Lazarus Rising

by John Howard

  The final component was the use of naval vessels and Orion aircraft, under the codename Operation Relex, to conduct surveillance and interception operations in the waters between Australia and Indonesia. The navy would meet boats on the high seas and ask them to turn around. If a boat refused, then when it reached Australia’s contiguous zone (the water adjacent to our territorial waters) the navy was legally able to board a boat and return it to international waters. Part of the remit to the navy was to ensure that boats returned to the high seas were seaworthy. Also starting in September, this policy really worked, partly because of the tacit cooperation of Indonesian authorities in allowing the boats back. This followed a careful briefing from a special ADF mission to Jakarta. Wisely, little was said about Indonesia’s role.

  The processing of claims for refugee status on Nauru and Manus was handled by the International Organisation for Migration, at arm’s length from the Government. In the meantime, we would provide proper shelter, clothing, food and medical attention for the asylum-seekers. In many respects the physical conditions in these facilities were superior to conditions in refugee camps in other parts of the world.

  By the end of November asylum-seekers had stopped coming to Australia. According to figures tabled in the Senate on 27 May 2009 by the Secretary of the Department of Immigration and Citizenship, the number of unauthorised arrivals by sea had fallen from 5516 in 2001 to precisely one in 2002. It was a stunning turnaround.

  These new measures, controversial and tough in the eyes of many, had been a resounding success. We had regained control over our border protection processes. Restoration of confidence in Australia’s migration program had begun, and the Australian people were in full support of our actions.

  The Rudd Government changed our policy by abandoning the Pacific Solution and softening the visa regime. Australia has again become an attractive target for people-smugglers. Kevin Rudd repeatedly said in his defence that a high percentage of the people on the Tampa ultimately made it to Australia when their refugee status was established. This missed the point entirely. The core of our policy was that we stopped the boats coming. They only returned because the Rudd Government weakened the policy.

  My involvement in what became known as the Children Overboard Affair began on Sunday, 7 October when, attending a campaign event in Danna Vale’s electorate of Hughes, in the Sutherland shire of Sydney, I took a phone call from Philip Ruddock, the Immigration Minister. He told me that the secretary of his department, who was a member of the People Smuggling Taskforce (which comprised senior officials from all relevant agencies and was chaired by Jane Halton, deputy secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet [PM&C]), had informed him that during a naval interception by HMAS Adelaide of a vessel known as SIEV IV, asylum-seekers had thrown children overboard as part of their attempts to stop the vessel being sent back to Indonesia. I had no reason to doubt this advice. Ruddock was a reliable minister. That evening I read a report from the Taskforce, dated the same day, which had been faxed to my Kirribilli House study. In part it read: ‘This [the naval interception] has been met with attempts to disable the vessel, passengers jumping into the sea and passengers throwing their children into the sea.’2 Halton later told a PM&C inquiry that the paper sent to me, which included specific reference to ‘children thrown overboard’, had been cleared by every member of the taskforce before being sent. Earlier that day and after being given the advice, both Ruddock (before he had informed me) and I had spoken to the media about the incident, criticising the behaviour of the asylum-seekers.

  The following day, Monday, I repeated my comments but more strongly, on both the Alan Jones and Neil Mitchell radio programs. On the latter one I said, ‘It’s not within my frame of comprehension that people who are genuine refugees would throw their children into the seas.’

  Both Philip Ruddock and the Defence Minister, Peter Reith, also made comments that day. Reith said that there was a video of the incident which showed that children had been thrown overboard. I continued my comments during interviews on 9 October.

  On 10 October, during a news conference at Ballarat, I was closely questioned regarding evidence to support the original claim. After explaining again how I had come by the advice, I said that I would seek more information. I spoke to Reith, who told me that he had photos supporting the claim. They were released that day and showed children in the water, with sailors apparently rescuing them. Reith said that there was a video, but that it was very grainy.

  I then dropped the issue, not even referring to it during my campaign launch speech in Sydney on 28 October.

  Children overboard effectively disappeared from the election campaign until Wednesday, 7 November, only three days before the election. That day the Australian carried a story quoting unnamed Christmas Islanders stating that ‘naval officers’ told them that the story of children being thrown overboard, during the interception by HMAS Adelaide, was false.

  Concerned by this story, I spoke to Reith later in the day and discussed the desirability of releasing the video, irrespective of what it might show. I had not seen the video. I knew that if I did not release it, the Government would be accused of a cover-up. We agreed that one of Reith’s staff, Mike Scrafton, would go to Naval Command in Sydney, which had a copy of the video, and view it. Scrafton was then to speak to me about its contents.

  That night, Wednesday, 7 November, I had dinner at the Lodge with my wife and senior advisors in preparation for my final press club address the following day. The others present were Arthur Sinodinos, Tony Nutt, Paul McClintock and Tony O’Leary. I had two telephone conversations with Scrafton that evening. The first, and lengthier one, consisted of his describing to me what was in the video. He said it was inconclusive, although it did not clearly show children being thrown overboard. After speaking to my staff and also Reith, I rang Scrafton back with instructions for the video to be released early the next day.

  I received several questions at the press club on the issue. In responding, I carefully explained the circumstances which had lead to the original statements. I quoted an Office of National Assessments (ONA) report, thinking at the time that it was an independent corroborative source. That report, ONA Report 226/2001, provided to ministers, indicated that ‘HMAS Adelaide has intercepted a boat with 187 Iraqis, including children, near Christmas Island, and escorted it to international waters where it was scuppered by its passengers … asylum seekers wearing lifejackets jumped into the sea and children were thrown in with them. Such tactics have previously been used elsewhere, for example, “on boats intercepted by the Italian navy”.’3

  The media, especially the ABC, pursued the issue until election eve. I had two appearances on Lateline on 8 November, the second caused by the fact that the chief of the navy, Vice Admiral David Shackleton, had erroneously, earlier in the day, said that the navy had not advised the Government that a group of asylum-seekers threw children overboard.

  Although the advice was later established as incorrect, there was no argument that the navy had originally provided that advice. Shackleton, later that day, corrected his statement. So I sought a second interview on the program.

  In an unrelated incident earlier that same day, there was an explosion on another vessel carrying asylum-seekers, with the loss of two lives.

  At no time before the election did I receive advice from Reith, my department or anyone else that the original information alleging that children had been thrown overboard was wrong.

  Kim Jones, then Director General of ONA, advised me on 12 November, two days after the election, that ONA did not have independent information about the incident. Given the relationship of ONA to the Government, ministers were entitled to think otherwise, and that ONA’s analysis had been self-generated.

  Doug Kean, head of the Strategic Analysis Branch at ONA, would later tell an inquiry that ONA had relied on media reports of the issue and had placed a high level of credibility on the reports because they reflected statements of
ministers. ONA had told my foreign affairs advisor, Miles Jordana, on 7 November that it was not aware of the source on which ONA had relied in compiling the report, and that it might, in part, be based on statements made by ministers. That information was not passed to me at the time.

  After the election, Defence conducted an internal inquiry under the leadership of Major General Powell. At my request, Max Moore-Wilton commissioned Jenny Bryant of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet to conduct an inquiry as well. Both inquiries reported in January to the effect that children had not been thrown overboard on 7 October, and that the original advice saying they were had been wrong.

  These reports indicated that as early as 11 October, confirmation that children had not been thrown overboard began to be passed through the Defence chain of command. There was a breakdown of communication between the Defence Department and not only its minister, Peter Reith, but also the Chief of the Defence Force, Admiral Chris Barrie, who well into February 2002 held to the position that he had not been presented with evidence to justify an alteration of the original advice that children had been thrown overboard.

  It emerged that the photos to which Reith had referred, and which were published on 11 October, had been taken on 8 October, the day after the alleged throwing overboard incident. The vessel had capsized that day and the photos were of children in the water after the capsizing.

  Unsurprisingly, the Labor Party pursued the issue in the Senate. The most dramatic evidence, both before the Senate Estimates Committee and a special Senate inquiry, came from Air Marshal Angus Houston, later Chief of the Defence Force. He told both hearings that as acting CDF — and on 7 November 2001 — he had telephoned Peter Reith and told him that in his view, based on an examination of the relevant material, children had not been thrown overboard, and that the original advice to ministers had been wrong. This was contrary to the view which Barrie, the CDF himself, had maintained to Reith. Interviewed for this book, Reith told me that he was not going to change his position on the children overboard story unless advised by the CDF that it was wrong. This guided Reith’s approach throughout. In the discussion between Reith and Houston, it was agreed that the issue would be raised between Houston and Barrie on the latter’s return to Australia within a few days — the weekend of the election.

  Reith did not tell me of Angus Houston’s telephone call before the election. I did not know of it until shortly before Houston was to give evidence before Senate Estimates in February 2002. He had rung Max Moore-Wilton to warn him of what he was about to say and Moore-Wilton had relayed this information to me.

  The initial reaction of Admiral Barrie, in his testimony to Senate Estimates, was to maintain his original position that children had been thrown overboard.

  A short time later, presumably after much internal discussion within Defence, Barrie shifted his position and also acknowledged that the original advice to ministers had been wrong. On 27 February 2002, at a news conference Admiral Barrie said, ‘After speaking at considerable length on Sunday with Commander Banks, the commanding officer of HMAS Adelaide, I have now reached the conclusion that there is no evidence to support the claim that children were thrown overboard.’4

  Many of the Government’s critics speculated that Angus Houston had done his career prospects great damage with what proved to be embarrassing evidence for the Government before the Senate inquiry. I personally assured him, shortly afterwards, that this would not be the case. My Government appointed Angus Houston as Chief of the Defence Force with effect from 4 July 2005, following the retirement of General Peter Cosgrove.

  Evidence before the Senate inquiry indicated that multiple doubts had arisen quite early inside Defence about the original story, and that within a short time senior officers in the uniform branch believed the story to be wrong. Yet at no stage did this crystallise into countermanding advice to the minister that children had not been thrown overboard until Angus Houston’s call to Reith on 7 November 2001. Given that the statements by Ruddock, Reith and me early in October were based on advice from the People Smuggling Taskforce, and that the CDF maintained his original position until late in February 2002, Reith’s determination not to change his position whilst the CDF held to his, although heavily criticised as politically convenient, was quite defensible.

  The Secretary of the Defence Department, Allan Hawke, appeared to play a particularly passive role, especially as the CDF’s overwhelming preoccupation then was Australia’s military deployment in Afghanistan. It is easy to sympathise with Barrie’s view that at the time children overboard was small beer. In Paul Kelly’s book The March of Patriots, Hawke acknowledges that he was told of the mistake with the photographs on 11 October, but did not raise it with Reith.

  In the course of the Senate inquiry, evidence revealed poor lines of communication, not only within sections of the Defence bureaucracy, but also and crucially, between Defence public relations and the minister’s office. The erroneous belief that the photographs published on 11 October were of children having been thrown overboard put the People Smuggling Taskforce off the scent of further investigation, at precisely the time when such further investigation would have established that the original advice was wrong. Jane Halton, head of the People Smuggling Taskforce, now Secretary of the Health Department, gave evidence to this effect.

  Between 10 October and 7 November 2001, I gave no thought to the children-overboard issue. I did not mention it in any speech or interview. When it was revived by the Australian story on 7 November, my total preoccupation was to avoid any suggestion of a cover-up by ensuring that the navy video was released, and whilst repeating the basis of my first comments in early October 2001, I took care to go no further. It was three days before the election. I had not treated children overboard as a major campaign issue, and it was unrealistic that I should have then ordered an inquiry into the affair.

  Almost three years later, and on the eve of the 2004 election, Scrafton, by then employed by the Victorian Labor Government, went public with an allegation that during his telephone discussions with me on the night of 7 November he had advised that the original claims were wrong and that children had not been thrown overboard.

  I strongly disputed this. The opposition majority in the Senate reconvened an inquiry in the hope of embarrassing me and the Government. Scrafton’s evidence was undermined when he claimed to have had three conversations with me that evening. The Lodge telephone records were produced, which showed only two calls: one had been at 8.41 pm, lasting 9.36 minutes, and the other at 10.12 pm, lasting just 51 seconds. This was consistent with my recollection.

  By February 2002, after it had been established that the advice to ministers that children had been thrown overboard was erroneous, the original claim, based on that erroneous advice, had been elevated — in the view of many — to being the major reason why the Coalition had won the 2001 election. In the eyes of electoral conspiracy theorists such as Labor’s John Faulkner, I had stolen the election through the making of the original allegations.

  That was palpably absurd. The children overboard allegations played a minor role in the election campaign. They were dwarfed by the broader and defining issue of border protection. I doubt that the children overboard allegations would have shifted a single vote.

  Those who voted for the Coalition due to its strong and successful border protection policies did so because we had stopped the boats coming — not because of the children overboard allegations.

  Judging by the published opinion polls, the additional surge for the Liberal and National parties because of their border protection policy came hard on the heels of the Tampa having been turned back. That was the decisive action which shifted community perceptions.

  The poll lift for the Government over border protection had begun to subside slightly by the time the children-overboard saga commenced. The Tampa was turned back on 29 August, but the issue did not arise until the end of the first week in October. According to Newspoll, the Coaliti
on’s peak lead, in the run-up to the election, was immediately before children overboard emerged. This contests the claims of those who assert that the incident was politically significant.

  Giving the children-overboard issue prime status as the explanation for Labor’s defeat, retrospectively of course, satisfied the hunger of Labor Party apparatchiks to have a plausible ‘we wuz robbed’ excuse to explain away the ALP’s third successive election defeat.

  33

  THE BALI ATTACK

  Any lingering thought that Australia was different, and the lucky country could escape the foul embrace of terrorism, was shattered on Saturday evening, 12 October 2002, when 88 Australians died and scores more were horribly burned and injured as two bombs planted by terrorists exploded in and adjacent to Paddy’s Bar and the Sari Club, at Kuta Beach, Bali. That night the last vestiges of Australian innocence were blown away. It was the largest loss of Australian lives sustained abroad in a single peacetime incident. Inspired by Jema’ah Islamiya (JI), an Indonesian affiliate of al Qaeda, the attack was a wanton act of Islamic extremism designed to kill Westerners, especially but not only Australians.

  The Bali attack was a reminder that the war against terrorism had to go on in an uncompromising and unconditional fashion. Any other course of action would be folly. Retreat would not purchase immunity from attack. That had been the experience of the past year; it had been the experience of mankind through history. It is impossible to escape the reach of terrorism by imagining that if you roll yourself into a little ball you will not be noticed, because terrorism is not dispensed according to some hierarchy of disdain; it is dispensed in an indiscriminate, evil, hateful fashion.