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Keywords: Basarnas

  • AUSTRALIA

    Mishandling Indonesia

    • Tony Kevin
    • 13 November 2013
    6 Comments

    Labor has made a political meal of last week's mishandled asylum seeker rescue. But neither Bill Shorten nor Richard Marles has shown any sympathy for the asylum seekers themselves. Meanwhile the Coalition's stubbornness has set back relations with Indonesia, has it pressed ahead with its turn-back policy to the point where Indonesia had to say very publicly 'We will not tolerate this any longer.'

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Abbott nails Jakarta

    • Tony Kevin
    • 02 October 2013
    15 Comments

    Tony Abbott did handsomely in Jakarta. He was able convincingly to pitch the message that the bilateral relationship is much bigger and more important than the people smuggling issue, which he implicitly admitted had been mishandled by Australia. The national interest will be well served by the PM's deft handling of a difficult situation. 

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Notes from a boat tragedy inquest

    • Tony Kevin
    • 02 July 2013
    4 Comments

    The WA Coroner's inquest into the sinking of SIEV 358 is shaping up to be the most thorough public examination ever of Australian rescue-at-sea protocols and practice in respect of assisting people on Suspected Irregular Entry Vessels. The Counsel Assisting the Coroner suggested that Australian Maritime Safety Authority's major focus for the first 11 hours of the incident had been to transfer the operation to Indonesia.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Australia and Indonesia's deadly games of pass-the-parcel

    • Tony Kevin
    • 24 June 2013
    15 Comments

    The sinking of the asylum seeker vessel SIEV 358 encapsulates key questions as to why these tragedies too often happen at interfaces between Australia's border protection system and maritime search and rescue system, and the under-resourced Indonesian maritime search and rescue system. Hopefully next week's public inquest by the WA Coroner comes up with some answers.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    More asylum seeker deaths, more unanswered questions

    • Tony Kevin
    • 11 June 2013
    34 Comments

    The fact that the boat was seen as stationary on Wednesday should have alerted Border Protection Command to the risk of likely engine failure. Had they reacted more quickly, the 55 or 60 drowned people may have been rescued. Instead, their boat drifted helplessly westwards, away from Christmas Island, and at some stage capsized and began to sink.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Did Australian authorities do enough to try to save asylum seeker lives?

    • Tony Kevin
    • 16 April 2013
    8 Comments

    We now have another distressing and perplexing case of possible Australian failure properly to use intelligence information to save lives. If the unnamed agency that briefed AMSA did have the relevant coordinates, and yet did not pass them to AMSA to pass to BASARNAS, it could be complicit in the deaths of up to 58 people last week.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Human lives Australia could have saved

    • Tony Kevin
    • 05 September 2012
    14 Comments

    Australian maritime safety and border protection authorities could have saved the lives of most of the people on the boat that made two distress calls by telephone to the Australian Maritime Safety Authority early last Wednesday. Instead they passed the responsibility to Indonesia, which has none of the sophisticated resources and technologies that Australia uses - when it wants to - to locate and intercept incoming unauthorised boats.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Australia's ad hoc refugee rescue costs many lives

    • Tony Kevin
    • 09 July 2012
    21 Comments

    When distress calls come from asylum seeker boats, Australia's current policy is to rescue by choice. Many of the calls come from the Indonesian search and rescue region. To its credit, Australia usually responds to these calls. But not always. Sometimes we pass them to the less well equipped Indonesian search and rescue authority BASARNAS and wait to see what happens.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Questions surround latest asylum seeker boat disaster

    • Tony Kevin
    • 19 December 2011
    20 Comments

    The latest tragedy comes ten years after SIEV X and a year after the Christmas Island shipwreck. It will be exploited by both Gillard and Abbott to further their border protection policies. Questions surround the disaster that the Australian Government would prefer not be asked.

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