Kate Lundy (ACT, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Sport and Recreation) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I, too, rise to speak about a memorial. On Christmas Island, in the Indian Ocean, a simple stone cairn on a point near the Administrator’s official residence bears this inscription:

SIEV X 19 October 2001.

In memory of the 146 children, 142 women and 65 men who drowned on their way to Christmas Island in search of freedom and a better life.

As you read this please remember all asylum seekers who have attempted this treacherous journey.

The memorial was erected by the Christmas Island Rural Australians for Refugees and the Shire of Christmas Island. At the base of the cairn are smooth stones on which volunteers have recorded the names and ages, where known, of those who drowned.

Some of the children were: Mohammad Alghizzy, age 10. Rem Haidan, age 4. Roukaya Alrimahi, age 7. Mahmoud Alrimahi, age 6. Alya Raad, age 2. Mohammed Al Rowaimi, age 3. Mohammed Alghazzi, age 4. Zahra Al Yassiry, age 3. Ali Falah, age 1. Batoul Falah, age 2. Fatima Falah, age 5. Emon Ismail, age 8.

Emon Ismael, the last child I mentioned, was the daughter of Sondos Ismael, one of only 45 survivors, who lost not only Emon but her two other little daughters, Zahra, aged six, and Fatima, aged seven. Whole families of children drowned. After the initial sinking an estimated 100 to 120 survivors were in the water, but most perished before fishing boats arrived and picked up survivors 20 hours later. Only four children, nine women and 32 men survived.

The stones at the Christmas Island memorial provide a rare, if incomplete, record of those who drowned in what has been described as the worst maritime tragedy in our region since World War Two. Researchers have been able to identify only 87 of the 353 who died. Incredibly, the government has admitted to having a list which it will not release, allegedly for fear of compromising the ‘confidential source’ of that list. The government attempts to have us ignore the victims of this disaster by denying us their names, their life stories, their humanity and their value. By speaking about this tragedy I hope to remind the government of the humanity of the victims and their families.

But this is being resisted, with no complete list of survivors even being released publicly. The list of the 45 survivor names requested from the AFP for a Senate estimates committee in February 2003 had 27 of the names blacked out. Only a few of the survivors appear to have been accepted by Australia, being given five-year temporary protection visas after a long wait. Some were accepted as refugees by Sweden, Norway, Finland and Canada.

The story of Sondos Ismael, aged 26, who lost hold of her three small daughters when the overcrowded leaky boat rolled over and quickly sank, illustrates what has been described as ‘the cold cruelty of Australian policies that created such misery’. Most of those on the boat were, like Sondos and her daughters, mothers and children attempting to escape Iraq and Afghanistan and to rejoin family members already in Australia.

When rescued, the few survivors were taken back to Indonesia. Their husbands, who had only temporary protection visas, were told that if they left Australia to visit their traumatised wives, they would not be allowed back into Australia. Only after months of campaigning by church and refugee support groups was Sondos permitted to join her husband. By this time, of course, the Prime Minister, Mr Howard, had won the election of 10 November 2001 having managed, indefensibly, to link the refugees fleeing persecution with terrorism.

But as Tony Kevin insists, ‘A nation like Australia has to have a conscience.’ He quotes Dr Martin Luther King, who said, ‘Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.’ Sadly, however, the story is not unique to Australian immigration and refugee policies and practices. According to the Guardian, on average 4,000 asylum seekers drown each year, most trying to get to European countries.

So far the Australian government has ignored the recommendation arising from the report of the Senate Select Committee on A Certain Maritime Incident that an independent or judicial inquiry is necessary to discover the full story on the issues and questions raised by the sinking of SIEVX and Australia’s responses. We must continue to press for this inquiry to answer questions of whether the SIEVX was, in fact, in international waters, and to investigate the allegations that a plane and two boats ignored the victims in the water. The activities of the people smuggler-double agent mentioned in the report need to be investigated, as do the reasons for the suppression of the names of those on the boat.

Yesterday, a memorial ceremony here in Canberra demonstrated that Australians do care and were touched by the tragedy. To mark the fifth anniversary of the sinking of the SIEVX, groups from all over Australia gathered at Lake Burley Griffin. Participants yesterday included Steve Biddulph, the Reverend Horsfield and Beth Gibbings of the SIEVX Memorial Project Committee, Sir William and Lady Deane, the Ambassador of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, church leaders, representatives of the Canberra Islamic Centre, the ACT Chief Minister, ACT and federal politicians, including Mr Tony Burke and me, as well as community and church groups, representatives from 300 schools and the Kippax Uniting Church Tongan Choir. At the ceremony there were also three men who were bereaved as a result of the tragedy.

The national memorial has long been proposed for the shoreline of Lake Burley Griffin, and the ACT government has supported this proposal. A young student, Mitchell Donaldson, submitted the design for the memorial as part of a 2004 national schools art project. At yesterday’s ceremony the memorial design of 353 poles, representing the victims, was assembled in a procession leading down to the lake. Poles were decorated by schools and groups across Australia, and one was from Christmas Island. The six-foot poles represented adults and the four-foot poles represented children, and many bore the inscription ‘unknown girl’, ‘unknown boy’ or ‘unknown mother’.

At the centre of the line of poles is a section representing the size and shape of the small SIEVX boat. In this section yesterday were eight poles in memory of the beloved family of Ali Al Husseini and five poles in memory of the family of Diya Al Saadi, including a baby aged only six months. Mohammad Al Ghazzi held one of the four poles commemorating his lost family.

The arrangement that the poles would stand at the lake for three weeks as a temporary memorial was, at the last minute, blocked by the National Capital Authority and the poles had to be removed at the end of yesterday’s ceremony without holes having been dug. The NCA had also previously knocked back the proposal for a temporary memorial on the basis that a memorial may not be erected until 10 years after the event. But that is the criterion for a permanent memorial, and this was proposed to last for three weeks. Certainly, there appear to have been numbers of exceptions to this mandatory guideline, which further makes the knock-back inexplicable. We hear that the Prime Minister plans a memorial to Steve Irwin. In October 2003, on the first anniversary of the Bali bombings, he unveiled an everlasting memorial in the centre of the national capital to the 91 Australian citizens and residents who died on 12 October 2002.

The Prime Minister in July 2004 unveiled a National Emergency Services Memorial in Kings Park, on the banks of Lake Burley Griffin, paying tribute to the contribution and sacrifice of emergency services workers during the January 2003 Canberra fires and the Victorian bushfires of 1998. In September this year, one of the police officers commemorated in the first national police memorial in Canberra was Adam Dunning, who was killed in the Solomon Islands in December 2004. These were all tragedies and all fully deserving of a memorial.

So planning and fundraising will continue to achieve a permanent memorial for those who died on the SIEVX. Senators Nettle and Bartlett and I gave notice that on 19 October we shall move that the Senate calls on the National Capital Authority to give permission for the SIEVX memorial to be established as a permanent memorial on the Canberra lakeshore as soon as possible, and I urge my colleagues to consider supporting this motion. Finally, the Chief Minister of the ACT, Jon Stanhope, spoke at yesterday’s ceremony and said:

This is a story that ought not be forgotten or disowned. It is a part of our history. All of those involved want the memorial to represent an unprecedented beautiful and powerful statement of concern expressing the grief and regret at the tragedy of SIEVX.