John Howard's boat saga won't go away

By GREG ANSLEY

This week, as Prime Minister John Howard appealed to a sceptical nation to trust him and support his intention to follow the United States into Iraq, Australians were given new cause to doubt his Government. Howard's treatment of the victims of Saddam Hussein and of the former Taleban regime in Afghanistan in the sea off Christmas Island in August 2001, and his use of them as electoral cannon fodder have returned to haunt Canberra.

The Indonesian fishing boat KM Palapa and the gigantic Norwegian container ship MV Tampa, and the others that were to follow in the defence of Australia's maritime borders, refuse to sink from controversy.

In a new book, Dark Victory, investigative journalists David Marr and Marian Wilkinson trace a story of political chicanery, deception and betrayal, the calculated manipulation of the darkest corners of Australian racism, and the erosion of military neutrality and respect.

Marr is an award-winning journalist and author who has written for some of Australia's leading publications, and is now presenter of ABC-TV's Media Watch programme, casting a leery and frequently controversial eye over the nation's news reporting.

Wilkinson is the Washington correspondent of the Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne's Age, was a former deputy editor of the Herald, executive producer of ABC's hard-hitting investigative programme Four Corners, and was a senior reporter for the national newspaper The Australian.

The bare facts are clear enough: determined to block a rising tide of asylum seekers crossing from Indonesia to Australia in dangerously overloaded and decrepit boats, Canberra decided to make an example of the Palapa when it began sinking in the Indian Ocean.

The asylum seekers were never to set foot in Australia, leading to the dramatic showdown off Christmas Island that severely damaged diplomatic relations with Norway, the home of the Tampa's owners, and Indonesia, still fuming over East Timor and outraged at new Australian arrogance.

Canberra went to extraordinary measures to keep asylum seekers out, flouting international laws and conventions, amputating islands from its legal entity as far as migration laws were concerned, even ordering its Navy to place border protection above its legal duty to protect lives at sea.

Dark Victory says at the root of this was Howard's desperate need to rally the country around him as he headed for election badly trailing Labor and bleeding votes to followers of the xenophobic Pauline Hanson.

Two events gave him victory: September 11 and the Tampa affair, playing as they did to Australia's pervasive sense of insecurity and fear of outsiders.

Tampa was a godsend. Howard played his role to the hilt as defender of the nation from Asian hordes, drawing lines between boat people and an invasion of illegals, and asylum seekers and terrorists.

Labor was emasculated, recognising that opposition to even the most draconian moves by Howard would doom the party as unpatriotic among an electorate overwhelmingly convinced Howard was right.

"A sympathetic position for people who come to the country illegally was non-existent," said former Labor Leader Kim Beazley.

In the weeks that followed the Tampa, this blend of scaremongering and Labor acquiescence was ruthlessly exploited by Howard and his ministers. So were darker, covert forces.

In Indonesia, as they had during the wave of boats that followed the Vietnam war, Australian agents were dabbling in the corrupt world of people smugglers and Indonesian officials on the take in a bid to stop boats before they left.

Dark Victory has evidence that boats were sabotaged - including the operations of small-time hood Kevin John Ennis, paid as an informant by the Australian Federal Police, who robbed asylum seekers of their savings and paid skippers to scuttle their boats.

When the Palapa asylum seekers were taken aboard the Tampa, Canberra set up a secret task force that was to rule with an iron fist, answerable only to Howard and his most senior advisers, imposing an absolute ban on the media and forcing the Navy to report and obey on even the smallest details.

It flouted Australian law through the illegal use of the electronic spy agency Defence Signals Directorate to eavesdrop on conversations between the Tampa and shore, and even between legal teams fighting to block the Government's actions.

Communication with the asylum seekers was banned: key aims were to prevent their "humanisation" in the eyes of the Australian public, and to block anything that might give legal force to the request for asylum.

Soldiers even snatched a letter handed to the Norwegian ambassador aboard the Tampa, against all diplomatic conventions.

Medical aid was withheld for 50 hours from the desperately ill and suffering, lies about their condition and the provision of aid were passed to the media.

Distress calls from the Tampa, including a Mayday alert, were ignored.

When the asylum seekers were finally transferred to the troopship Manoora, force had to be used. As it did with other incidents later, the Government denied this.

The Government and Navy also denied persistent reports sailors and soldiers had beaten asylum seekers and used electric batons.

Aboard Manoora, the asylum seekers were not placed in cabins, but locked in the vast, bare tank deck, with limited water and toilet facilities, for their snail's-pace voyage to Nauru.

More was to follow the Tampa crisis.

Other fragile boats, against all laws and conventions of safety at sea, were intercepted, boarded and either taken over or towed back out to sea and told to return to Indonesia.

The book describes pitched battles by desperate asylum seekers, and the dangerous condition of boats that led finally to the notorious "children overboard" affair.

On October 6, 2001, the frigate HMAS Adelaide intercepted the Olong, with 223 asylum seekers aboard, firing 28 shots from its main gun across the boat's bow in a bid to turn it around.

In the melee that followed a subsequent boarding party, a father held a young child over the rail briefly, gesturing to sailors below to take her, and others jumped into the sea.

The following day the drama peaked when the Olong sank.

During a dramatic rescue, two sailors were photographed jumping into the water to save people, photographs the Government later used to try to prove its electioneering claims that asylum seekers were hurling their children into the sea.

Even when the Government knew the truth, it held fast to its story. Howard ensured no one who knew the full story was able to brief him.

The Tampa and the Olong served their purpose - a major role in the re-election of Howard's Government.