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Grubby blame games smear brave rescuers
Miranda Devine From: The Sunday Telegraph December 19, 2010 12:00AM
CHRISTMAS Island harbourmaster Dave Robertson has a better idea than most who the heroes were of the asylum-seeker boat tragedy.
"What the navy and Customs did to save that many people in those conditions is extraordinary. [They] are heroes," he said.
With cyclonic five-metre high waves and dangerous debris in the water from the broken-up wooden fishing vessel, it was extraordinarily difficult to navigate inflatable rescue boats close to the rocky shore and pluck drowning people to safety.
But our naval and customs personnel managed to save 41 asylum seekers, including a little orphaned boy and a woman whose husband and seven-year-old son had perished.
Despite these efforts, fanatical refugee advocates and fellow political opportunists, who have probably caused more harm than good in the whole debate, were busy offloading blame from themselves and the Government which they have so successfully influenced.
Their insinuation was that some shadowy force in the navy, Customs or Border Protection Command had been "tracking" the boat, officially known as SIEV 221, on its journey, and had deliberately left it to founder.
Their accusations aren't as blatant as they were when the Howard government was in charge, but the dog-whistle was clear.
Former diplomat and SIEV X crusader Tony Kevin didn't blame the navy outright for the deaths, as he has done before, but he was suddenly an expert on radar.
"The intelligence on what boats are coming comes mostly from the JORN [radar] system which covers all the waters between Australia and Indonesia," he told ABC radio the day of the tragedy. "It's a very well tried procedure. Everybody involved knows exactly what to do."
He left open the question of how such super-duper technology managed to miss SIEV221 - but his implication was clear.
The next day, when actual radar experts pointed out that a wooden vessel in cyclonic weather in the pre-dawn darkness is hellishly difficult to detect, Kevin was reduced to saying, well, the boat had "metal motors and they can be tracked by [radar]".
The calumny piled upon the Royal Australian Navy is despicable. It was the same smear behind the explosion of another boat off Ashmore Reef last year, in which five people died.
Again, naval personnel risked their lives to rescue the survivors. Yet they were scapegoated in the coronial inquest, which focused on their supposed blunders and the accusation they had saved their colleagues first.
It's impossible to understand the real motives of those spreading wild conspiracy theories about a "delayed" rescue last week but they only add to the distress of asylum seekers who are primed to believe the worst about authority anyway, because of their life experiences.
Now detainees on Christmas Island have been protesting and are reportedly angry because they have been led to believe the RAN turned a blind eye to the distress of SIEV 221. Misplaced distrust isn't a good start for people looking to become citizens.
The fact is, nine boats in the past three years have managed to slip through to our offshore islands without being spotted, so what happened last week was not so surprising.
The Customs vessel ACV Triton was already loaded up with 108 asylum seekers whose boats had been intercepted earlier in the week, but reportedly had not been able to dock at Flying Fish Cove because of the stormy weather. Along with HMAS Pirie, it was sheltering on the other side of the island, several kilometres from the stricken vessel.
After the distress signals started coming though from 6am on Wednesday, both vessels made their way around the island and dispatched tenders, which were pulling out survivors by 7am.
Other boats have sunk en route to Australia but this time the horror was filmed close-up, the howls of fear and pain were audible, the babies and children were seen one minute, gone the next. Australians won't soon forget the feeling of helplessness.
But the blame doesn't belong to the navy. SIEV221 would never have set sail if not for the Rudd government's needless meddling with Howard-era policies which had worked effectively since late 2001 to stop the boats, deprive people-smugglers of business and prevent such loss of life. The tragedy was inevitable the moment those policies were dismantled.
So determined were the Howard-haters to demonise their nemesis they became blind to the humanitarian benefits of his difficult decisions.
Julia Gillard can no longer hold two mutually contradictory policies on boat people - tough talk and soft policies which lure asylum seekers to their deaths. Either she removes what the Indonesians call "the sugar" from the table, adopting the plan proposed by the Opposition before the last election. Or she does what
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