Dark Victory
David Marr and Marian Wilkinson

“We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come.”

This book can be read in one of two ways. It is either a miserable tale of how the ruthless promotion of hate and fear can be exploited to maintain power, or it is an essential handbook for would-be power brokers seeking to refine their skills in Machiavellian 'wedge politics'.

Dark Victory is the story of the final 10 weeks leading into the 2001 Australian federal election, just 2 months after the terrorist attacks on 9/11. It began with the rescue of 438 boat people from international waters by the Norwegian vessel Tampa and ended in the momentous political turnaround and third term for John Howard.

Politicians lead, but mostly they surreptitiously exploit the public opinion their pollsters reveal. On detecting broad but superficial voter concern over the trickle of boat people arriving on Australia's northern shores from Indonesia, John Howard set out to manipulate and escalate a hitherto trivial issue into a question of national security. That the objects of antipathy were insignificant, faceless 'queue jumpers', made the job of scapegoating all the more effortless.

But it was not just about whipping up frenzy of anxiety. Howard revealed himself as the ultimate political machinator - first, hanging the judiciary out to dry, then riding roughshod over the rule of law, exploiting a politicised and compliant civil service and then out-manoeuvring his political opponents. It was masterful.

Co-author, David Marr, hosts a regular Monday night slot on ABC's "Media Watch"; a 15-minute, meticulously researched critique of the incestuous relationship between politicians and the media and the resultant loss of journalistic integrity: the blurred lines between news and editorial.

Back in late 2001, it was journalists such as Marr who were denied access to the very personal tragedies unfolding on the decks of the Tampa, the boat that sank and the countless other stories of suffering, persecution and desperate journeys. These stories never made it onto the nightly news. The Howard Government made sure of that. Marr and Wilkinson take the reader into the steaming cargo holds of the rotting timber vessels crammed full of people by the smugglers. They also take us into the ops-rooms of the naval vessels dispatched to 'intercept' these SIEVs (Supect Illegal Entry Vessels) and tow them back to Indonesia, seaworthy or not.

In those 10 weeks Howard resolutely insisted that no boat people would ever get to Australia. He repeatedly warned that the nation's northern beaches would be "thick with boat people" if Australia did not exercise its sovereign right to secure its borders. Bankrupt Pacific nations were cajoled in setting up detention centres, squalid vessels sank, 353 human beings - not merely 'asylum seekers' - lost their lives when Australian forces were instructed not to be concerned with locating a ramshackle SIEV they knew was coming to Christmas Island, but had failed to show up. Most of these people were seeking asylum were from Afghanistan and Iraq - home to despicable regimes Australia was soon to start help bombing.

Australia takes an admirable number of refugees. This is not in dispute. Refugee teachers, doctors, nurses and engineers are all gratefully accepted for a ticket to asylum in Australia. Those who are not cherry-picked and make their own way, often having cashed in their life's assets to pay a people-smuggler, are just as desperate, but are simply not welcome.

The rescued boat people on the
decks of the Tampa
The ship had 32 crew who fed,
found blankets and attended
to the sick.

On 26 August 2001 the Tampa became Australia's problem. The Norwegian container ship had been advised by Australian coastal authorities to attend a SOS call from a vessel in distress. One brave sea rescue later, over 400, mainly Afghani, boat people were on the decks of a ship now bound for Australian territory.

Howard reacted to this news with devastating speed. Shipping conventions and international law were disregarded while Howard, senior Ministers and the most on-side bureaucrats sought to micro-manage affairs without the interference of meddling lawyers. From the outset the battle was on with the media. It was this rushed, ill-advised political offensive that inevitably led Ministers to stand by unsubstantiated accusations made on the hop and to make judgement calls contrary to law and convention.

As the Tampa dropped anchored off Christmas Island, the scheming took on an almost surreal form. Under all costs, the machinery of the Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs (DIMA) was to be kept away. The processing of what were now people now generally accepted as seeking refugee status under international law was out of the question for Howard. The SAS troops who secured the Tampa were instructed not to fly an Australian flag on their boarding vessel to ensure that this did not become an Australian rescue situation under maritime convention.

At the same time pro bono lawyers in Melbourne were seeking access to clients on the Tampa to bring the plight the asylum seekers into the remit of the courts. They were denied this access and written correspondence from the boat people to the Australian Government, formally requesting asylum, never left the Tampa.

As the master parliamentarian and politician, Howard brutally exposed weaknesses in the informal system of checks and balances inherent in the 'Westminster model' of democracy. His assault began on the judiciary in a very public vilification campaign to garner popular support to remove judges from all decisions on refugee status. Howard perversely considered the adjudication of the law to be within the gift of the executive branch of government. It even became Howard's campaign slogan; “We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come.” Howard - as the elected leader - spoke for the vox populi. Judges, in their ivory towers did not reflect popular opinion.

Next on Howard's hit list was the civil service. The juggernaut of the high executive blunted the 'frank and fearless' advice from the bureaucrats. They were instructed to carry out illegal activities (such as monitoring communications between the skipper of the Tampa, his bosses and the Norwegian government) or were simply ignored if advice did not fit the objectives of, the now dubbed, Operation Relex.

Following theTampa affair, Howard openly praised the loyal mandarins who had helped usher in a new era of government administration, where the civil service would be compliant to the will of the elected government.

At the end of it all, Max 'the Axe' Moore-Wilton, Howard's Chief of Staff, declared without hesitation that who he shared a drink with on Saturday nights was his business. Crucially, the particular drink to which he was referring was shared with John Howard at his post-election victory party. Frank and fearless advice to Ministers - that mantra of the public service - is now a rare thing amongst the senior ranks in Canberra.

In a similar vein to the civil service, Australian military forces were deployed on the whim of a government in caretaker mode to carry out Howard's election strategy. When instructed to carry out orders that were in contravention of international law and Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS) conventions, the navy answered the government's call with regret. And to conceal potential divisions, all media releases from the navy would be cleared through the Prime Minister's Office. In effect there was a news blackout. One relapse in the policy earned a naval Commander a sharp and very public rebuke from Howard. So when Howard's lies about children being thrown overboard were exposed, he was able to glibly protect his Ministers and vindictively turn his criticism directly on the navy, blaming it for providing faulty information.

It was now open season on the bureaucracy and military. Long gone are the days when Ministers protected their civil servants. Collective responsibility has been buried under the weight of maintaining the apparent integrity of the elected politicians at all costs. Lies or no lies, if Ministers do not know what is going on in their department, they are equally as culpable.

The most blatant provocation was the Defence Minister's use, despite screaming advice to the contrary, of photographs from navy personnel of the dramatic rescue of souls from a stricken SIEV, in justifying the government's accusation that boat people would stop at nothing, even throwing their 'children overboard', to cheat the system. "We don’t want people like that in Australia," bemoaned Howard. Even when Ministers had been advised they were wrong - that the photographs were of an unrelated incident - they stuck to their guns, insisting that the photos were inconclusive. The government was just days away from polling, all they had to do was smother the episode in ambiguity for a few more hours.

That all this was happening in the wake of 9/11 just made things easier for Howard. With his evasive and patronising guile he seamlessly conflated boat people and the terrorists who had slammed two planes into the World Trade Centre. Despite expert advice to the contrary, Howard maintained that it is possible that the wretched people on board the SIEVs could be part of a highly organised and well-funded international terror organisation. Merely alluding to boat people and terrorists in the same breath is enough to sow the seeds of suspicion in a cowed electorate. This is paralleled in the USA, where George W Bush managed to blur the public distinction between Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. Howard's hatred of boat people does not derive from his racism as he maintains he is not a racist. But he overtly used the politics of race-hate - fear of the foreigner - as a central theme in his election campaign.

But perhaps the easiest victory for Howard was over his political opponents, exposed as weak and inept. During his previous administration, Howard had outflanked One Nation by adopting its policies on border protection and treatment of the 'Asian hordes'. He then backed the ALP into a corner from which it felt it could not argue a contrary case for fear of loosing crucial votes. ALP leader, Kim Beazley, had a torrid few weeks, knowing that every morning boat people made the front page, another few thousand votes were lost to the uncompromising Coalition. The day SAS shock troops bravely secured the unarmed, sick and exhausted asylum seekers on decks of the Tampa, Beazley told Parliament:

"In these circumstances, this country and this parliament do not need a carping Opposition. What they actually need is an Opposition that understands the difficult circumstances in which the Government finds itself, and to the very best of my ability, I will ensure that that situation prevails."

The ALP was boxed in by its own policy position, unable to criticise, unable to hold the government to account and worst of all, too afraid to engage the Australian public with rational, humane and forceful argument. Beazley caved and agreed to a rushed debate to pass emergency legislation, the draconian Border Protection Bill. All three readings were seen off in one evening in the Lower House but inevitably the Bill stalled in the Senate, where cooler heads prevailed. Despite the complicity of the ALP in passing the Bill in the House of Representatives, Howard was scathing in his criticism of the ALP in obstructing the Bill in the Upper House. Of course, the ALP took the blame at this time of national crisis. For Howard, it was like shooting fish in a barrel.

Labor strategists screamed at Beazley to "Just pass the fucking thing and repeal it when you’re in power." But the Senate did not fold and Labor took the electoral hit. The ALP had become the 'carping Opposition' it declared it was not.

By the time there was 353 bodies floating in the Indian Ocean after 'SIEV X' sank in heavy seas, Beazley knew he was beaten and he just wanted the whole thing to go away. But it was at this point that the Howard Government's nastiness reached its acme. One of the bodies recovered from the water and returned to Indonesia was the wife of refugee, Ahmaed Al-Zalimi, who was living in Sydney on a Temporary Protection Visa (TPV). Al-Zalimi's wife had sold everything the family had owned in Iraq to pay people smugglers to get her and her three daughters to Australia to join their husband and father. He had escaped two years earlier, however, due to changes in the law, introduced by the Howard government, with only a TPV, his wife and family had no automatic right to travel to Australia, although they too, would qualify as refugees if they managed to present themselves to Australian authorities. Distraught at the death of his entire family, Al-Zalimi sought permission to fly to Jakarta to grieve next to the remains of his wife and then return to Australia. On direct instruction from Ministers, permission to return was refused. He did not go.

As a postscript, a vast majority of those detained on Nauru, in PNG (as part of the 'Pacific Solution') and in the deserts of Australia were granted ayslum. Only the Afghanis on the Tampa and other ships, by virtue of their state being 'secured' by the subsequent removal of the Taliban, were denied. 150 were later accepted in New Zealand.

In Dark Victory, Marr and Wilkinson demonstrate how fear can be made to win over hope. It is almost as if there is a mass electoral neurosis at work: there is fear that we will loose what we have got, rather than a hope for something we might achieve. The authors describe how the neuroses can be identified by studious reading of polling results and how it can be fertilised through hysteria, evasiveness and an aggressive media stance.

The Tampa affair and the children overboard story would dog John Howard over his next term and in the lead up to the 2004 election. But that criticism was made only by liberal-left press, not the official Opposition. And when the truth behind the whole grubby episode was finally revealed to the Australian public, it seemed that it wasn't that important after all. Integrity in government and a modicum of decency in international humanitarian affairs were just not on the radar for most people. Australians had held up a mirror to themselves and were not really troubled by what they saw.