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Kate Wilson. 'Review of David Marr and Marian Wilk At a time when governments are blaming 'faulty intelligence' for their own mischief, David Marr and Marian Wilkinson's Dark Victory which deals with one group of 'boat people' seeking asylum in Australia is worth a close read. More than an election post-mortem; more than a scandal-tinged examination of the Tampa episode, the children overboard affair, and the 'Pacific Solution', Dark Victory exposes an election masterplan by the Prime Minster, John Howard, in which the media, the judiciary, the military, asylum seekers, the federal Opposition and, finally, the Australian electorate, were duped. The story involves a sleight-of hand campaign of smoke-and-mirror politics that was so manipulatedly masterful that the media and Opposition could do little at the time to unscramble it. Trawling through the intricate and often contradictory accounts of the victims and players involved, Marr and Wilkinson undoubtedly faced similar problems. Perhaps the only way to unravel it was to structure Dark Victory as a chronological narrative from many viewpoints. But although the book is heavy on detail and tangential events, it is nonetheless a gripping page-turner. This is partly due to Marr and Wilkinson's humanisation of 'illegals' and 'queue-jumpers'; the people that the Coalition government successfully de-humanised. During the 2001 election campaign, Peter Reith's Department had expressly forbidden the military from releasing any 'personalising or humanising' images of the asylum seekers. Although many readers will be familiar with the events described, they are nonetheless shocking in a personalised re-telling. We first hear about the asylum seekers' motivation to risk their lives by boarding the over-crowded Palapa. We then learn of the conditions on board their rescue vessel, the Norwegian Tampa:
So begins the first of many horror stories of suffering and neglect, abuse, dehydration and hunger, food poisoning, death, misinformation and disregard for human rights and dignity – all the result of direct orders from the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, unprecedented and often illegal. We are confronted with the image of a foetus with its umbilical chord still attached to its dead mother; of military personnel filming survivors collapsing, or throwing up, or begging to be told why they are being held; of families with a promised new life watching their loved ones drown or remain unconscious without medical assistance; of survivors crammed for weeks into the Manoora's relentlessly noisy tank deck, without daylight or clean air, while the Prime Minster implied to the media, the UN Secretary General, and the Federal Court, that they were accommodated upstairs in the comfort of troops' quarters. 'Australian troops often spend weeks on that vessel,' he said. 'Conditions on the Manoora are as comfortable as they can be, given that it is a large troop ship.' As Marr and Wilkinson put it: 'Howard is a master of the political art of deceiving without lying.' Concurrently, we learn of public servants exploited, of a military gagged, and of how Tampa Captain, Arne Rinnan, the only hero in this epic, stood his ground on at least three occasions despite (illegal) threats of imprisonment by Canberra . We learn how the 'children overboard' campaign was cooked up; how Alexander Downer unsuccessfully attempted to bully the Norwegian government and the Tampa's shipping line; and of how Canberra unlawfully used intelligence to eavesdrop on lawyers representing the Tampa and the asylum seekers. We learn how Howard personally drafted the Border Protection Bill to thwart a court challenge to his Tampa tactics, and to outmanoeuvre an impotent Kim Beazley; and how his government successfully managed the inevitable fallout. The usual suspects – Howard, Ruddock, Reith, and Downer – as well as public servants Max Moore-Wilton and Jane Halton, are all implicated in engineering the 'border protection' issue to whip up a storm of fear among the Australian public. So electorally successful was Howard's spin of these events into issues of Australia's 'sovereignty', 'security' and 'territorial integrity', that the Liberals used these mantras as their election campaign, and Labor lamely tagged along. 'We decide who comes to this country, and the circumstances in which they come,' said a clenched-fisted Howard, and Australians collectively voted 'hear, hear'. The events in Dark Victory serve as an exemplar of what has come to be known as 'dog-whistle politics', in which a campaign message is, as Laurie Oakes puts it, 'pitched so high that dogs hear it but humans do not . . . a message to a particular group of voters that other voters do not hear'. Oakes is of course referring to the One Nation vote that Howard was so keen to reclaim. More importantly, the book shows how the many 'ordinary' Australians who voted for Howard were duped into confusing asylum seekers with terrorists and interpreting the 'boat people' issue as one of alien invasion and national sovereignty. The government's subtle but meticulously calculated wedge politics were helped along by the many Howard-handmaids in Murdoch media. Those who thought government-controlled media was the preserve of China or North Korea might consider Howard's relationship with the Courier-Mail's political editor Dennis Atkins, who colluded with Howard in linking boat people with terrorists: On Howard's plane late on the night of November 6, Adkins had his laptop open to show his press colleagues how the Courier-Mail would be splashing his [terrorist] scoop the next morning. Howard appeared in the aisle and showed him, too. 'Good,' said the Prime Minister. 'Excellent.' This was the campaign that gave Beazley and the ALP no room to move. As journalist Peter Mares later observed, critics who attacked Howard for racism misfired, 'because to condemn him as a racist was to accuse his supporters – millions of Australian voters – of being racist too'. Perhaps this is why the hapless Beazley was as culpable as his opponents. When Howard finally introduced the draconian Border Protection Bill that Beazley couldn't support, he'd found the wedge to destroy his opponent. But as the book pointed out, Beazley wouldn't have fared much worse electorally if he'd done the decent thing. The whole affair has cost Labor dear. But the Dark Victory story doesn't end with a successful (or catastrophic) election campaign. Nor does it start with the Tampa affair. A campaign to engineer a fear of invasion began well before the maritime rescue and September 11, and it continues today. Twenty years ago, a poll found that only 10 per cent of Australians supported the idea of asylum for 'boat people'. (Those who arrived by air enjoyed better public support and government treatment.) While no government since has worked towards quelling the community's fears, neither (as Marr has pointed out) has one exploited those fears for electoral gain. Until now. What Dark Victory neglects to examine is why the media accepted at face value the 'children overboard' claim and subsequent 'proof' when it was such an obvious beat-up. Where were the editorials questioning why an Australian government, in the midst of a peacetime election campaign, would announce sensitive information that is the jurisdiction of coastguards and the navy? Or why the military and the media had been gagged? Since when have these unprecedented measures been in the public or national interest? Where were the broadsheet editors of conviction who refused to splash their front pages with such an obvious beat-up? Similarly, now, the federal government has developed an unscrutinised habit of calling press conferences to announce sensitive intelligence information: terrorist raids, alleged links to terrorist organisations, alleged security threats to Australia. When it became clear that the whole 'overboard' affair was a fabrication, Howard and his ministers employed a successful strategy of denial and scapegoating. The military copped the blame, and the public lost interest. (That almost all the Iraqis and Afghans involved have been found to be genuine refugees has gone largely unreported.) The same denial-and-scapegoat strategy has been used with the 'weapons of mass destruction' fabrication and the impression of 'mistakes' on the part of intelligence agencies. This is why Dark Victory is an important read for those who want to challenge Howard's strategies in a meaningful way. His government is light-years ahead of the ALP and other parties in its spin sophistication. If we don't learn from this dark victory, we're doomed to endure more. Kate Wilson edits Overland in Melbourne with Nathan Hollier. |
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