BOAT BOY SHAME MORE THAN A MINOR MATTER
The Federal Court is set to endorse a Commonwealth payout to settle a 13-year scandal.
About 220 Indonesian men will share $27.5 million in compensation because Australian authorities broke international laws designed to protect the weak.
This is the cost of hanging onto a political ideology in the face of escalating uncertainty about proving the age of Asians, coloured by an assumption they lie.
Kids were slammed into adult jails. That’s illegal. Under-18s must be held apart from perverts and brutes under the 1990 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Australia is a signatory.
The prime victims of the Stop The Boats panic that gripped Australians last decade are the terrified teens from remote villages on the archipelago next door wrongfully charged as people smugglers.
The xenophobia was politically weaponised. Huge sums have been paid to lawyers trying to hammer square dogma into round reality while insisting - as the Attorney General’s office does - that “the rule of law underpins the way Australian society is governed.”
The story started when Colin Singer (right) exercised his conscience. Had he done so in the Year of Persecuting Whistleblowers he might have been banged up inside Perth’s Hakea Prison. But in 2010 the JP was an ‘official visitor’ bailed up by medical director Dr Brian Walker.
“He told me there are kids in here,” Singer said later. “I thought this impossible. I had great faith in the Australian justice system and believed it to be fair.
“Then I saw them - they were pre-pubescent frightened children, certainly not men.”
The striplings were former deckhands hired by people smugglers to help ferry asylum seekers fleeing conflict zones and who’d made it to Indonesia.
Singer spoke to Ali Yasmin (later to become the lead plaintiff and get a separate $40,000 award) from tiny Lembata island more than 1,000 km east of Bali. "He was alone and clinging to a fence, clearly traumatized," Singer recalled.
Tough, said the Australian Federal Police, take it like a man because we have proof. A wrist X-ray that referenced a 1942 US bone atlas with a four-year plus-or-minus margin of error determined Ali was 19.
He was 14, but couldn’t prove his age. Jobless lads hanging around harbours don’t carry passports. He quit school at 12 to support his mother after his Dad died knowing little of the outside world.
A letter from Ali’s principal confirming his 1996 birth date and organised by TV journalist Hamish Macdonald was rejected because it wasn’t a sworn statement.
There’s no evidence of Australian or Indonesian agencies visiting the school to get the paperwork right.
(Lawyers acting for Yasmin have told him not to talk to the media until the settlement is endorsed. Requests for a compromise have been ignored.)
Meanwhile the adult smugglers did OK - and in a perverse way have lifted our image. Their actions were illegal but a civilised state’s must be legal - no bashings or, thrashings.
Nurdin Tanal (left), now 47, admits his wrongdoing, pocketing $3,500 to captain a fully-provisioned boat organised by an Arab speaker in Jakarta whom he never met. His wife Hajija Buja (also left) used the money to build a new house in the village of Waipare on Flores - a largely Catholic island 1,200 km east of Bali.
But he didn't get to see it after being jailed in Brisbane for carrying 44 people from Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan - including a breast-feeding mother. When Nurdin realised they'd paid around $10,000 each for the three-day trip, he reckoned he'd been cheated.
“I’d go back to Australia tomorrow if it was legal,” Nurdin told Michael West Media. “I was suddenly released and told I was not guilty. I came home with almost $2,000, for working, given by Aussie friends, and the Indonesian Embassy.”
Wuring is a Muslim village. Rayah, 62, (right) is the go-to gossip. the snack seller at the port entrance. Though she's never been Down Under, her info gleaned from locals makes her a splendid influencer: "Australia good. You look after people."
In 2012 the Australian Human Rights Commission published An Age of Uncertainty. The 331-page report found the wrist X-rays "an inherently flawed technique …unreliable and untrustworthy."
Like Robodebt the system hugged its wrongs when it should have been hugging the wronged. As they were shuffled through the bewildering system, scores of officials, many of them parents, must have been struck by the doubts that upset Dr Walker.
Also slow to mature was PM Anthony Albanese’s “Australian instinct for fairness, decency and care and respect for each other.” His assessment was made before the Voice referendum results.
Singer said he found most prison staff compassionate: “My criticism is for the bureaucrats, politicians and lawyers who turned away from their responsibilities and ignored the rights of children.”
Like fallen trees blocking roads, the facts got too big to drive around. Ali and 14 others were released 'on licence' in 2012 and headed home. The WA Court of Criminal Appeal quashed their sentences, "satisfied that a miscarriage of justice has occurred."
I saw my first child 'people smuggler' in a Perth court in 2012 - X Hadi, standing with an adult X Riadi. Many Indonesians have only one name – an actuality Australian bureaucracy can't handle. The label X is usually reserved for witnesses who can't be identified.
The ‘Mr Big’ organisers of the vile trade were absent. Few accompany their customers on overseas trips.
Through an interpreter, the men pleaded not guilty to "unlawfully transporting aliens" - the fishermen call them “black goats”. Facing the accused was a jury of a dozen Australian citizens and several confident Afghans keen to back the prosecutor's story of their voyage to freedom.
Hadi said he'd crewed a craft carrying coconuts that later collected 54 foreign men. A lawyer asked why he didn't sniff illegality, jump ship and report his suspicions. The question made no sense culturally or practically. Some police have allegedly been involved in the rackets.
The boat was seized by an Australian naval patrol and tagged SIEV (Suspected Illegal Entry Vessel) 86.
Australians arrested abroad arouse the tabloids and TV squawkers to demand rapid repatriation to escape dodgy foreign justice.
The Indonesian government seemed unconcerned about their X-men. Outside the court, an official explained prisoners "get good food, high quality medical care, and earn $30 a week doing kitchen chores."
Laws to calm public terrors of a tsunami of Asians tied the hands of the sentencing bench - five years mandatory. Judge Richard Keen said prison would "bring home the message that Australia treats people smuggling seriously."
It didn’t; the Federal Court's message is that Australia stuffed up. Finding the beneficiaries will be tricky - those still fishing are often itinerants. Distribution of the compo has yet to be determined, but probably around $125,000 each.
The average time spent far from home was 950 days - 130 bucks per nightmare. Had they sought a template - like parity with Federal politicians' away-from-home allowances - payouts would have doubled.
Paradoxes abound. While jailing kids was morally and legally wrong, the policy may have helped deter the smugglers. While compensation is right it may encourage the exploiters to try again.
Posters at Indonesian ports once warned of the dangers. They’ve vanished, like the estimated 1.720 who tried to reach the promised land last decade. All the more reason for Canberra and Jakarta to talk seriously.
The PM reportedly claims “remarkable progress” on agreements about defence. How about human lives?
Duncan Graham has an MPhil degree, a Walkley Award, two Human Rights Commission awards and other prizes for his radio, TV and print journalism in Australia. He lives in East Java.
First published in Michael West Media, 23 December 2023: https://michaelwest.com.au/indonesian-people-smugglers-wrongly-imprisoned-finally-compensated/
No comments:
Post a Comment