Denied the facts about how asylum seekers ended up with burns on their hands, people overseas will conclude that this is just another Australian atrocity, writes Mungo MacCallum.

For once I have to agree with Tony Abbott. I do not believe that Australian Navy personnel ordered asylum seekers to hold on to hot metal pipes, thereby inflicting serious burns to their hands.

Our sailors are not perfect: various inquiries over the years have shown that they, or at least some of them, can be insensitive, undisciplined and at times downright ugly. But this is not to say that they would indulge in pointless sadism. There has to be another explanation.

We start from the premise that the burns are real: the pictorial evidence appears conclusive. And there is absolutely no reason to believe that the Indonesian police are somehow colluding in a monumental fraud to embarrass the Australian Government. Thus either the burns came about through accident, or they were deliberately inflicted.

Abbott has said that the asylum seekers obviously had a motive to try and discredit Australian policy; he seems to be implying that they may have burned themselves in order to do so. This seems almost as improbable as the accusation that they were the results of torture, and carries disturbing echoes of the 2001 "children overboard" incident in which the Howard government gave credence to rumours later proved false with the intent of demonising asylum seekers in general. So, as Sherlock Holmes would say, having eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

Let us consider the circumstances. The asylum seekers are stopped and boarded by the Australian Navy, in what can only be seen as a hostile act. At first they hope, and indeed may even have been told, that they are to be escorted to Christmas Island, the first step to reaching Australia. But then they find that they are in fact being turned around and are being pushed, towed or otherwise, back whence they came.

Quite possibly some or all of them try to resist, and the Australians defend themselves; a certain amount of push and shove ensues, and in the confined space, some of the asylum seekers end up battered and bruised. This later leads to accusations that they were punched and beaten by the sailors. And the result is that they no longer have any doubt that the Australian Navy is their enemy, and a ruthless one at that, prepared to do whatever it takes to compel them to return to Indonesia.

Their logic is faultless; after all, these are precisely the orders Abbott and Morrison have given the Navy. So this is war. The asylum seekers now accept that they have lost the battle and effectively surrender; they must do whatever they are told to by the victors. And this is where it gets tricky, because we have absolutely no way of knowing what the victors told them or how well they understood it, or even if they understood it at all.

It may be that one of sailors told a group of them to pay attention to the engine, to stop it overheating - check the temperature. And this may have been misinterpreted as an order to hold the hot pipes. Or they could have been given a more general instruction to look after the engine and, not having been trained to do so, they accidentally burned themselves. But in either case they would naturally blame the Australian sailors; after all, they were the ones in charge, they were the ones who had to be obeyed.

In any case, some of the asylum seekers ended up with burns. And of course, just as we don't know how the burns occurred, we don't know what happened next. Did the asylum seekers approach the sailors asking for medical treatment? If so, was it forthcoming? Did the sailors even know about the burns, or did the asylum seekers keep quiet about them, fearing that they might be punished further if they complained?

Well, we shall probably never be told, because after all, these incidents happened on the water, and that makes them operational matters, and that makes them subject to national security, never to be revealed in case the people smugglers ever find out and use the information to their advantage. Which just shows how stupid, how mindlessly counter-productive the whole ridiculous policy of secrecy has become.

The story has by now gone around the world; the Indonesian police have referred the case to the United Nations High Commission on Refugees for investigation and it will be an ongoing issue for days, possibly even weeks, to come. Readers, listeners and viewers, denied the facts by a paranoid Government, will make up their own narratives, almost all of which will be far more damaging than any conceivable reality.

Few Australians will believe the asylum seeker version, but overseas there will be many who find it depressingly plausible: the idea of maltreatment by victorious forces is hardly an unlikely outcome to those who have been involved in real wars. And of course in Indonesia itself, where a large chunk of the population has never been happy with what it sees as the crude, bully boy attitudes of the overbearing neighbour to its south, there will be a ready acceptance of yet another Australian atrocity.

Just when you thought relations between the two countries could not get any worse, they are about to. And of course Abbott's belligerent and uncompromising rejection of all Jakarta's protests about the way his government has handled the problem since day one can only heighten the tension. Immediately after the election, our Prime Minister promised that his Government would be more about Jakarta than Geneva, and by golly has he delivered on that pledge. Lucky old Swiss.

Mungo Wentworth MacCallum is a political journalist and commentator. View his full profile here.

Editor's note (February 5, 2014): A statement from the ABC regarding its reporting on asylum seeker abuse claims can be found here.