Disturbing evidence is emerging of moral confusion and a propensity to hide embarrassing facts, within Australia's Border Protection Command system, on its obligations to protect lives of people on suspected illegal entry vessels (SIEVs) passing through Australia's northern maritime surveillance areas.
A powerful investigative report by Natalie O'Brien led the Sydney Sun-Herald's 'Extra' lift-out section on Sunday (a shorter version of the article is online in The Age). O'Brien set out a convincing case, assembled from many grieving relatives in Australia, that a boat which left Indonesia on 13 November 2010 with 97 passengers on board, never reached Christmas Island.
None of the passengers has been located, despite exhaustive enquiries in all relevant refugee care and detention agencies in both countries. We must assume the boat was lost at sea with no survivors.
The Minister for Home Affairs Brendan O'Connor advised George Newhouse, a lawyer representing the families in Australia, that:
Neither Border Protection Command nor the Australian Maritime Safety Authority have any information relating to a venture that matches the details of your correspondence.
The Minister's office did not offer to make any further enquiries.
At the same time, Border Protection Command (a joint interagency command comprising ADF, AFP and Customs elements) faces two public enquiries — a coroner's inquest in Perth and a Parliamentary Joint Select Committee enquiry in Canberra — into the shipwreck of SIEV 221 at Christmas Island on 14 December 2010, drowning about 50 people.
I wrote an initial comment in Eureka Street on 19 December 2010 and have made submissions to both enquiries. My concerns on this complex issue require a bit of reading and thought. In sum, I believe the following propositions to be true.
Many SIEV boats — small wooden ocean fishing boats, with motors and essential navigational aids — come to Australia from Indonesia. Relatives in Australia usually know from phone calls when boats are on the way.
Most arrive safely under their own steam, usually in the vicinity of Christmas Island or Ashmore Reef, one to three days' motoring from Indonesian departure points. These are short, normally safe crossings unless the boats are overloaded, defective or encounter exceptionally bad weather. Over 220 such boats have officially been listed as arriving since 2001.
BPC prefers, for reasons of safety, law and public image, to intercept SIEV boats at sea in a zone 12–24 miles offshore. A public impression is nurtured that SIEV boats are detected at sea by BPC vessels or aircraft, visually or using shipboard or airborne radar, and that these small wooden boats can sometimes be hard to find in the vast seas to our north, especially in bad weather.
Despite a 99-plus per cent safe SIEV arrival record, it suits Government, Opposition and some refugee activists to foster a public myth that these crossings are highly dangerous, when all known facts indicate they are normally quite safe and successful.
Boats are well enough equipped and crewed for these voyages, and BPC has access to reliable information on where they are heading. Meeting them on arrival is a routine professional process of interpreting what BPC calls 'cueing data and intelligence', and positioning BPC assets accordingly.
The Jindalee Operational Radar Network (JORN), a land-based system for radar surveillance of 9 million square km of Australia's northern maritime approaches, is designed to detect every kind of aircraft or vessel passing through this vast region. The system undergoes constant improvement. It was modified some 12 years ago to improve its detection capability for people smuggling boats.
JORN, as described by senior RAAF commanders, is the 'tripwire' in Australia's northern surveillance system. There is nowhere to hide from the Jindalee system, because its radar 'sees' a boat from above, bouncing signals off the ionosphere. One may safely surmise that most detections of incoming SIEV boats over the past 12 years were triggered by initial JORN-based data traces.
The Government and BPC find it politically expedient to try to hide the existence of JORN. To admit JORN's major role in detection and interception of SIEVs would bring into question BPC's claims that it has no radar information on SIEV 221 during its two-day voyage in December 2010 from Indonesia to Christmas Island, or on the boat that left Indonesia on 14 November 2010 whose passengers have never been heard from since.
I do not believe JORN was switched off, or that its technology could have failed to detect these boats. But, in the long chains of data-interpretation and decision-making within the organisationally complex border protection system, there is much scope for human error or misjudgement.
While the BPC system continues to obfuscate and to avoid giving straight answers at every level of public response, suspicion grows that something quite unpleasant is being hidden from us in respect of the loss of these two boats. I see no national security reason for this.
The Australian Customs and Border Protection Service submission (no 8) to the parliamentary inquiry, apparently submitted on behalf of BPC, does not mention JORN at all (though JORN appears once as a glossary entry, suggesting it may be addressed in a confidential attachment), and the tone of the submission is decidedly defensive.
I fear that there may be people within BPC whose disposition is to 'rescue by choice' — to assist SIEV boats which have signalled their distress at sea, but to look away in cases where there are doubts as to whether boats entered the surveillance zone or may have turned back to Indonesia.
In my book on the SIEV X, I asked how hard BPC tries to find and help SIEV boats in possible distress that it believes are unlikely to arrive at their Australian destinations. It is time for parliamentarians who are serious about protecting human life at sea to ask the same question.
Tony Kevin is an author and former ambassador to Cambodia and Poland whose 2004 book A Certain Maritime Incident sparket debates about Australia's moral responsibilities on the high seas.