October 25, 2002	Friday	Sha’aban 18,1423

SYDNEY: Australia’s government deliberately lied to the public during last year’s parliamentary election when it said that refugees had thrown their children into the sea to attract the attention of an Australian naval patrol, an inquiry has found.

A report by the Australian senate issued on Wednesday said that Peter Reith, the then defence minister who has since retired from politics, “engaged in the deliberate misleading of the Australian public concerning a matter of intense political interest during an election period”.

Reith was a central figure in the “children overboard” affair, which became one of the key issues of the Australian federal election last year.

He claimed that refugees on a ship off the country’s northwest coast had been throwing their children overboard, in an attempt to force the Australian navy to recover them and allow them to claim asylum.

Photographs of Australian naval officers attempting to save refugees after the sinking of the boat were also released to the media and presented as images of children supposedly thrown into the water.

The former Australian defence chief, Chris Barrie, had taken the blame for the false allegations in February — after the election — saying a mixup in military communications had caused the government to make the false claims.

The allegations were repeated by leading members of the government, including the prime minister, John Howard, though yesterday’s report stopped short of directly implicating him.

It said that the children overboard story had been propagated for political reasons. The way it was handled was to be “a public show of the government’s strength on the border protection issue. The behaviour of the unauthorised arrivals was to be a public justification for the policy.”

The obtaining of further evidence about how much senior political figures knew of the deceit was frustrated by a government ban on the interrogation of ministers and ministerial advisers.

However, the inquiry leader, Senator Peter Cook, said there could be little doubt that knowledge of the deceit went to the top of government.

“If you look at this from a political perspective, it is inconceivable that a defence minister would have done this sort of thing without the knowledge and consent of senior politicians and the prime minister,” he said.

The report was angrily dismissed by present and former members of the government. Reith, who now works as a private business consultant, said it was “not worth the paper it’s written on”.

A minority report, issued by inquiry members from the ruling Liberal party, described the process of investigation as “nothing less than a political show trial” and the report as a “political polemic”.

Howard gave no initial response to the report.

Margaret Piper, secretary of the Refugee Council of Australia, said the damage had already been done by the government’s demonizing of refugees.

“The public believe the government is protecting them from a threat which doesn’t exist, which the government has actually manufactured,” she said.

Sen Cook also reiterated calls for a full judicial inquiry into the sinking of another vessel between Indonesia and Australia less than a fortnight after the children overboard affair, with the loss of 353 passengers.

There have been persistent claims that the boat had been sabotaged by Australian agents, or Indonesians employed by them, in a covert “people-smuggling disruption programme”.

Kevin Enniss, an Indonesian-based informer for the Australian police, claimed he had frequently bribed Indonesians to scuttle people-smuggling ships.

“The form of words that the government has employed in denying this story has been so carefully calibrated that you have to ask what else is there,” said Sen Cook.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.