Navy capable of winning sea battle of wills


Piers Akerman
The Daily Telegraph
July 20, 2012 8:09AM


CLAIMS the Australian navy cannot turn back the boats are ridiculous.


Yet the ABC persists in trotting out retired defence brass hats to claim such work is dangerous or it is not the sort of work navy people like.


Well, boo hoo to retired Admiral Chris Barrie and former defence secretary Paul Barratt, who have ventured into these politically charged waters with a series of interviews in which they have given a clear indication why the Defence department has been such an easy target for gutting by the Labor-Green-independent government.


Barrie, who did not distinguish himself with his confused thinking during the children overboard affair, now asks: "Are we still playing a game where nobody's prepared to give anything on this issue and that leaves asylum seekers still in jeopardy?"


Barratt doesn't pretend to take a detached view. He takes the position that Opposition Leader Tony Abbott has no wish to solve this problem: "He wants to maintain it as a problem because he sees it as an election winner."But Abbott has said he wants to solve this problem and has proposed the reintroduction of measures that ended the lethal business of human trafficking under the Howard government. Those measures included turning back boats when possible and issuing illegal boat arrivals with temporary protection visas.


The US Coast Guard turns boats back to Cuba and the Dominican Republic on an almost daily basis. The Sri Lankan navy turns boats back. Our navy is more than up to the task, as distasteful as it may be.


In May 2004, I was aboard HMAS Stuart in the Persian Gulf when Captain Phil Spedding was routinely sending heavily armed boarding parties to inspect suspicious dhows posing a threat to shipping and offshore oil facilities. A week earlier, on the eve of Anzac Day, a flotilla of suicide craft had launched attacks on the crew of the USS Firebolt, killing three.


As I watched, the Stuart's two boarding craft William and Wallace swept off to a large dhow.


The boarding party was led by the Stuart's executive officer, Lieutenant Commander Michelle Miller, now Captain Miller.


Was the job dangerous? Yes. Was Lt-Cdr Miller capable of performing her duty as an RAN officer? You bet.


Only yesterday, a former human rights commissioner warned that hundreds, if not thousands, of asylum seekers will almost certainly drown on their way to Australia unless something is done to stop people-smuggling boats. In his submission to the federal government's expert panel on asylum seekers, Dr Sev Ozdowski said Labor's decision to wind back the Howard government's Pacific Solution and temporary protection visas created an undeniable pull factor for people trying to flee Sri Lanka, Afghanistan and Iraq.


"If the current trend continues, boat arrivals for 2012 will be well over 10,000," he wrote.


"The increased boat people arrivals will almost certainly result in hundreds or thousands of people drowning on the way to Australia. This statement is not alarmist - it will happen."


On Wednesday, the sixth illegal boat with some 65 people aboard arrived in just three days - taking the total number of undocumented arrivals since Labor wound back the Coalition's border protection policies in 2007 to nearly 21,000.

The government's panel is due to report before parliament resumes next month but the government's alliance partners, the Greens, have already sent in a submission at odds with Labor's proposed Malaysian Solution and Labor has warned it will not necessarily support the panel's recommendations.


As opposition immigration spokesman Scott Morrison said: "Not only have Labor sought to distance themselves from their own expert panel by reserving their position on its recommendations, they remain at war with their alliance partners on the committee they set up to solve the problem."


More than 131 boats carrying nearly 9500 undocumented people have arrived since the Malaysian Solution was announced on May 7, 2011. Under the swap-and-release proposal, Australia would have sent 800 asylum seekers to Malaysia and received 4000 in return.


The High Court killed the plan stone dead because the government could not guarantee the security of those sent to Malaysia, which is not a signatory to the UN Convention on Human Rights - a basic requirement once insisted upon by Labor. The plan was meant to be a one-off and act as a deterrent but there is no indication it would have succeeded.


On the other hand, if Labor had not dismantled the Howard government's border protection regime, people would not have died at sea, more than $1 billion would have been saved, the Christmas Island detention centre would be mothballed and naval and customs officers would have been freed to get on with other duties.