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Human tragedy is the stuff of news. A boat sinking and the death by drowning of 353 men, women and children is a big story in anybody's language. That this tragedy happened to a leaky, overloaded asylum-seeker boat on its way to Christmas Island on October 19 last year, at the height of Operation Relex, a major and forceful Australian military operation to detect and repel asylum-seeker boats, makes it an Australian story.
So it is particularly important for our self-respect as Australians that we try to understand how and why this tragedy happened.
But in fact, after the initial three-day sensational media coverage, the story quickly died. There was no investigative Australian journalism. Compare this to the exhaustive and sustained media coverage of, say, the Thredbo landslide disaster.
But on this story, our media unquestioningly swallowed the Federal Government's spin: that this was an Indonesian maritime disaster, in Indonesian territorial waters, and solely the result of a greedy people smuggler overloading his boat. The media bought the government's convenient line: that what happened to this boat had no connection at all with Operation Relex; that this maritime disaster was nothing to do with us.
The desired lesson having been spelt out - that the tragedy starkly illustrated the dangers of people smuggling - the Howard Government quickly "moved on". Asylum seekers, who had been very briefly acknowledged as victims and fellow human beings, went back to being dehumanised as faceless alien invaders.
