Jennifer Bryant, from the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, investigated advice provided to ministers about the incident; and a select Senate committee forensically broke down the matter. The facts below are from those documents. All of this took place in the middle of the bitter federal election campaign of 2001, the so-called Tampa election. Doubts were swirling about the images of children in the ocean before Reith released them on October 10. But after Reith made his claim and released photographs to ''prove'' the incident took place, a military adviser rang Ross Hampton, Reith's media adviser, and left a message on his mobile phone confirming that the photographs were of another sinking. Hampton says he never received the message. But by the very next morning, his office had been told. On the 11th, both military and Defence Department advisers informed Reith's senior adviser (defence) that the claim was wrong. From October 11 defence personnel told Reith or his office on at least six occasions of either the lack of evidence for or doubts about the children overboard incident.

What most angers Reith is the accusation of conspiracy to conceal, yet when he was told by Mike Silverstone that a video the minister also claimed as evidence of children being thrown actually did not show that, he replied with the famous phrase, ''Well, we'd better not see the video, then.'' I don't own instruments fine enough to parse the difference between conspiracy and what the CIA would call plausible deniability, but we can all agree that's an old-fashioned cover-up. Reith has always maintained he was simply passing on what Defence had told him. Indeed, just this week Reith again stated: ''I relied on the advice of the Chief of the Defence Force for the comments I made.'' I am amazed he continues with this, because even that handpass doesn't help his cause. As the Bryant report shows (page 33), Admiral Chris Barrie acknowledges that on October 11 he advised Reith that the photographs he released the day before were not of the child-throwing incident. So, yes, he was told all right. Reith then allows four weeks of the election campaign to pass without correction. The majority opinion of the Senate committee was that ''Mr Reith deceived the Australian people'' during the 2001 election campaign''. Why does this still matter? Because truth in public life matters. Because the slur - the appalling accusation that people would be prepared to kill their own children to get into Australia - has never really gone away. And because Reith has re-entered the public debate and wants to be taken seriously in it. To do that, he's finally going to have to account for this sorry chapter. An apology for the concealment would be good, too.

Imogen Bailey nailed it on Go Back when she said the issue still resonated because that moment, that uncorrected untruth, shifted the public's view of asylum seekers for all time. The shadow it casts over refugees and the body politic is long. Many things changed in public life, post-Reith. It seems to me that was the true end of ministerial responsibility. That mealy-mouthed phrase ''… as I am advised'' sprang fully formed from this time and persists today: a phrase that exculpates the politician and protects the public servant, too. It fractured Australian society permanently over refugee policy, which had been until then in a bipartisan, hands-off zone. The ALP, the original author of mandatory detention, simply never recovered its footing on the asylum-seeker issue, and much of its voter base has seeped away in disgust to the Greens. This week I pulled from a dusty file the two-page list of questions that I took with me into the studio at 774 ABC Melbourne every day for years after the Senate report was released: I wanted to be prepared for the day Reith finally responded to our calls and came on air to account for himself on the program where he first made the claim. Looking at them now, they could all be condensed into one, unanswered question: why didn't you correct the public record?

If an untruth like this is deliberately left uncorrected, does that make it a lie? I'll leave that to the ethicists to decide. But I reckon that if Peter Reith believes he has no case to answer, then he's lying to himself. Virginia Trioli is on leave from presenting ABC News Breakfast.