David Fawcett (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I too rise to take note of this report and to highlight that the coalition members did not support the majority view in a number of regards. There are two areas to this. One point is the issue that a lot of the concepts that were discussed were military or operational in nature, and it is difficult for people without a background in that area to understand. The other point is that it was a very political exercise.

I will come to the first point. There were two issues that were discussed in some hours of questioning during the inquiry where members of the Labor Party and the Greens who were represented there clearly struggled to understand two basic concepts around the operation. One was of military command and control. There seemed to be this thought that a superior command would need to authorise a vessel or an aircraft and would need to know exactly where it was at every point in time in order for them to have appropriate command and control. The witnesses attempted to explain the concept of an area of operation, whereby command and responsibility for navigation is delegated to the aircraft's or the vessel's captain, and they are approved—they are authorised—to operate anywhere within that area of operations or AO. Yet, question after question came out from people wanting to know why the superior headquarters had lost control, lost command or lost visibility of the vessel. There was clearly an inability of people to grasp that concept, and that led to some wrong assumptions that came out in the report.

Similarly—and Senator Dastyari just mentioned the concept of GPSs—very early in the discussion some of the senators put questions to the witnesses around things like GPs and then, when the witnesses said that there was not a continuous data stream from the vessel back to a higher headquarters, they made the assumption that perhaps a GPS had been turned off and therefore the ship was lost and did not know where it was. Again, there was a long period of questioning over a lack of understanding around the technical detail that, for very good technical or operational reasons, vessels will not always have a continuous data stream providing real-time or near real-time updates to superior headquarters. Those kinds of issues (a) wasted a lot of time in the questioning and (b) have led to some of the comments where senators from the Labor Party and the Greens feel as though things were obscured from them when, in actual fact, the witnesses were providing the information. Those opposite just did not actually understand.

The second point is that it was a very political exercise. Reading through the draft that was given to us and now the final report, what we see is that the Labor and Greens senators have deliberately avoided some of the balance that was provided in evidence. There were two experts there on the law of the sea who provided a range of views. In some areas they did not agree with each other, and in some they did. The majority report only highlighted those areas where they agreed and where it could be seen as being critical of the government's policy. What they did not highlight was, for example, the evidence by Professor Rothwell, who said:

Consistent with the LOSC, Australia is entitled to “take the necessary steps in the territorial sea to prevent passage that is not innocent” (Article 25 (1), LOSC). This could extend to ordering the delinquent ship to remove itself from the territorial sea, or physically removing the ship by taking control of it. A similar right exists in the case of the contiguous zone, where Australia can rely upon its capacity to “prevent infringement” of its immigration laws within the territorial sea…

In his conclusion he talks about the fact that Australia has a very firm legal basis, under the law of the sea, to interdict asylum seeker vessels within the Australian territorial sea contiguous zone or EEZ. This report, unfortunately, is the latest example of the political exercises that are being run by the opposition that do not actually add value to understand the issue at hand. The coalition senators have, therefore, submitted a dissenting report on this report of the Foreign Affairs Defence and Trade References Committee. I seek leave to continue my remarks later.

Leave granted; debate adjourned.