A Pillar of Consistency

AS DAVID MARR observes, it is beyond decency's comprehension to hear the sort of abuse hurled at a prominent and successful woman.

The World According to David Marr

IN THE 14 months since SIEV 221 came to grief off Christmas Island and 50 lives were lost, Silly star David Marr has churned out quite a bit of that quality journalism. The flow began well before the last body had been hauled from the water, when Marr went to press with his considered opinion that the Royal Australian Navy needed to be held accountable.  He took up the same theme at much greater length on the tragedy’s anniversary, once again blaming the navy for failing to detect the boat and, when its presence was known, for being culpably slow to mount a rescue. And on Friday, Marr was at it again, this time adding Western Australia Coroner Alistair Hope to his list of villains. Hope’s offence is to have produced a lengthy report which dares to disagree with Marr’s view of events.

We will get to Hope’s inquiry in a minute, but before then it needs to be noted that Marr’s boss, the quality CEO Greg Hywood, has lately been making all sorts of sanguine noises about his company’s transition to the Digital Age. Yet somehow, Cyber Dude Hywood’s Silly and Phage have each neglected to provide a link to Hope’s report, which is readily available via the web.  Read it and the one question yet to be answered concerns not the navy but Marr: is he the most incompetent journalist in Australia or the most dishonest?

Below are some of Marr’s more florid assertions, followed by what Hope has to say about them. Incompetent or dishonest, you decide:

EXHIBIT A

MARR 2010: The key mystery of this tragedy is how that boat was allowed near those cliffs in that filthy weather. 

MARR 2012: [Hope] gives a lot of attention to the lack of radar, or indeed any, surveillance on the morning of the wreck; but the navy command comes out of clean.

True, Hope deals at length with surveillance, but he also explains why it is not to be regarded as a Navy failure:

HOPE 2012: The Jindalee Operational Radar Network (JORN) was not turned on at the time when SIEV 221 was wrecked and was never designed as a surveillance tool for detecting small wooden boats such as SIEV 221. At the time of the incident Border Protection Command had commenced a process to trial a land based radar system but that system was not operational. It is doubtful whether that type of radar system would have been capable of detecting SIEV 221 on the morning of 15 December 2010.

In his further comments, Hope notes the Navy ship, HMAS Pirie, and its companion Customs vessel, the Triton, were correct to have sheltered on the island’s lee, where they escaped the storm which drove SIEV 221 onto the rocks. From there, because a mountain was in the way, each was unable to scan the northern horizon, whence the doomed boat came.

Further, Hope observes that the area within 12 miles of Christmas Island is the responsibility not of the navy but of the Australian Federal Police, further noting that its patrol vessels were unfit to put to sea under such conditions. There would appear to be a story in this, as Hope reports AFP was forced to accept unreliable and unstable twin-hull vessels it did not want and whose adoption the Volunteer Marine Rescue Service also opposed. The Leisurecat craft were forced upon both services regardless and, as Hope remarks in passing, as a consequence of some curious business in regard to the awarding of contracts.

A quality journalist might catch the sniff of a story in that decision to equip rescuers with boats they could not use, but not Marr. So determined is he to blame the Navy and advance his initial judgment of its culpability, Hope’s points about those Leisurecats do not rate. Nor does he dwell on the fact that all those vessels were out of service due to safety and mechanical deficiencies when SIEV 221 hove into sight.

Finally, as Hope also points out, the navy had issued repeated reminders that its brief is coastal protection, not rescue. Its ships would be more than willing to take part in such operations, the brass advised, but they could not be counted upon as their prime duties might render them unavailable.

Indeed, when SIEV 221 went aground, the Pirie had its hands full tending to another people-smuggler boat, SIEV 220, which arrived at Christmas Island the day before. 

EXHIBIT B

MARR 2010: Christmas Island is a gloomy mountain sticking out of heavily patrolled seas. Navy and Customs are everywhere. For a boat to reach the cove undetected is extremely rare. 

HOPE 2012:  …another vessel SIEV 220 had arrived on the morning of 14 December and had first been detected by persons onshore in the area of the Settlement when it was only 300 yards north of Flying Fish Cove … over the preceding six months there had been an increasing number of SIEVs arriving at Christmas Island.

Actually, undetected arrivals at Christmas Island are not all that rare. Most vessels are spotted relatively close to the island, and seven have dropped anchor without being spotted at all.

Indeed, as Hope also explains, finding and intercepting SIEVs off Christmas Island is not a priority for the entirely logical reason that refugee boats are already intent of going there, where they know safety awaits. The navy’s primary and more problematic chore is to intercept vessels which do not want to be found.    

EXHIBIT C

MARR 2012: [Christmas Island residents] had realised at once that a refugee boat steaming out of the murk at 5.30am was in danger. 

No they didn’t. When first spotted, SIEV 221 was to the north of the island, its engine was working and its crew had the choice of heading to the storm-lashed western shore or the pacific eastern one, where a safe landing site was available at Ethel Beach. The first person to spot the boat was so unconcerned she did not bother to immediately contact authorities. Marr, who has made much of the precious minutes allegedly wasted by a “tardy” Pirie, also gets the time wrong: 

HOPE 2012: [Island resident] Mr Martin contacted the customs on call officer, Les Jardine, by telephone at 5.46am and advised him of the situation.

The boat’s true peril became apparent to those onshore only after it executed that ill-advised turn to the west. That was around 6:00am, when a deluge of calls began to flood emergency operators and Christmas Island officials.  As Hope puts it on page 34 of his findings, “the disastrous decision to turn to the west, presumably made by the crew, took place at about 5:55am and the boat then travelled to Rocky Point”, where it was wrecked. 

HOPE 2012: Residents on Christmas Island made emergency calls at 5:57:57am, 5:58:56am, 5:59:34am, 6:00:06am, 6:07:04am and 6:09:04am. These calls went through to the AFP On-call officer on the Island who advised the officer in charge, Sergeant Peter Swann, of the calls at about 6:07am.

EXHIBIT D

Having mangled the timeline, an error that just coincidentally aids his prosecutor’s case for navy negligence, the Silly’s coverage continues thus:

MARR 2012: “[Residents] made the right calls to the right people. They assumed the Pirie, sheltering in the lee of the island about half an hour away, would soon be on the scene. How wrong they were.”

What Marr also neglects to mention is that the Pirie was underway and making all haste for the island’s western side by 6:21am (page 63), just 11 minutes after Lieutenant Commander Mitchell Livingstone roused his crew and ordered the ship readied for rescue operations. 

By 6:32am, the Pirie was making 24 knots when Livingstone received a more comprehensive briefing of  SIEV 221’s engine failure and imminent danger. Such was its peril, Livingstone was advised to redeploy the second of his two rubber boats from attending to SIEV 220, which was allowed to drift unsupervised.

HOPE 2012: This appears to have been the first occasion on which those on the HMAS Pirie or ACV Triton were alerted to the concern that the SIEV might be in serious danger.

Remember, Marr asserts SIEV 221’s danger was apparent at 5:30am, suggesting the navy should have known about it and taken immediate action. Yet Hope states Livingstone only became fully aware of the situation’s gravity almost a full hour later.

Marr’s reaction is to sniff “Amazing!” – which it would be if Hope had not laid out an accurate timeline of the morning’s events, the timeline Marr pointedly declines to acknowledge.

Livingstone dropped a U-turn and retrieved his rubber boat, then resumed his original course – only to see his progress further slowed when one of his two engines went on the fritz. Marr, who declines to dwell on the dud Leisurecats, makes much of this mechanical failure.

EXHIBIT E

MARR 2011: At 6.32am the Pirie set out at full speed for the other side of the island. Two minutes later her port engine automatically shut down. The cause of the failure - a small chunk of metal drawn into the turbo impeller - would not be discovered until the ship returned to Darwin. The Pirie was left limping through the swell at 16 knots.

Limping? Well, that is a matter of definition.

HOPE 2012: At about 6.35am HMAS Pirie suffered an emergency stop on her port main engine which initially limited speed to approximately 11 knots as the standing operating procedure, which was implemented, was to immediately bring the other main engine back in order to avoid damaging both engines.

Livingstone scrapped ship's operating protocol and thrashed the one remaining engine for all it was worth to achieve the16-knot speed which Marr regards as such a dawdle. In addition, he unloaded his rubber boats and sent them speeding by the shortest possible course to the crash site while he directed the Pirie via a longer route around an uncharted section of coast off the island’s northern edge.

EXHIBIT F

While Marr makes highly selective use of Hope’s findings and narrative, there are some elements which do not rate a mention at all. One wonders if Marr’s eagerness to plead the boat people’s case might not have had something to do with these omissions from his late report:

HOPE 21012: the boat had no radio

·       there were not enough life jackets

·       the boat was overloaded

·       the captain left halfway through the voyage

·       the bilge pump was faulty

·       people were instructed to throw their mobile phones away

·       the engine had problems before the journey

·       the fuel was not secured

·       the survivors observed no emergency safety equipment, such as a maritime radio or EPIRB, and

·       the GPS was thrown overboard, thereby abandoning a navigational tool that could have ensured safe passage to the lee of the island

Marr began his latest assault with this statement “The navy gets off lightly.” Accurate reporting, however, takes quite a beating.

A Boy's Own Story*

 AS READERS of this little blog will have noticed, many serious topics are treated with a measure of levity, an approach the former Mrs Bunyip dismissed as the symptom of a greying and perpetual immaturity. Well, she would approve of what follows because a six-year-old boy brought into being to satisfy a gay male couple’s happy-family fantasies is a very serious matter indeed. As the Fairfax comics reveal this morning beneath David Marr’s byline, the lad is now in protective custody in Los Angeles while his adoptive father and father are investigated for their intimate connections to members of a child-porn syndicate. The story is shocking, even on the strength of the  Fairfax paper’s nuanced headlines and the details that quality journalist Marr, who is rather keen on the gay business, has somehow neglected to include in his copy, at least as it has been published.

“Boy taken from gay parents” announces the lead story on the Phage’s home page. If skimming readers gain the impression that the couple are victims of intolerance and homophobia, one guesses there would be few objections in Fairfax newsrooms. “Kid seized in porn probe” would have given a much better indication of what Marr reveals, but as the reporting of straights facts is so often these days framed as a manifestation of prejudice and intolerance, succinct accuracy probably didn’t have a chance.

That is a minor quibble, however. More disturbing, although not at first glance, are these lines from the former Media Watch host’s account:

The men blame their predicament on innocent visits to three men in the US, New Zealand and Germany, who, to their complete surprise, turned out to be collectors and producers of child pornography. All three were arrested last year.

The key figure was a lawyer, Edward de Sear, 64, an old friend of the boy's father, who was arrested in New Jersey and charged with distributing child pornography on the internet.

To their complete surprise!

What is a complete surprise is that Marr ia prepared to accept that they found it a complete surprise. In an omission that would have drawn his scorn during the Media Watch days, Marr neglects to mention that Edward de Sear’s home in Saddle River, New Jersey, was raided by American authorities on July 14 last year. The child was not taken into protective custody until October, which is the better part of three full months. Had Marr provided a chronology, his readers might have been inclined to wonder how the Australian couple could have remained entirely ignorant of the “old friend’s” travails, especially as two other members of their circle were being visited by police during that same period.

Marr’s softly-softly tone also overlooks some other, quite interesting angles. While he mentions that the Australian couple’s associates are being busted and probed, he makes no mention that de Sear is – or was -- a partner in the globe-girdling law firm Allen & Overy, which recently launched an Australian outpost by poaching a posse of top-shelf legal talent from Clayton Utz, Big Tobacco’s chief Australian defender. That information has no direct relevance to the abuse story, but it would still have been interesting to know.

As to de Sear’s alleged offences, Marr does summarise them, and while his precise is deeply disturbing, it is as nothing in comparison with the complaint filed against de Sear in New Jersey. That document can be found here. Be warned, it is stomach-turning. Perhaps that is why the Silly neglected to provide a link.

All the same, with the Australian couple claiming “to be victims of prejudice in Australia and the US against gay fathers”, as Marr states very early in his report,   and “canvassing support for their cause in Cairns and the gay press”, the indictment’s grim details will be worth bearing in mind over the strident clamour for gay justice we are certain to hear in months to come.

(*apologies to author Edmund White)

Marr And Pa

ANYONE who has read Dark Victory, David Marr’s co-authored expose of John Howard’s inhumanity, will have realised very early on that the man whom Silly editor Peter Fray urges his paper’s reporters to emulate has a tendency to, well, place an excessive weight on some facts while skating very lightly over others. At the start of his Tampa book, for example, the reader gets many sympathetic pages about the plight of the rescued Afghan refugees – many of whom, Marr concedes, were not Afghan at all – before any mention that “a delegation” representing the ship’s unplanned human cargo invaded the bridge and threatened its captain and crew with big trouble unless the vessel was put about immediately for Christmas Island. By any definition it was a hijacking, but Marr leaps with sprightly grace over this inconvenient reflection on his heroic victims’ disregard for law, preferring to paint Howard & Co in subsequent pages as villains for refusing to reward with entry permits those who forced with threat and intimidation that change of course. While this is all ancient history, the Marr syle is well worth keeping in mind when reading his approving analysis of the damage Judge Mordy has done to free speech in the matter of Andrew Bolt.

Consider these paragraphs:

Here's Bolt on Larissa Behrendt: "She's won many positions and honours as an Aborigine, including the David Unaipon Award for Indigenous Writers, and is often interviewed demanding special rights for 'my people'. But which people are 'yours', exactly, mein liebchen? And isn't it bizarre to demand laws to give you more rights as a white Aborigine than your own white dad?"
Among the problems here are that Behrendt's father was a black Australian, not a white German. And like all the others, Behrendt was raised black. Judge Bromberg wrote: "She denies Mr Bolt's suggestion that she chose to be Aboriginal and says that she never had a choice, she has always been Aboriginal and has 'identified as Aboriginal since before I can remember'." Bolt didn't contest her evidence.

There is no denying Bolt did get it wrong. Behrendt’s father, by his daughter’s account, came to regard himself as an Aborigine. Chalk one up for David Marr, who curiously neglects to set the record straight. Had he done so, Bolt’s error would not only have struck Silly readers as negligible, the truth would also have bolstered  Bolt’s overall argument that an individual who chooses a single, minor strand of genetic pedrigee above all the rest is making a statement not on breeding but of politics and cultural preference.

The truth is that it was Behrendt’s grandfather who was white and German. It was her grandmother who was of mixed race. Both are an equal number of generations removed from the woman who famously tweeted that she preferred bestiality to Bess Price, so while Bolt is wrong in the particular, his overall point stands.

There is another thing about those paragraphs that is worth noting, the line where Marr says Larissa “was raised black.” Her version, as told to Marr’s colleague Malcolm Knox, does nothing to explain what “raised black” actually means. Indeed,  for those not quite so exquisitely attuned to the mores of racial identity and self-identity, it is a bafflement:

It was, ironically, [her white mother] Raema who instilled a sense of Aboriginal identity in Larissa and her brother. ''When Jason got picked on because of his colour, Dad had said … 'My son is as white as you are.' It was Mum who allowed us never to feel embarrassed about our Aboriginality. She has a great heart and social conscience. But it came at a cost to her, because she couldn't feel part of it herself. So she dropped us off at rallies and stayed outside.''

How odd that Marr did not share these facts with his readers, did not plumb the Silly’s archives for a little context and background. Perhaps he was distracted at his keyboard by the sound of champagne corks popping or, just as likely, more sweet nothings from the lips of a doting editor.