles north of Christmas Island on the morning of 19 October. This is the farthest north that Arunta travelled during the SIEVX voyage.

If we combine the position of Arunta with the information about the sinking position contained in the DFAT cable and corroborated by Bonsers testimony, it is apparent that Australian Defence assets may have been significantly closer to the waters where SIEVX sank than Defence Minister Hill and Rear Admiral Smith had indicated.

The positional data concerning HMAS Arunta also provides us with a means of clarifying the testimony of Hill and Smith regarding the sinking position of SIEVX as the following calculation shows.

We know that the distance between Sunda Strait and Christmas Island is 240 nautical miles. Subtracting the 67nm that Arunta travelled from Christmas Island leaves the distance between Arunta and the Sunda Strait. If we then subtract the 150nm that Hill and Smith repeatedly claim was the shortest distance between Arunta and SIEVX we are left with a figure of 23 nautical miles as the most southerly point at which SIEVX could have foundered. It appears that Hill and Smith have drawn the line where the sinking could have occurred at a point just shy of international waters (ie 24nm from land) and the beginning of the Australian border protection surveillance zone.

One must ask how this assessment was made. Was it backed by hard evidence or was it simply political expediency? An extract of a short interview with Hill broadcast on SBS Dateline in July 2002 gives a clue. When questioned regarding the sinking position of SIEVX Hill said:

I’m saying to you that we were observing those waters on… the 18th, 19th and 20th – and we saw no sign of the boat. We therefore believe it most likely sunk off the Indonesian coast in the vicinity of the Sunda Strait.

This is a convenient argument which eliminates any questions as to why the boat was not observed by the saturation surveillance that Australia was conducting in the waters close to Indonesia under Operation Relex at the time SIEVX sank.

Dateline challenges the Government line

The same day that Bonser appeared before the CMI Committee, 22 May 2002, SBS Dateline went to air with its first program on the SIEVX Affair. Dateline reporter Geoff Parish had unearthed important new evidence about the SIEVX sinking an official Indonesian document from the Harbour Master at Sunda Kelapa Port, North Jakarta. Dated 3.30pm local time on 24 October 2001, it contained the coordinates of the position where SIEVX survivors had been plucked from the water by Indonesian fishermen the previous Saturday, 19 October. This document showed that 44 survivors were rescued by the fishing vessel, Indah Jaya Makmur at 07 40 00S / 105 09 00E, approximately 70 miles from the Sunda Strait and 51.5 miles from the Indonesian coast. An image of this document and the coordinates it contained were broadcast during this program. This was the first hard evidence to become public regarding the sinking and it provided a means to significantly narrow down the area in which the vessel had foundered, as shown by Oceanography Professor Matthias Tomczak at Flinders University.

In December 2002, at the request of Tony Kevin, Tomczak applied his knowledge of ocean currents to the rescue coordinates to calculate how far the survivors may have drifted from the

sinking site. Tomczak was able to conclude ‘quite categorically’ that SIEVX was well beyond the twelve mile limit of Indonesian territorial waters when it foundered. This clearly eliminates the Sunda Strait as a possible sinking position. Charting Professor Tomczak’s most conservative estimates, allowing for maximum drift, still puts the sinking in the Operation Relex zone.

Defence did not respond immediately to the new evidence unearthed by Parish; that would come later in the Gates Review. Instead, officials continued to maintain that the boat had gone down outside the Australian border protection surveillance zone.

Two weeks after the Dateline program, on 4 June, Rear Admiral Chris Ritchie (Commander Australian Theatre) appeared at a Senate Estimates hearing and fielded questions about SIEVX. At one point he stated: “To my knowledge, [the boat] never ever came within our search area.”

Two days later the PST minutes were received by the CMI Committee. The taskforce minute of 23 October 2001 noted that SIEVX was likely to have been in international waters, and by implication the Operation Relex zone, when it foundered. Here finally was official corroboration of the critics case and a dilemma for the Government who had strongly maintained that the boat had sunk very close to Indonesia, either in the Sunda Strait or territorial waters off the coast of Java. How to explain these dramatic contradictions?

There was a period of several weeks in June and July 2002 between the release of the PST minutes and the tabling of the Gates Review of Intelligence related to SIEVX where government and Defence officials were working very hard to contain the SIEVX story. The testimony of Bonser, the clarification of evidence by Smith and the publication of the rescue coordinates by SBS Dateline in May sparked a fire which threatened to blaze out of control following the publication of the PST minutes in mid June.

It is interesting to review the public statements of Howard, Ruddock, Hawke, Barrie and Hill during this time. Each of these men had received a copy of the DFAT cable of 23 October 2001 showing that SIEVX had sunk up to ninety nautical miles south of Sunda Strait.

Howard tried to fudge it. He implied that when he said ‘Indonesian waters’ he really meant the Indonesian Search and Rescue Area of Responsibility – so there was no conflict with the PST minute which noted the boat had likely sunk in international waters, because ‘the Indonesian Search and Rescue Zone…does include international waters.” This was the same unconvincing line that Jane Halton would take in her testimony to the Committee on 30 July – that these terms were interchangeable. Howard is the master of spin. But blurring the boundaries between Indonesian waters and the IDSRR did not explain why Hill and Smith had both claimed that the boat had gone down close to the Sunda Strait.

Ruddock initially conceded that the boat may have got as far from the Sunda Strait as ’60 miles’ or 100km.100 Towards the end of June, however, he changed tack and began to adopt the new line that was gradually emerging that is – ‘We don’t know precisely where it sank. We never did.’ This was in stark contrast with the Prime Minister’s strong and repeated assertions during the 2001 Federal election campaign that the boat had sunk ‘in Indonesian waters’ and it was also in conflict with official testimony and evidence that Hill and Smith had provided to the CMI Committee that the boat had sunk in the Sunda Strait.

Secretary of Defence Allan Hawke and Chief of the Defence Force Chris Barrie both also took this position.

At the National Press Club on 19 June, Hawke was questioned about the sinking. He responded to journalists with the new line, claiming that there was ‘no concrete evidence about where it sunk’, conveniently ignoring the Jakarta Harbour Master’s Report. He also claimed that it would be possible to provide ‘quite a big area on a map’ where the boat may have foundered, but did not mention that most, if not all of this area would be in the Australian Operation Relex surveillance zone.

Admiral Chris Barrie continued the equivocation over the sinking position at his farewell speech in Canberra on 3 July, just days before the Gates Review was received by the Senate. Barrie claimed that ‘the position where the vessel foundered is unknown and all attempts to estimate the location are speculative at best’. ‘Speculative’ was fast becoming the new Defence buzz word in regard to the sinking position of SIEVX.

Hill was the only one who tried to have it both ways – that is, ‘we dont know where it sank, we can only speculate, but our best evidence is that it sank in the Sunda Strait’. On 19 June he said in the Senate:

“[W]e made a best estimate, on the basis of what information is able to be put together, as to where it did sink. I have referred to it as in the Sunda Strait; [the Prime Minister] referred to it as in Indonesian waters. The best evidence is that both of those answers are still correct.”

In a letter to the Age on 27 June responding to an opinion piece by Robert Manne he wrote:

“Manne assumes that there is no doubt that SIEVX had exited Indonesian waters and entered the surveillance zone of Operation Relex. There is simply no evidence to support this assumption. There have been varying estimates as to how far the boat may have travelled and its possible course, but by their nature they are at best speculative. The best advice that Defence can provide is that all indications point to the boat sinking in the vicinity of Sunda Strait.”

In the end the Gates review took the pressure off.

The Gates Review

Rear Admiral Raydon Gates had been tasked to conduct a Defence review of intelligence pertaining to SIEVX. The purpose of this review was to ensure that the letter that Defence Minister Hill had written to Opposition Leader Simon Crean in March 2002, responding to Tony Kevins concerns, was ‘accurate and complete’ in the detail it provided about Defence’s knowledge of the boat including Hill’s claim that the sinking had occurred ‘in the vicinity of the Sunda Strait’ and by implication not in the Australian border protection surveillance area.

When the Gates review commenced in March/April 2002 there was scant evidence in the public arena concerning the sinking location of SIEVX. On the one hand, public statements by the Prime Minister, Defence Minister and Maritime Commander indicated that the boat had sunk very close to Indonesia, either in the Sunda Strait or the territorial sea off Java. On the other, media articles by Greenlees and Walker published in the Australian in October and December 2001 and by ibonweb.com on the internet seemed not to gel with these pronouncements.

However, we now know that hidden away from public gaze on file in the government departments of Defence, DIMA, DFAT, PM & C and Justice, were a number of official documents related to the sinking. As shown earlier in this paper, the overwhelming weight of this evidence is that SIEVX went down inside the Operation Relex surveillance zone.

It was not difficult to discredit the evidence in the public arena – survivor testimony and newspaper articles are easily dismissed. A much more difficult proposition was to overlook the hard evidence of official government documents.

While Gates was conducting the SIEVX review, the CMI Inquiry and associated media investigations caused some of the counter evidence about the sinking position to become public:

* On 1 May, Tony Kevin drew the CMI Committee’s attention to the Greenlees article from October 2001 which stated that the boat had sunk about 80km (43nm) from land,

* Three weeks later on 22 May, Rear Admiral Bonser testified that Coastwatch had assessed that the sinking could have occurred up to 80nm south of the Sunda Strait,

On the evening that Bonser testified, SBS Dateline broadcast the Jakarta Harbour Master’s report and the rescue coordinates it contained, showing that the SIEVX survivors had been found in the Indian Ocean inside the Operation Relex zone, and

* On 6 June the PST minutes were received by the CMI Committee, including the first official confirmation that the government had knowledge that SIEVX had sunk in international waters.

If any evidence had existed supporting Howard, Hill and Smiths contention that SIEVX had sunk in Indonesian territorial waters or in the Sunda Strait there is no doubt that the Gates review would have produced it. The problem was that virtually all the evidence showed quite the opposite, that SIEVX had most likely foundered in international waters inside the Australian surveillance area.

This made it impossible for the Defence Review to fulfill its mission and find that Hill had provided accurate and complete information to Simon Crean when he informed him that SIEVX had sunk in the Sunda Strait. So how did the Defence Review deal with this dilemma? Rather than pointing out to the CMI Committee that it appeared that Hill’s information was inaccurate and incomplete, the Review falsely concluded it was unable to say where SIEVX sank:

Some public comment has inaccurately suggested that it is possible to say with some precision where SIEV X foundered (eg media ‘expert’ analysis of figures reportedly provided by the Harbour Master at Sunda Kelapa port in north Jakarta). This is to ignore what is known, namely that both the timing and location of its last landfall is unknown (the vessel is reported to have had a number of stops and delays); that its planned and actual course is unknown; that the impact of tides, currents and weather is unknown, and the impact of its seaworthiness on its speed is unknown. In the absence of positional data from either SIEV ‘X’ itself or the fishing boats that rescued the survivors, Defence can only speculate as to where the vessel foundered. Defence has no reason to change this assessment. The fact that there are a number of such assessments only goes to underline the uncertainty surrounding the information available on this matter.

In order to reach this false conclusion, the Defence Review had to denigrate, misrepresent and conceal key evidence.

The Jakarta Harbour Master’s Report – to date the most authoritative piece of evidence regarding the sinking – is grossly misrepresented here. Firstly, the Gates Review inaccurately downgradesthis official Indonesian document to media expert analysis of figures reportedly provided by the Harbour Master. Secondly, in double-speak worthy of Orwell, the information that it contains – ie ‘positional data from the fishing boats that rescued the survivors’ – is said to be absent. The denigration and obliteration of this vital piece of evidence was not an accident or an oversight. As mentioned earlier in this paper, Defence had been provided with a copy of this report and so was aware of the rescue coordinates it contained.

It is a relatively straightforward matter to take positional data such as that contained in the Harbour Master’s report and compute a likely sinking position provided that the time of sinking is known. Organisations such as AusSAR regularly do such computations as part of their search and rescue work. Tomczak’s assessment is based on a similar computation. So in order for Defence to sustain its claim that the sinking position of SIEVX was unknowable it was crucial that the Jakarta Harbour Masters Report be obscured.

The PST minute of 23 October stating that the boat had probably foundered in ‘international waters’ and Bonsers testimony concerning the Coastwatch assessment of the sinking position

were similarly swept aside, becoming merely two of ‘a number of assessments’, all of which are given equal value by the Gates Review.

As well as denigrating and traducing this public evidence, the Review also continued to conceal other evidence such as the key DFAT cable that pointed to a sinking location in international waters.

It is clear that the DFAT cable was part of the Defence holdings reviewed by Gates. Firstly, its distribution list included three senior Defence personnel; the Minister, Secretary of Defence and Chief of the Defence Force. Secondly, the cable is referred to in a list of documents that Defence declined to release under FOI in 2002, indicating it was well aware of this key document.

Finally, it is apparent that the cable was included in Gates review as the report quotes directly from it.

For example, these lines are from the cable:

Thursday 18 October – The vessel departed Bandar Lampung at approximately 0130. At this time due to the size of the vessel, 10 PIIs refused to embark…

The SIEVX Chronology (part of the Defence Review) uses the same words:

18 Oct – Quassey vessel departs a port in south Sumatra (Bandar Lampung) in the early hours (approximately

0130G). 10 PII refused to embark due to the size of the vessel…

These quotes from the DFAT cable are very selective; none of the information contained in the cable about where SIEVX sank appears. Instead this has become just another assessment like the Coastwatch assessment mentioned by Bonser and the PST minute of 23 October. Presumably all evidence that Defence ‘reviewed’ that indicated that SIEVX had foundered in international waters was similarly downgraded.

Through such sleight of hand, the Gates Review was able to conclude that SIEVX could have sunk anywhere.

The deliberate misinformation and obfuscation in the Gates review finally removes any doubt as to whether the withholding of the 23 October 2001 DFAT cable from the CMI Inquiry was deliberate.

The Gates review was intended to be the final word by Defence on its knowledge of SIEVX. Gates had the role of providing reassurance to the Committee that Defence evidence had been open and honest. Instead the Gates review manifests a contempt for the prerogatives of the Senate Committee.

In October 2001, Defence assessed that SIEVX had sunk perhaps as far south as 8 degrees latitude in international waters within the Australian border protection surveillance zone (the cable). When the CMI Inquiry commenced its hearings in March 2002 the assessed sinking position had changed to the Sunda Strait (Hill and Smith). When the PST minutes were released sourced from the DFAT cable and showing that the boat had likely sunk in international waters then Defence shifted ground again, now claiming in the Gates review that the sinking position was unknowable.

So it appears that when the PST minutes of 23 October 2001 were released to the CMI Committee on 6 June 2002 blowing the lid on the Indonesian waters/Sunda Strait cover story, a new strategy was then brought into play by Defence. Rather than informing the Committee that incorrect evidence had been given about the sinking position of SIEVX, it better suited their purposes to claim that the place where SIEVX sank could not be narrowed down either to ‘Indonesian waters’ or ‘international waters’ – both were possible. This was the ploy of the Gates review – finally blown away by the release on 4 February 2003 of the key embassy cable, but already manifestly implausible in May 2002, in view of the Harbour Masters reported rescue coordinates then put on the Australian public record by SBS Dateline.

A disturbing footnote to the story of the Gates Review is the refusal by Minister Hill to allow Gates to appear at the Inquiry for his review to be tested. Instead the Minister sent Colonel Patrick Gallagher (Commander Australian Theatre Joint Intelligence Centre) on only two and a half days notice and having only been appointed to his current position a few months earlier. Senator Faulkner rightly expressed anger at this action:

“I am accusing the minister of deliberately shoehorning a witness in here who cannot assist the committee in relation to a whole range of matters…The minister ought to allow the appropriate witness – Rear Admiral Gates – to come before us, given that Rear Admiral Gates has been tasked to prepare information and background for the committee in relation to SIEVX – I know it, you know it and every reasonable person knows it. To shoehorn this colonel in in relation to these matters is just an outrage as far as the minister is concerned.”

5. Conclusion

By examining the testimony of key witnesses to the CMI Inquiry through the lens of the DFAT cable it is apparent that the Committee was deliberately misled regarding the likely sinking position of SIEVX. The release of the cable confirmed what had been gradually emerging since mid 2002 – that SIEVX sank in the Operation Relex zone where Australian authorities were carrying out intensive surveillance. The DFAT cable, the Jakarta Harbour Master’s report, the DIMA intelligence note and the People Smuggling Taskforce note – all of this evidence, when coupled with expert oceanographic current analysis, shows unequivocally that SIEVX sank well inside the Australian surveillance area.

These key items of evidence were extracted painfully, bit by bit over a ten month period. But although these documents took a long time to become public, they all existed back in October 2001 and were known to Australian authorities when the CMI Committee began its hearings.

During the course of the Inquiry, the head of Operation Relex and the Minister for Defence went on the public record repeatedly saying that SIEVX sank in or close to the Sunda Strait, implying that the sinking occurred in Indonesian territorial waters, outside the Australian border protection surveillance area. A number of other witnesses knew of evidence that contradicted this and yet, when given the opportunity to correct the record, chose instead to play for time or keep mum. The Gates Review that was initiated to investigate and verify the information that the Defence Minister had provided to the Leader of the Opposition regarding SIEVX, continued the cover up. When the Committee requested Raydon Gates appearance so that his SIEVX review could be tested, Minister Hill refused.

It is a terrible irony that the CMI Inquiry which was convened to investigate the cover up and

misrepresentation of evidence in regard to the Children Overboard allegations, itself fell victim to another cover up when it turned its attention to SIEVX.

This has all been known since February 2003 and yet at the time of writing, there has been no response to what appears to be blatant contempt of the Senate. Can witnesses knowingly mislead the Senate without fear of consequence?

This is not a minor matter – officials at the highest level were prepared to dissemble and mislead about the circumstances of the deaths of 353 people, including 150 children. That this could occur casts doubt on other testimony given to the Inquiry. Did witnesses mislead the Committee on other matters pertaining to SIEVX? Was other vital evidence deliberately concealed? Is there evidence to support the suspicion that Australia did more than just fail to notice a tragedy occurring on our watch – were our agencies directly or indirectly complicit?

That such a large number of government officials from a range of government departments were willing to co-operate in withholding the detailed, highly relevant information in the DFAT cable leaves little doubt that we are still far from the full truth concerning the sinking of SIEVX.

***

UPDATE

Butt-covering Brief Finally Released!

22 May 2003

by Marg Hutton and Tony Kevin

Yesterday, the infamous brief that went to the PM on 24 October 2001 confirming what he had been erroneously and emphatically claiming – that SIEVX sank in ‘Indonesian waters’, was finally received by the Senate – just one day after sievx.com published an in depth analysis of evidence pertaining to the sinking position, and ten months after Jane Halton was originally asked by the CMI Committee on notice to provide it.

We have waited a long time to read what Jane Halton’s signed PM and C update status report to the Prime Minister would say in full about the sinking of SIEVX.

Now at last – an incredible 10 months later – we finally have the report in the public domain. This is what it says:

Boat sunk in Indonesian waters – a boat carrying 421 people (thought to be mainly Iraqis intending to join family members in Australia) left Indonesia in the early hours of Thursday, 18 October. We understand that a number refused to board the boat initially for safety and seaworthiness concerns, and that 24 people left the boat later that morning when it took shelter in the lee of an island to avoid bad weather. At around 3.00pm on Friday afternoon, 19 October, the boat capsized and sank quickly south of the western end of Java, with loss of possibly 352 lives. 44 of the 45 known survivors (including 5 children) have been taken to a camp near Jakarta. AFP is offering assistance to Indonesia to provide information and facilitate prosecution of the organisers. (Complete version online at doco)

There were three authoritative official intelligence reports available in Canberra on 23 October (Jakarta Embassy cable; People Smuggling Taskforce minutes; DIMIA Intelligence Note), plus two specific, obviously Embassy-sourced, media reports from Jakarta, all indicating one agreed sinking area – in international waters, between 43 and 90 nautical miles south of the Sunda Strait – i.e., well inside Operation Relex’s air surveillance area.

So we were all waiting with bated breath to see what new intelligence Jane Halton’s updated status report of 24 October 2001 on SIEVX’s sinking location was based on. And the answer is – one big fat nothing!

Jane Halton puts a signed updated status report to the Prime Minister’s key advisers – Sinodotis, Jordana, and her boss Moore-Wilton – which on this question simply says: ‘Boat sunk in Indonesian waters (title)…, and ‘The boat capsized and sank quickly south of the western end of Java’ (which means precisely nothing in this context, as it could be anywhere between Java and Christmas Island).

Halton had actually quoted all the relevant text there was, to CMI on 30 July 2001.

All day long on 23 and 24 October 2001, the Prime Minister had been easing his own and the Australian public’s conscience with his Big Lie, that ‘the boat sank in Indonesian waters’ and therefore was not in any way Australia’s responsibility.

And on 24 October, Jane Halton obliges by retrospectively serving up a minimalist briefing to him – in a ‘state of play brief’, so that he could say if ever challenged on the point, that he had had updated ‘departmental advice’ on which he had based that Big Lie. Halton’s note was nothing more than an arse-covering exercise for Howard. It contained no new intelligence, no new information.

For months, we waited to hear on what Halton had based the vague intimations in her CMI testimony on 30 July that the three solid reports of 23 October had in some way been overtaken or superseded by new updated information that came in from departments on 24 October.

But there never was any new information. The section falsely titled ‘boat sank in Indonesian waters’ is completely unsupported by any new facts in the ensuing text. ‘South of the western end of Java’ is simply a different way of expressing the advice in the previous day’s three reports: ‘south of Java’ and ‘south of the Sunda Strait’.

And the Halton status report importantly left out the key material in these three reports, that put the sinking site in international waters in the range 60-90 nautical miles south of Sunda Strait.

With the false title, this status report was all Howard needed: another outrageous case of making sure that Howard is not told what he or his advisers would rather he did not know.

Remember, readers, this issue is not trivial: it goes to vital questions of Australia’s Rescue at Sea responsibilities in the avoidable deaths by drowning of 353 human souls in what we now definitely know – and, in any decent system of governance, that should have been openly admitted on 23 October 2001 – to have been our country’s Operation Relex air surveillance area.

It isn’t just our Government’s manifest lack of integrity at issue here – it is the entire rotten no-questions-asked ‘whole-of- government’ border protection system co-ordinated in Canberra by the Prime Minister’s Department. And it emphasises the re-emerging possibility that the system is still hiding much more of what it knew about SIEVX at the time when the boat sank, when lives on board might still have been saved.

If our country’s governance system can lie so glibly for so long, and initially so convincingly that it snowed the CMI Committee, about SIEVX’s sinking location – what other lies is it still concealing about SIEVX?

G’Day. Here’s a piece on the Labor leadership I never thought I’d write. I’m off for a couple of weeks to recharge, and have a think about where Webdiary might go to from here. As usual, your ideas would be greatly appreciated.

***

Political documents come and go, but there’s one set I’ve kept on my bookshelf at work for more than ten years, called Fightback!

Remember November 1991? The Coalition had dithered it’s way through seven years of opposition until John Hewson took it by the scruff of the neck and set it to work finding out what it believed in and why, and how it proposed to realise the vision.

Vision statements are meant to be passe these days, and Hewson’s tome is conventionally seen as the way NOT to do politics. But step back and take the long view, and that muscular, honest, rigorous document is the blueprint for just about everything the Coalition government has done since.

When the Coalition lost in 1983, it thought it would soon return to government. It sat back and waited for Labor to fail, and found, to its great discomfort, that it agreed with many things Labor did economically. It pulled together a bit of this and a bit of that election after election, a sweetener here, a rhetorical flourish there, and shunted the leadership between Peacock and Howard for years looking for a way back to office without effort. It failed. Fightback! ignited the Party and the 1993 loss – based on the lie by Paul Keating that could have tax cuts without a GST – galvanised many grassroots Liberals into committing energy into turning it round next time. It’s the energy born of a common vision, and it matters.

I thought Kim Beazley did a good job as opposition leader in the first term. He did the healing and kept the party unified. I wrote at the time that the second term was the one for a new vision. Labor needed to work out its mistakes in office, reenvision the Party’s alternative to the Coalition, in particular the role of government, and set the agenda in areas like water, education, health, the environment, Aboriginal affairs and accountability. It needed to find, through research, community consultation and vigorous debate, its core values and principles, its abiding beliefs, and adapt them for a changing world, as John Hewson did after 1990 and as Tony Blair did with his Third Way.

But it did not. It thought it would zoom back into office by opposing the GST Howard took to the 1998 election. It failed. Then it thought it would get back by opposing the GST and making itself a “small target”.

That lazy, arrogant stance saw Labor take decisions which destroyed principles many thought were at its core. It supported the private health insurance rebate despite saying, correctly, that it would destroy Medicare, the most popular policy for a generation.

And Simon Crean did something so dreadful I can hardly credit that Labor ever made him leader. Howard sold the GST as an integrated package, giving with one hand, taking with the other, to promote fairness between sectors. In return for the GST business got tax breaks, in particular the halving of the capital gains tax. But it also had to suffer a clampdown on the most widespread tax avoidance mechanism around, family trusts.

But after the Democrats did a deal to pass the GST shadow treasurer Crean, in a panic of relevance deprivation syndrome, rushed into Peter Costello’s office to do a deal on the business tax package. He agreed to support the business tax sweeteners in return for a mere promise by Costello to bring in legislation at a later date to fix the trust problem. As was obvious then, that legislation was later dumped due to political pressure from the Coalition’s core constituency. Crean and Beazley share the disgrace.

The ever smaller target also saw Labor rail against the redistribution of funds to wealthy private schools, then pass the legislation. By the time Howard had picked the vibe and spent his way back into contention for the 2001 poll, Labor was wide open to a Tampa type sting. When it came, it capitulated, and yet another core Labor principle – an insistence on the universality of human rights – was also gone.

Back in 1998, after Beazley’s first lost election, Mark Latham, incensed that his visionary education policy had been reduced to a couple of lines by Beazley’s office, retired to the backbench. He’s been doing the hard yards on policy and vision ever since. His latest book, ‘From the Suburbs: Building a nation from our neighbourhoods’ (Pluto Press) is a collection of his essays trying to reenvision Labor as the outsiders party, giving power to the powerless, and promoting bottom up democracy.

I’ve been a Latham fan for a while now, believing that his combination of mongrel, thick skin, and intellectual powerhouse was what Labor needed to regenerate, as Hewson regenerated the Liberals.

But now, I find myself believing something I never thought I would – that Kim Beazley should be given another go.

We live in dark, insecure times when international affairs dominate our lives and our fears. I believe the Australian people will not accept an untried player at this time. They like Kim Beazley, and respect his judgement on matters of defence and foreign policy. They would therefore be prepared to consider him next time around, but would not take the risk with Latham. Of the other contenders, Stephen Smith and Wayne Swan are small target machine men, and that’s bad news for Labor. Very bad news.

I hope Kim Beazley has learnt the lesson of his failures. He was badly advised, and he wrongly accepted that advice. He was on the right track with Knowledge Nation, but got freaked out by the supposed necessity of a balanced budget, an ideology being trashed as we speak by George Bush in the nation which founded that orthodoxy. Investment in our future can’t be reduced to short term numbers, as the Coalition proved when its decision to increase HECS for science and maths students saw many fewer students get educated in these vital fields for our future.

If we get Kim Beazley back, and he sets to work forcing his party to really look at itself, and produce a Fightback!, Labor will finally stop reacting to the Coalition agenda and produce an agenda of its own to argue for. Fightback! put Labor on the backfoot for more than a year, and destroyed the Prime Ministership of Bob Hawke. Keating was reduced to deceit and scaremongering to win the 1993 election, and was duly punished at the next one.

Labor’s performance since it lost office has been deeply damaging to Australia. It has failed to hold John Howard accountable for his failures, or his lies. It has left a vacuum where engaged, constructive policy debate should occur, leaving the field to polemicists who have reduced the national debate to vicious pointscoring and the politics of prejudice.

Kim Beazley may get the chance to prove that he really is a conviction politician. Australia needs that, desperately. The dominant neo-liberal ideology is dated, and has created terrible unintended consequences. are looking for a credible alternative that’s not about manipulation of their feelings, but based on Labor’s deeply held conviction that it can truly serve the public interest better than the Coalition.

John Hewson is a martyr to the Liberal Party, doing what had to be done while failing to reap the personal success from it. Kim Beazley too, might not reap the personal success of rolling up his sleeves and getting to work on a fresh new vision for Labor, but the service he would give to his party and the nation would be priceless.

 

Image by Webdiary artist Martin Davies.daviesart

G’Day. Lots to think about this Easter.

Here is the speech I gave to the Sydney Institute on Wednesday night. The topic was “Where the left’s at”, but I’m still trying to process the war and its terrible aftermath, so it’s more about how the experience might change the discourse. Imre Salusinszky also gave a speech on the topic, which was about his view that the war debate proved that the intellectual left is defined by anti-Americanism.

I hope you can be with people you love this Easter.

***

Where the left’s at…

I guess some of you assume I’m here as a representative of the beleaguered left, taking up defensive position number 123 to ward off a rampaging member of the triumphalist right about to stick the boot in one more time.

Could we start again please?

The world, the allied and Iraqi troops, the Iraqi people, and all of us who watched it and read about this war have just been through a traumatic experience which will continue for a long time, perhaps for my lifetime.

That experience sounded, please God, the death knell for the traditional left-right dichotomy, which lost its utility a long time ago and now survives, it seems to me, as a convenient means by which commentators accuse each other of being disgusting, idiotic ideologues to the cheers of fans who stopped thinking because it got too hard. The labels are an excuse not to engage, to reassure adherents there is a certain truth, an instinctive escape from genuine conversation in an era of profound uncertainty.

I know a few people for whom expressing dissent by way of rallies and protest marches is a part of their lives. Without exception, their experience of the big weekend of protests before the war was one of awe – to a man and woman they said, in wonder, “I didn’t see anyone I know!” Humanity – all shapes, sizes, addresses, incomes, world view – cared enough to come together, in peace, to ask our leaders most sincerely if they could please find an alternative to war. Even if you supported the war, surely there was joy in seeing so many Australians, so many people around the world, having a say, trying to make a difference?

The war debate saw the traditional left split. The traditional conservatives split. The nationalists split. The realists, in general, were against a unilateral US war. No, that’s too simplistic. Australians, like peoples around the world were in many camps. No war in any circumstances. War only if the UN agreed that the weapons inspections could not disarm Iraq. Support for a US led war, but not Australia’s participation. In my case, opposition to a US war without prior disclosure of a just and democratic transition to peace by an genuine act of self determination by the Iraqi people and, ideally, a unanimous resolution of the Security Council to establish an independent state of Palestine as a top priority. BUT, if by whatever means and even if under no constraints the UN gave the green light, yes to Australia’s participation due to our reliance on the American alliance for our national security.

So the people who marched had many reasons, and represented many strands of political belief. Remember this letter to the Sydney Morning Herald way back in September last year?

“We put this conviction directly and unequivocally: it would constitute a failure of the duty of government to protect the integrity and ensure the security of this nation to commit any Australian forces in support of the US military offensive against Iraq without the backing of a specific United Nations Resolution.”

That letter was signed by former Labor Prime Ministers Gough Whitlam and Bob Hawke, former Liberal Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser, former Liberal opposition leader John Hewson, two former chiefs of the Australian Defence Force General Peter Gration and Admiral Alan Beaumont, former navy staff chief Admiral Michael Hudson and the head of the RSL Major-General Peter Phillips.

Let’s be honest here. In my view, the fundamental split was between those who thought a US invasion would make the world a safer place, and those who thought it would make it more dangerous. For each nation, the question of its national security within a changed world was paramount. And hovering over the debate was the desperately difficult fact that the world’s only superpower had decided that, on the basis of its national interest, it would decide which nation to invade, the circumstances in which to invade it, and how the invaded country would be shaped after regime change. It was that issue, more than any other, which saw a strange new alliance formed between France, Germany, Russia and China, and which saw “right wing” leader Jacques Chirac oppose the invasion and Labour leader, Tony Blair, give it his backing.

We do not know who is right and who is wrong. We will not know for many years. Most importantly, the question is not predetermined, merely requiring revelation in time. It will depend on how the world’s nations and the world’s peoples act and react from now on.

What we’ve just been through, for the first time in my lifetime, is the peoples and the nations of the world engaged in a tumultuous, deeply unsatisfactory debate about the world’s future through the prism of one nation.

Every sensible person knew as they watched those two planes crash into the World Trade Centre on September 11, 2001 that the world changed irrevocably at that moment. Since then, we’ve watched the world unite, then divide bitterly and destructively as America launched a preemptive war without disclosure of its blueprint for peace and proved to the world, starkly, that might is right.

Now, the rules of the old security order have fallen over and with them, in my view, the supposed “inevitability” of world economic globalisation, which the collapse of the World Trade Centre towers also symbolised. So also, the globalisation of environment protection and human rights – which struggle to keep up with economic globalisation – are at grave risk.

As the UN as we know it – and thus the power of the forces of internationalisation of world governance – collapsed, what the world began debating so imperfectly were the greatest, deepest and most confronting questions of all. In many types of discourses, we began discussing the values and beliefs to which we – as individuals, nations, and collective custodians of this world, our home – subscribe, and the costs we are prepared to pay to meet the demands of those values and beliefs.

For me, a piece by novelist Walter Kirn in The New York Times, summed up my experience watching the war:

“Lately what the polls seem to be demonstrating is their own pathetic inadequacy in the face of events that cut deeper than the cranium – events that can be processed only in the soul. What’s your opinion of a soldier with a head wound staggering through a sandstorm at 3 a.m.? What’s your opinion of a missile blast that collapses eight stories of reinforced concrete on top of an unknown number of civilians who were either inside the building by accident or because they’d been herded into it at gunpoint? What’s your opinion of mass panic brought on by the noise of unrelenting artillery fire and a chronic shortage of clean water? What’s your opinion of nerve gas?

… Sorry, not playing. I’m turning in my card. What’s more, I’m turning off the polls. To keep tabs on what ‘we’ think before I know what I think, and perhaps to risk shaping my own thoughts in the process, whether out of some secret longing to fit in or an unconscious desire to stand out, strikes me as a form of spiritual cheating, of shirking my obligation before the cosmos to pass through this fire naked and alone, without checking to see who’s with me and who’s not and by what magnitude and over how many days.”

Hard choices, each one having a terrible cost. No referee. No consistency. No level playing field. Shifting arguments. Fake evidence. And the certainty of all thinking people, surely, that the stated rationales for the war were untrue, that there were deeper, more fundamental reasons in play, reasons which those who rule us believed could not be openly discussed because they were ashamed of them, or because they were too confronting for us to face, or because we might interrogate them and they might discover (or do they already know?) that the peoples of the world just don’t support them.

Then war. Scenes of horror, dismemberment, liberation, anarchy, joy, hope, unimaginable pain and loss, fear, hatred, hubris… Name your adjective – list them all through the prism of the experience of the people of Iraq, blessed and cursed with its abundance of oil, torn asunder by wars of empire over thousands of years. We stared at the human condition, blinkers removed.

And then – too quickly – many of us put the blinkers back on. The debates resumed as before, only more bitter, angrier, even more divisive.

But it can’t be, can it? It doesn’t matter what your walk of life, your wealth, your philosophical or political bent – an unsafe world where bombs or other mechanisms of random death can hit anyone, anywhere, anytime means we’re all in the same boat in a world rent with terror, aren’t we? We were all able to emphasise with the tragedy of the war and the fragility of hope for the Iraqi people, weren’t we? There MUST be common ground, mustn’t there?

What is the value of a human life? What is the responsibility of those who decide they will sacrifice some innocent lives for a larger purpose? What place does Australia have in the world and what place can it realistically aspire too? What values does Australia stand for? What compromises must Australia accept to those values to keep us as safe as possible?

Left and right. Black and white. Good and evil. All or nothing. These binaries are methods of escapism from the need to examine who we are and where our society is failing us with clear, honest eyes. The left-right debate in Australia reinforces prejudice on both sides, and is both an avoidance mechanism and a dangerous tool of fanatical political tribalism. It destroys. It is hopeless. It does not reflect the diversity and nuances of the views we hold, or the extent of our common ground. It does not facilitate constructive conversation. It is an admission of the failure of public debate to achieve anything of value for society.

I suggest those of us lucky enough to be paid to think about our nation and its values, and those interested in reading and participating in that discourse take a deep breath at this momentous moment in Australian and world history, and make the assumption that each of us is in good faith and has the best interests of Australians and Australia at heart.

Let’s then explore where we differ, and why. Let’s first focus on what our core beliefs are about the individual, our society and the role of government. Then let’s see what common ground we’ve got, both in our core beliefs and principles and in our assessment of the weaknesses in the way our society and our democracy are working. You know, it’s just possible that most of us will share more core beliefs and principles than not. Most of our disagreements may well be about the best means to fulfil our common principles, and on whether we are inherently pessimistic or optimistic about the human condition.

But pessimistic or optimistic, we must find the hope in this, and nurture it for all it’s worth.

So let’s do what we always promise we’ll do next time but never do when the time comes, and look at the history of this war from September 11, when fanatics invaded America and a group of Americans called neo-cons had the clear-eyed, bright-light, absolutist, fundamentalist vision ready to put in place in response.

And let’s look back on the wreckage of the rules now gone, and consider in hindsight what could have been done differently, and how, by all the players, to achieve a more satisfactory, less brutal, less uncertain result for all of us. If we all had our time again, what would we do differently, and what would we have liked our leaders to have done differently?

And when we’ve done that, let’s dream about what a new world order might look like, that we think gives the world a better chance to survive and to maximise human freedom, happiness and dignity.

I don’t know about you, but I feel humbled by this war. It brings into sharp relief the urgent work to be done in finding a useful mechanism by which the world tackles the world’s problems, the ones no country can tackle alone. Amid destruction of the rules must come renewal, and I’m trying to think, as many of us are, about what my role could be in that, in my little world, in my little country, as a citizen of the world committed to doing my best to leaving it in the best shape I can to the children of my relatives and friends.

I’ve got lots of thoughts – too many – jumbling around my head, competing with each other for attention. Maybe some people in the audience need what I do – a process – a means by which I can converse with other people of good faith, who care about our land, our people, our country, and our world, to settle on a few basic values, to be honest about the constraints individuals are under, in their individual circumstances, in giving them full rein, and to work across old political divides to find, encourage and support leaders who will help us all nurture our hope, and put the energy that gives to good purpose.

No-one has “the truth” any more. We all know it, in our hearts, though so many of us pretend not to, for fear of what that means, and the consequences that might follow for our careers if we dropped our pretence. And partly because of these left-right barriers, we can’t seem to get together and talk things through any more. And agree, politely, to disagree on some matters, and have the courage to agree, with relief, on others, and put our heads together to push those common ideals along.

When an old order falls, there is the chance to rebuild a better one. This is a time of vulnerability and fear. Thinkers can exacerbate those feelings, or facilitate honest conversation with each other to do our bit to rebuild community spirit and regenerate a shared value system.

The people in this country and this world need to trust, and need to hope. The left-right debate doesn’t engender either. Could we start again, please?

 

War cartoon by Courier Mail cartoonist Sean Leahy. Sean spoke at the Just Peace seminar in Brisbane. Republished with permission.

This war was – is – an incredibly challenging experience for media practitioners and and media consumers alike. For the first time, we and they had ready access to both sets of propaganda and the full spectrum of opinion on the war, its meaning, and its possible consequences from multiple sources with multiple angles of vision.

G’Day. This is a speech I gave on Tuesday night in Brisbane at a seminar on media coverage of the war organised by a group called Just Peace. To comment on my piece, media war coverage, your experience watching the war, or how you’d like the Sydney Morning Herald to adapt or change in the internet era, click on Repartee. I will moderate the feedback.

Newspaper and reader: the post-war relationship

This war was – is – an incredibly challenging experience for media practitioners and and media consumers alike. For the first time, we and they had ready access to both sets of propaganda and the full spectrum of opinion on the war, its meaning, and its possible consequences from multiple sources with multiple angles of vision. And this at a time when the old world order is tumbling and the world’s superpower begins to stamp a new one on us, with the threat that nations which dissent join its enemies, and those which agree are rewarded. And at a time when the tired old classification of political thought into left and right became utterly meaningless as highly unusual alliances took shape across politics and between nations.

As the rules and norms by which we have lived for a long time crash down around us, the world’s nations and peoples began debating the values and principles by which we wished to live and the costs we will accept to live by them. For Australians, the debate was complicated by the fact that our leader avoided it and our opposition has no idea what it believes in.

For the first time in my lifetime people in just about every country in the world began debating one topic – the world’s future, through the prism of one country – Iraq. We learnt much about history and its consequences, and the perspective of other cultures. We participated directly in decisions usually made by grey men behind closed doors, and saw that they lied as a matter of routine. And we influenced events profoundly. I do not believe that the UN Security Council would have dared turn America down without those massive protests all over the world from people who said categorically that wars of aggression meant failure, not solution, and promoted danger, not safety.

Many people, pro and anti war, didn’t watch the war or read about it. Of those who did, many regretted the experience, for it confronted them to their core, while others pondered whether engagement was, in the end, meaningless. Said Webdiarist Hugh Driver:

“I just wonder whether scouring the net, posting rants, sending e-mails, etc etc isn’t just an intellectual exercise that, at the end of the day, counts for very little outside the very, very small circles of consequence that we operate in. Is it just another form of entertainment for modern media junkies?”

Susan Metcalfe, similarly overwhelmed, replied:

“I can’t turn away but I’m not sure where to look or how to process the massive amounts of information being produced on the subject … in truth what is happening is so painfully human, in the worst possible way.”

“Howard will only do what plays well for him, he will do what wedges us from our own feelings and offer us a paternalism that has worked so well for him in the past. Our decisions are again made for us by a parental figure and we are again powerless. He does it well. Most of us fall into line without too much fuss, and who’s got time to fight all the hard battles anyway?”

Yet there was blinding clarity, too. Ned Roche wrote:

“I am not a Lefty or Right-winger. I completed a major in Politics at UNSW and qualified for Honours, but couldn’t bear the thought of another year at University. I am a 26 year old single gay male, I live in a small country town running a pub, and I realise that community is important. I have a view on the war, but that is far less important than realising that my (Iraqi) brothers and sisters with whom I share the same human experience need my help, and it is as easy as donating money.”

I cling to the belief that the more information we can access, and that our readers can access, the greater the chance of the world’s peoples making informed wise choices, and that from the ruins of the rules of the old world order, a worldwide discussion of the values and principles upon which we wish to base our construction of new rules on can deliver a better future for the world.

The media is no longer the gatekeeper of information. As we, the media, judge what is news and which views to publish, our readers are in a position to judge us. The internet has levelled the playing field between newspaper and reader. Our readers, if they so chose, can get the information they want when they want it and link to like-minded people around the world. Some of those who don’t wish to, or can’t, do this, will expect us to exercise judgement on their behalf, and they will want to know by what values and principles we do that. Some – and this is the competing demand which will arise in a fractured, uncertain world – will want us to stroke their prejudices and rebuild their certainties with dishonest, black and white news and views and escapism.

I don’t know how the media will develop from here. We face not only new and confusing circumstances and a transformation of our traditional role, but the emerging world-wide hegemony of Rupert Murdoch, who runs an empire which, as the war coverage showed, is willing and able to use its media as a deliberate instrument of his business interests. It is also willing to abandon a core belief of the industry in democracies – the right to free speech – to threaten and attempt to silence those who disagree with the line his empire takes on world and domestic issues.

I believe media practitioners who believe that the media has a vital role in protecting and enhancing our democracy must now dig deep to reexamine the core values and beliefs of our media outlet which we will strive to serve. We must state those core values and beliefs publicly, make ourselves accountable to our readers for fulfilling them, and be very open to their participation and critique.

Since there are now no certainties, I’d like to see us wind back the mutual provocation which passes for much comment these days, and move towards a genuine exploration of what core values and principles most of us can agree on and genuine engagement on how best to put those values and principles into practice. This could mean experimenting with form. For example, the Sydney Morning Herald could ask two experts with differing views on an issue to collaborate on a piece which debates the matter internally and draws out the common ground and the points of disagreement.

I’d also like to see us interrogate our conception of “news judgement” and admit that the dominant conflict-driven, top-down view requires a radical overhaul. At a time of transition, it becomes important to report process as well as final decisions and to give public figures the freedom to change their mind without catastrophe, and to float new ideas without insisting on detailed costings or making the loose ends the story before debate can begin. I’m looking for openness, not closure; facilitation of debate, not instant judgement upon each contribution. I’m looking for a media which will reach out, not circle the wagons, a media which will search for common ground, not escalate political tribalism.

I believe that at this momentous moment in our history, what each of us stands for in each of our our spaces on each of our stages will influence the shape of the future. The temptation is enormous to escape into fantasy, or close our eyes and pretend nothing has changed. That too, of course, is doing something.

Webdiary columnist Harry Heidelberg, an Australian who lives in Europe, works for a US multinational corporation, and supported the war, spelt out the challenges for the active reader in the new, internet era, a challenge which also confronts our media:

“The information in this war is breathtaking in its openness. We have the American view, the Iraqi view, the Al Jazeera view and several things in between which verge on independence. As usual, people will pick and choose but it is a rich smorgasbord of information.

“That’s the joy of a free society. You see it all. It also makes it hard. We are challenged to figure it out for ourselves…If there is anything to celebrate in all this crap and misery, it’s that we have full access to the smorgasbord and have every bit of the spectrum analysed. That makes us fortunate indeed.

“When you see all the spectrum at once……what do you see…….yes……that’s bloody right……you see white light. The prisms create rainbows and they are actually beautiful. Looked at as a whole as white light or split through the prisms into rainbows, the light of information enriches us all.

Get mad, get passionate, but never, ever try to shut off light or extinguish candles. We need every aspect of this debate fully lit.”

Kerryn Higgs, an Australian in New York, has reported for Webdiary on Richard Clarke’s evidence to the S11 inquiry in Bush before September 11: the awful truth and Bush on the ropes: his awful deeds post S11.

 

New York, Wednesday April 14th: Here today, the 9/11 Commission concluded two days interviewing intelligence officials and turning up new shreds of evidence about warnings ignored.

At the same time, Bush and Sharon conducted a mutually congratulatory press event (�historic and courageous�) where the US gave the green light to Israel�s settlements in the West Bank � now to be termed �population centres� � as well as denying any right of return for Palestinian refugees from what is now Israel.

All at odds with international law, but who cares? There was no Palestinian presence at the Whitehouse. In the voice of the Palestinian representative who held a press conference afterwards, though dignified and level, you could hear his deep distress and hopelessness. These moves are bound to further degrade U.S. relations with the Arab world, including Iraq. Not to mention the fate of the Palestinians.

On Iraq, I was interested to see that, though the SMH reported the concerns of British officers about U.S. attacks using disproportionate violence, it chose to leave out a key sentence referring to the attitude of the US troops – that they see the Iraqis as �untermenschen�, a term Hitler used to describe Jews, gypsies and other �racially inferior� groups:

“My view and the view of the British chain of command is that the Americans’ use of violence is not proportionate and is over-responsive to the threat they are facing. They don’t see the Iraqi people the way we see them. They view them as untermenschen. They are not concerned about the Iraqi loss of life in the way the British are. Their attitude towards the Iraqis is tragic, it’s awful.

“The US troops view things in very simplistic terms. It seems hard for them to reconcile subtleties between who supports what and who doesn’t in Iraq. It’s easier for their soldiers to group all Iraqis as the bad guys. As far as they are concerned Iraq is bandit country and everybody is out to kill them.”

These comments resonated with those of a soldier I heard quoted on TV here just before the initial assault on Fallujah � he was saying how they all felt really good about going into battle and settling the score over the desecrated bodies of the four security men.

The SMH did, however report the difference between British rules of engagement and the US approach:

“British troops would never be given clearance to carry out attacks such as the US helicopter gunship assaults on targets in urban areas.

“When US troops are attacked with mortars in Baghdad they use mortar-locating radar to find the firing point and then attack the general area with artillery, even though . . . it may be in the middle of a densely populated residential area.”

This is deeply troubling, especially when U.S. sources keep insisting that preternatural care is being taken to avoid civilian targets � while there is endless evidence of civilian carnage on many sites, including those listed on your webpage. But it also helps to explain the discrepancy.

Tonight, it appears that the �ceasefire� might break down and Fallujah is in danger of being “levelled:

…as Marines traded gun and mortar fire with rooftop snipers and fighters on the northern edge of Fallujah, some of them anticipated a bloody push to take the city of 200,000 people, a stronghold of Sunni Muslim insurgents.

“If they’re trying to find a peaceful way out of this, great. But at this point, there seem to be few options other than to get innocents out and level it, wipe it clear off the map,” said 1st Lt. Frank Dillbeck, scanning the city’s outskirts with binoculars during a relative lull in fighting.

This is a day when you dare to hope, and fear hope will be dashed. Although the war is not over, it is a day when healing could begin and hearts could open. Yet energy is drained at a time when the important, patient, constructive, long term work must begin.

I’ve received emails of hope, triumphalism, abuse, threats, bitterness, argument, advice – you name it. The war on Iraq is bloody for the combatants and the innocents, bruising for those who watch, worry, wonder, can’t sleep, weep, despair, and dig to the core of what they believe in, and why. Millions of people around the world in almost every country in the world have experienced an intensity of feeling, energy and debate on one subject – our common future – through the prism of one nation, Iraq.

I hope that the world’s scrutiny will bring out the very best in America. Only America at its most noble can achieve the result the world needs out of this nightmare. Peace with dignity.

Webdiarist John Nicolay said to me today that the scenes in Baghdad yesterday were “a marvellous affirmation of liberal values – and of the belief that, ultimately, it’s not possible to crush the human spirit entirely.” I think that test is about to begin. It will be a long, long road, with no certainty of victory. So let all of us who believe in liberal values – pro-war, anti-war, ambivalent, keep Australia out of it, only with the UN – shake hands and do our best to make John’s wish come true.

David Jones writes: Just maybe? I have been sickened and saddened by the war in Iraq. The pictures today of Iraqis rejoicing in the streets cheering their US liberators gives me cause to question my stand on the high moral ground. Who am I to pass judgement on any of this? To walk a mile in the shoes of the war victims or the victims of Saddam Hussein’s regime is not one I would want to undertake, nor one I will likely ever understand.

I’m off tomorrow. Back Monday.

(For a wild read on an alleged underground battle in Baghdad, see Israeli military site debka)