Now Peter Reith is whining about ABC bias, and the hard time the national broadcaster gave him in the children overboard affair. Really? Was there no old friend to warn the former minister for defence not to go there, to stay well clear of the great controversy of the Howard years?

“Mr Reith,” said the ABC’s Virginia Trioli, “there is nothing in this photo that indicates these people either jumped or were thrown.” She was right. But Reith kept insisting the blurred, uncaptioned photograph was proof that ruthless asylum seekers had thrown their children into the sea.

That 2001 exchange with Trioli would come to haunt Reith. The navy knew no children had been thrown overboard. The navy had already warned the minister’s office the photographs were of another rescue on another day. Their use grossly misrepresented the truth.

As Trioli kept pressing, Reith kept claiming he had the navy on his side. Mounting his high horse, he said: “You may want to question the veracity of reports of the Royal Australian Navy. I don’t.”

Now in the Fairfax press Reith is reiterating his plea of innocence – “I believed the children overboard story to be true at the time” – and damning the ABC for trying “to undermine the efforts of the new government to stop the boats. It is a classic case of bias.”

How the allegation of burnt hands brings back those sordid weeks as Howard and his ministers twisted and turned to keep the truth from coming out before the nation went to the polls in November 2001.

Then and now the press was not allowed anywhere near the navy; all questions were routed through the office of the minister of defence; and any doubts raised about the military operation against the boats was met with a blast of Advance Australia Fair. To question was close to treason.

As the government hid behind the navy, the military was trying to compel Reith to face the fact that no children had been flung into the sea. Brigadier Mike Silverstone told Reith “no children were thrown overboard”. Air Vice Marshall Angus Houston told Reith in front of a witness recruited for the purpose: “There was nothing to suggest that women and children had been thrown into the water.”

Then as now, the minister refused to release the video of the operation. The navy videos everything. Then, as now, obscure “operational” reasons were said to make it impossible to put the evidence on the table.

One thing has changed since then: to a remarkable degree, the press accepted the secrecy flung round Howard’s operation to turn back the boats in 2001. That’s not so now and it is not so largely because of the children overboard affair, because it all blew up in the government’s face.

Why isn’t Reith bemoaning the bias of News Limited? It was the Australian, a few days before the poll, that reported sailors on Christmas Island denying kids had gone over the rail. It was a fine scoop.

The press returned to the story with a vengeance. Vice Admiral David Shackleton, surrounded by the press at a ceremonial farewell for a couple of ships leaving for the Gulf, admitted the truth about the children on that refugee boat: “It doesn’t appear they were thrown in.”

That afternoon Reith’s office forcefully demanded the admiral retract. He did what he could to back the minister. That night Howard faced questions from the ABC, entirely professional questions.

“Who was it that convinced Admiral Shackleton to make this new statement?” asked Tony Jones. Howard obfuscated. “I certainly didn’t speak to him and I didn’t ask the defence minister to speak to him …” He refused to answer Jones’s questions about Reith’s photographs.

Next day the prime minister won a third, mighty victory at the polls. The truth came out, of course, as the truth does. Howard’s reputation never recovered. Reith’s went down the toilet. Relations between the navy and the government hit a historic low.

But all Reith can remember a decade or so later is how awful the ABC was to him. “The ABC’s bias is cultural, deeply ingrained and not about to stop,” he wrote in his Fairfax column. Well, on the evidence of the children overboard scandal, that calls for a round of applause. Pity News Limited has, in the burnt hands affair, come down on the side of secrecy.

Now as then, the big question is what the navy is telling the minister for defence, the splendidly indignant David Johnston. Of course, we would like to see the video of the New Year’s Day pushback. And it might be an idea to turn off the national anthem.



David Marr and Marian Wilkinson are the authors of Dark Victory, about the Tampa, the children overboard affair and the Pacific solution