10th Anniversary Siev X Memorial Service

Good Evening.

I acknowledge the traditional owners of the land, the Nunnawal people and pay my respects to their elders past and present. Consistent with our commitment to reconciliation, I am also pleased to say that the process to achieve constitutional recognition of Australia’s indigenous people is well under way. Thank you for being here.

Thank you for remembering the tragedy of the sinking of the SIEV X with its shocking loss of 353 lives, including 142 women and 146 children.

Thank You for caring about those who died and those 41 adults and 3 children who survived but who have had to live since with the personal trauma and grief, and,

Thank you for not letting the failure to provide the full story of what happened just slip from public consciousness into the past and disappear.

Thank you to all of you who helped to see the wonderful permanent memorial on the shores of Lake Burley Griffin, become a reality. The contribution of schools from all over Australia demonstrates what we all know and that is that the young have an almost unbounded capacity for empathy, generosity and kindness if the leadership they are offered encourages and nurtures it.

To honour those who lost their lives in the SIEV X, and to reassure ourselves of the integrity of the democratic processes of our nation, we must offer that leadership in every field in which we have influence.

The next generation of leaders in Australia must understand we are one global community who share a common humanity and a home increasingly threatened, not only by war, but also by global warming and resource exploitation.

According to a UK report, Migration and Environmental Change released overnight , by 2050, millions more will be refugees forced to flee their homes because of floods, droughts, storms and heatwaves.

Given the consequences of war and the increasingly extreme climate related weather events, it is not an option to leave Australia in an ongoing political race to the bottom when it comes to the treatment of people seeking asylum in our country. It is wrong to argue against on shore processing of asylum seekers and for inhumane responses like the Malaysia solution, ignoring international law under the guise of concern for people who may lose their lives at sea. A genuine concern for loss of life at sea would have seen a judicial inquiry into the sinking of the SIEV X well before now.

With the move to onshore processing of asylum seekers, we must stand up boldly and declare our commitment to global justice and responsibility, our commitment to the United Nations Human Rights Convention and our determination to see every person who arrives seeking asylum, treated with fairness and respect.

The opportunity now exists to open a new page in Australia’s response to asylum seekers. We can restore our national pride by reaffirming our respect for and adherence to international law and our willingness to be responsible and generous global citizens.

But there will not be a real change of heart in political circles until we face up to the black episode in our history that is the sinking of the SIEV X.

Prime Minister Gillard said earlier this evening whilst welcoming Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth to Australia that we are a nation that tells the truth about our past.

Well, in the case of the Siev X, this is not so, Prime Minister.

For as Winston Churchill said, “Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it” and repeat it we have.

Since the Siev X, there have been many more boats arrive and the Australian authorities have saved the overwhelming majority but nevertheless three more have sunk, two without trace and one more, the SIEV 221 recently off Christmas Island. It is estimated that 105 Hazara Afghans were on one, 97 Iraqi and Iranians on another, and we know that 50 more drowned at Christmas Island.

If Australian agencies have tracked, found and rescued all the rest, what failing in the sytem of intelligence gathering and operations allowed these three ships to be lost? We went to war in Iraq and Afghanistan, yet we refuse asylum to those who have fled persecution from those same regimes.

Ten years on we still have not had a judicial inquiry into all the circumstances surrounding the events leading up to the SIEV X leaving Indonesia and everything thereafter. Only last week both the Coalition and the Labor parties voted down a motion to establish a judicial inquiry in to the Siev X tragedy…even though it was Labor policy until 2004. Why was it quietly abandoned? We don’t know. It is not an excuse to say that Labor cleared the decks of all policies in 2004 because many were reinstated. Why was the Inquiry into SIEV X not reinstated?

The outstanding questions leading up to the departure of the SIEV X remain:

Why were the SIEV X passengers transported in buses with motor cycle escorts across Indonesia and forced by police with guns onto the boat?

The Select Committee on a Certain Maritime Incident recommended that a full and independent inquiry into the disruption activity that occurred prior to the departure from Indonesia of refugee vessels be undertaken, with particular attention to the activity that Australia initiated or was instrumental in setting in motion through both its partners in the Indoneisna government and in its own network of informants.

What “disruption” activities related to the SIEV X?

Australians still do not know what the People Smuggling Intelligence Analysis team knows and what it chooses not to pass onto Operational Border Protection command so as to avoid Freedom of Information requests or questions from officials in the Senate Estimates or Inquiry process. As Tony Kevin has written recently, the need to know basis and tiered layers of analysis and responsibility needs to be unpicked.

We need to know what intelligence services knew about the SIEV X before it left Indonesia and who they told.

Further Serious questions remain about the circumstances surrounding the sinking and the plight of people in the water.

Could Australian agencies have found and rescued the vessel before it sank? Was it fitted with a tracking device and was its whereabouts known by the Shoal bay tracking station?

Could Australian agencies have rescued passengers and crew of the SIEV X from the water?

Was the HMAS Arunta told to stand off rather than sail for the scene of the sinking?

Survivors reported military ships arriving at the scene as people were in the water, shining search lights on the sea and then sailing away…..which ships were they and how did they locate the shipwreck?

Was the fact that no specific search and rescue operation was mounted for SIEV X evidence either of intelligence failure or of negligence in relation to the welfare of the vessels passengers and crew?

We still don’t know.

Apart from a judicial inquiry into the Siev X to set the record straight and to honour those who died, now is the opportunity to step up as a nation and develop a genuinely regional protection framework to address refugees and asylum seekers.

We need to:

• Increase Australia’s refugee and humanitarian intake to between 20 - 25 000 a year (up from 13,750)
• Provide support to Indonesia and Malaysia and the UNHCR in these countries for faster processing and re-settling of asylum seekers - Currently only 2 UNHCR personnel in Indonesia assessing asylum seeker claims (from Amnesty)
• Provide Australian officials in transit countries like Indonesia to assess claims so Australia accepts asylum seekers directly from those countries
• Actively work with countries within our immediate region to sign onto the Refugee Convention (Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand are not signatories)
• Actively encourage all countries to implement anti-people smuggling laws, that punish the people smugglers, not the asylum seekers.

Ten years on, it is sometimes disheartening to see such slow progress towards justice and a full account of the SIEV X tragedy but in times such as these, I always keep in my mind the words of E F Schumacher, author of Small is Beautiful:

"We must do what we conceive to be the right thing and not bother our heads or burden our souls with whether or not we will be successful because if we don’t do the right thing, we will be doing the wrong thing, we will be part of the disease and not part of the cure."

Thank you for all you do to address the disease, to heal the scars and to work for hope and well being for all.