Tag Archives: Indonesia

“These claims are indeed difficult to verify”

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The ABC is filled with such pathetic losers whose only claim to our attention is the billion dollars they receive from the rest of us. Take away the billion and we can find them on street corners of a Friday night selling The Green-Left Review. It is one thing to mention that a bunch of asylum seekers said that they had been abused by the RAN. It is quite another to go on with it as if there were anything more than the remotest possibility that it’s true. Unless this is being broadcast to help the government dissuade asylum seekers from coming across from Indonesia where, surely, they have already found a safe haven.

THE ABC has defended its editorial processes against a rising tide of criticism of its reports that Australian navy personnel beat and burned asylum-seekers during a tow-back operation earlier this month.

This is despite strong assertions from the government and the Australian Defence Force that the claims are unfounded and another television network, Seven, treating the asylum-seekers’ allegations with much greater scepticism a fortnight earlier.

The reports, by ABC Indonesia correspondent George Roberts, featured prominently on the network’s radio, television and online platforms on Wednesday. They centred on video footage of the asylum-seekers receiving treatment for burned and blistered hands at a medical facility in Kupang, West Timor.

The asylum-seekers claimed the burns were a result of being forced to hold hot engine pipes by navy personnel. They also alleged they were badly beaten by navy personnel before their boat was turned back to Rote Island on New Year’s Day.

“This video and the version of events given by Indonesian police appears (sic) to back up the claims of mistreatment first made by the asylum-seekers when they spoke to the ABC a fortnight ago,” Roberts said in a video report.

ABC news director Kate Torney yesterday defended the reports. “These claims are indeed difficult to verify and we have reported that too, along with Immigration Minister Scott Morrison’s emphatic denials,” she said.

It’s not so much that it’s untrue that is the issue, but that the ABC wants it to be true, and in this post-modern world will do everything to turn this fiction into truth even if the events never happened.

Fixing messes

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Quiet diplomacy seems to work. The story deals with issues on two fronts, not just spying but the live cattle trade, both of which had been botched by Labor but are now on the road to being repaired by the Coalition. First the “spying” which is dated, please note, 2009:

INDONESIA has accepted Tony Abbott’s explanation of the 2009 spying scandal but says the bilateral relationship will not fully resume until a new ‘protocol and code of ethical conduct’ is agreed and implemented between the two countries.

President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono extended the olive branch to Australia last night after a special cabinet meeting, signalling the end of the worst diplomatic crisis between Australia and Indonesia since 1999.

However, Dr Yudhoyono made clear that the relationship would not be fully resumed – including military and police cooperation on people smuggling – until the code of conduct he and the Prime Minister had signed was ‘fully implemented’.

The boats aren’t coming anyway which I can tell because they are never mentioned in The Age or on the ABC. But the story goes onto another front in our relationship with Indonesia:

Indonesia was not considering any reimposition of quotas on Australian live cattle, citing ‘the need to maintain stability of prices’. Indonesia has issued permits for an additional 120,000 head of Australian cattle to be imported during the current quarter, as the government battles to drive down market prices for beef from near-record levels.

Maintaining the stability of prices is another way of saying that Australia is the cheapest and most reliable supplier of beef to the Indonesian economy.

Never apologise, never explain

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As a fan anyway of our Prime Minister I am still astonished at his sure footed ability to handle our latest controversy with Indonesia. Everybody “spies” on everybody else because in foreign relations it’s important to keep surprises to a minimum. You do want to know what they’re up to and you also are not averse to ensuring they know what you are up to, unless you are up to no good.

There’s politics here and in Indonesia. The Indonesians have to be “outraged”. Their politics demands at least some sense of having been officially offended by the routine use of listening and other devices that they no doubt use themselves. So the politics will play out but should be an absolute nothing one year from today. There are and will be many other things to worry about.

The apology demanded by some, even of the weakest kind, admits fault, and there is nothing some people like better than to exploit weakness and to play the injured party. We would be making a massive mistake to end up with anything resembling an apology. We would never hear the end of it. Toughing it out now means that this should peter out with no permanent harm done.