Mooney, Gavin --- "Book Review: A Certain Maritime Incident; the Sinking of SIEV X" [2004] MarStudies 33; (2004) 139 Maritime Studies 26

• BOOK REVIEW
• A Certain Maritime Incident; the Sinking of SIEV X, Tony Kevin, Scribe Publications, Melbourne, 2004. ISBN 1 920769 21 8

BOOK REVIEW

A Certain Maritime Incident; the Sinking of SIEV X, Tony Kevin, Scribe Publications, Melbourne, 2004. ISBN 1 920769 21 8

We have just been through an election campaign which was ‘kick started” by John Howard’s appeal to the voters on trust. That seemed odd at the time and even odder in the light of reading this exposé of the SIEV-X affair. Distrust of the Howard government is the emotion that this reader experienced when reading Kevin’s account of the government’s dealings with the Senate Inquiry into SIEV X.

In the wake of this murky affair, our former levels of trust in our democratic institutions emerge as rather dented. Tony Kevin has relayed honestly and frankly his investigation into the sinking of SIEV X. I am confident we can trust him!

SIEV X was the – now infamous – boat that set sail from Indonesia in October 2001 heading for Australia with 421 people seeking asylum in a better country and with a will to build a new life in Australia. The grossly overloaded 19 metre boat sailed for 33 hours and about 60 nautical miles into the Indian Ocean. It then sank in international waters with the loss of 353 lives. The sinking occurred well within the area of the military-protection and surveillance zone which was then being patrolled intensively by Australia’s Operation Relex.

This is a deeply worrying book. It is a story of enormous human tragedy which needs to be recognised as such and independently of any assessment of blame. For the memory of the victims and their families and for those 45 who survived, this book had to be written. It is a book however which had to be written for yet wider reasons as it is for all Australians who seek to be able to believe in the integrity of our democratic institutions and of our public service.

From start to finish this book is about government obfuscation and seeming cover-up. While the nature of the evidence presented by Kevin has to be subject to words like ‘obfuscation’ rather than ‘lying’ and ‘seeming’ rather than ‘proven’, what is absolutely clear are the efforts by government – our government – the public service and the defence forces – again ours – to hide various aspects of the truth or at least to try to prevent them coming out. What is not certain is how far down the chain of command the deceit and obfuscation went – hopefully for the reputation of our Defence Force not far!

Whether the Australian government was culpable in any direct sense for the SIEV X deaths we may never know for sure. What is very clear not only from Kevin’s book but more generally from the recent history of the Australian government’s handling of asylum seekers, for example locking them up in detention centres in high security imprisonment environments, is the callous indifference of our government to such people. The book also has to be seen against a background of what now looks like lying by that same government with respect to WMDs in Iraq and later to the Mike Scrafton revelations about the children overboard affair.

Apart from Kevin himself, perhaps Margo Kingston, The Canberra Times, maybe Senators Bartlett, Collins, Cook and Faulkner from the Senate Inquiry, there are few heroes in this book and then mostly anonymous. It is a tale of sordid sorties into subterfuge for political gain. And in the end having turned the Tampa and the 2001 election around and having failed to do more – perhaps anything – to protect the lives of the 421 on SIEV X and having falsely accused innocent people of what would have been a dastardly act of throwing their children overboard, did the government apologise for any of their neglect or false accusations? No, as with the Stolen Generation, saying sorry in the harsh climate that today passes for Australian politics is seemingly not an option.

Can we believe Kevin? It is for the reader to judge. I believe him in his careful, painstaking reconstruction of events. It must have been a quite extraordinarily difficult task to bring together this ‘evidence’, much of which by Kevin’s own account is not such that it would have stood up in a court of law. Any suggestions however that Kevin is a man obsessed as the government have been keen to brand him are clearly false. For example, government senators in the minority report from the Senate stated: ‘We cannot help but wonder… whether the conspiracy theories so sedulously fostered by other senators [on the Inquiry]… may have nurtured the febrile climate of suspicion in which Mr Kevin’s fanciful allegations were able to establish a foothold of credibility.’ They are not fanciful; it is an enormous foothold.

The style is fascinating. Measured and dispassionate it certainly is. Yet just below the surface one can detect the seething passion of a man who feels betrayed not for himself but for the values that he has sought to uphold in Australian public life for 30 years and which he now clearly and justifiably sees as being threatened.

Tony Kevin is a gentle caring man who spent three decades in Australian public service, including time in the Prime Minister’s Department and as Australia’s ambassador to Poland and Cambodia. He does not come over in his book or in person as a man obsessed but as one who cares about the maintenance of such values as integrity, trust, openness and decency in Australian public life. It is difficult to associate him or his writings with ‘fanciful allegations’. Indeed I would challenge anyone to read this book and be able to sustain that view. The account is clearly not fanciful. It is painstakingly detailed, eschewing emotion when that sentiment would seem to be uppermost in the reader’s mind. It is close to masterful in providing a justification for Kevin’s call for a judicial inquiry.

What is very clear is that there was deceit and obfuscation not only on the part of the government but also members of the defence forces and, perhaps most damaging of all to the social fabric of Australia, of senior public servants. ‘Evidence’ was given to the Senate Inquiry by senior public servants in such a way that it would give Don Watson materials for most of another book on political speak. Some of this is described by Kevin as having been presented in a way that seemingly the individuals concerned had ‘perfected the art of giving testimony that was “not quite a lie”‘.

Mick Keelty, the APF Commissioner, was quite extraordinarily honest about his evidence to the inquiry: ‘I am aware that my inability to answer those questions goes to the very heart of my credibility as a witness as well as that of my organisation in your eyes and potentially those of the public’. But he had an excuse. He went on: ‘on the advice provided to me, I simply cannot go further.’ And the Senate Inquiry did not have the powers to make him or other witnesses go further or indeed in some instances to appear.

The writer’s puzzled indignation at the failure of so many actors on the governance stage not to recognise their own roles in undermining some of the values of Australian public life is there on every page. It is painful for the reader to sense the despondency in Kevin as he comes to acknowledge what for him, a career public servant, must have seemed the unthinkable: that there exists a moral corruption in our system of government and not just in specific individuals. This moral corruption is in turn a source of pain for the reader as an Australian citizen – the recognition of this disease in the body politic.

The awful truth will eventually out and my guess is that a large proportion of Kevin’s ‘fanciful’ allegations will be proved correct. Whatever, the truth will out. There are too many people with guilty consciences to stay quiet for ever. Career public servants will eventually buckle to their consciences and spill the beans.

What matters is the need for the recognition that some of the fundamentals of Australian democracy may be at risk unless we have a radical change in the body politic.

This book is only secondarily about asylum seekers. Primarily it is about government obfuscation and cover up. Perhaps we have reached a point where we have such a lack of faith in government that that idea is no longer disturbing. Yet it ought to be. Perhaps even more so, we need to be concerned when the public service is so pusillanimous, so politicised and so cowed as it was in and by this incident.

We would traditionally expect senior public servants to give free and frank advice to government. Apart from the heart-rending story of SIEV X as such, Kevin’s book is a very detailed and damning indictment of the state of our public service – and, to some extent as well, our defence forces.

As for any reader, for me the question that remains from this book is this. If the government were right to argue that this was no more and no less than a tragic accident, why was the obfuscation, deceit and tortuous use of language – all of which are very clearly documented in the book – necessary? A judicial inquiry could prove the government right. I do not believe it would but that is not the point. The way to clear the government’s name, and that is what is at stake, is to have that inquiry.

The election was claimed to be largely about the economy, interest rates and the like. It ought also to have been about trust and more generally public values if the ALP had wanted to make it so.

There is more to Australian life than the greed that drove voters in October. Kevin’s book needs to be read by all Australians who seek to be part of a decent society and who want to place their trust in good governance. That decency and trust can only be achieved through more openness and transparency in public life and a return to the values of honest, open government that we have come to acknowledge in the past as being based on ‘Aussie values’.

In the wake of 9/11, we can wonder where Australia is heading and perhaps despair, especially now that the government has a majority also in the Senate and the avenue of Senate Committees to hold them in some sort of check will not be used to any real purpose. But despair is no way forward. Where hope lies is in the examples set by the Tony Kevins of this country. And they are many, the plethora of decent Aussies who, less famously perhaps, stand up for a better society. It is in these decent ‘Aussies’ that we need to start in rebuilding this as a caring open society. It is there that hope lies.

Gavin Mooney

Professor of Health Economics, Curtin University

and Co-Convenor of the WA Social Justice Network,

[e-mail], phone [phone]