Seven years ago a top-level committee of bureaucrats was monitoring the arrest of a boat containing refugees trying to reach Australia. Wrong information given to the committee that some of the boat people were throwing their children into the water was passed on in good faith by the Immigration official to the minister for immigration, Philip Ruddock, and was soon the subject of statements to the press. Ruddock and later the prime minister, John Howard, used the statement for shameless political purposes. Soon, some senior officials knew the public was being misled and tried to have the record corrected. But a strange paralysis in the system prevented the public's being told till after the election.
A year ago an Indian doctor, Mohamed Haneef, was arrested in Queensland after a tip-off from British police. His name had emerged after a botched terrorism attempt in Britain. The Australian Federal Police and Queensland Police closely questioned the doctor, who was being detained under extraordinary new terrorism powers, and prejudicial police leaks suggested an Australian plot had been nipped in the bud. In Canberra, the National Counter-terrorism Committee and cabinet's national security committee met.
A host of government agencies and officials were involved some from Immigration, which had been co-opted on to the committee. Even before the AFP had laid charges against the doctor, representatives of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation told the various meetings that ASIO did not think Haneef was a terrorist or implicated in the British terrorist act. It is not clear how many ministers it told this, but one was certainly Ruddock, then the attorney-general. But no one seems to have told the then minister for immigration, Kevin Andrews, who claims that a finding he made some days later that Haneef failed the character test was made in ignorance of ASIO's view.
By the time Andrews made his finding, the AFP had charged Haneef, but it became clear there were strong doubts whether the charge could be sustained. It was emerging that Commonwealth prosecutors had given the courts quite misleading information about the evidence, and that at least some of the AFP investigators had seriously misunderstood what they had been told.
As it became clear that Haneef would probably be granted bail, AFP officers cooperated with Immigration officers to prepare ''contingency plans'' action against Haneef's visa. In taking that action, Andrews said repeatedly that he was privy to secret information against Haneef justifying what he had done. As the farce developed, the Director of Public Prosecutions dropped all charges against Haneef, the minister's action was quashed by the Federal Court and it became obvious that an investigation begun in good faith had gone seriously awry. Only the AFP, and its Commissioner, Mick Keelty, who had a high profile on the case while it had seemed a police coup, have continued to insist that their actions were justified and that, indeed, the investigation should continue.
The AFP is still pouring money into the case: $8 million has apparently been spent in trying to retrieve something from the debacle. An inquiry with limited powers is now being conducted into the affair. The AFP continues to withhold from public scrutiny the material it holds, in part because it includes confidential exchanges with British police and security authorities. The DPP, whose performance also appears to have been lamentable, is also withholding its submission. ASIO and other agencies have not been so inhibited in accounting for their actions.
There is no suggestion that former justice John Clarke, who is holding the inquiry, mostly behind closed doors, is yet being denied access to information before the various parties. The present Government, which hopes the inquiry will embarrass the previous one, chided the AFP for its public silence but has so far been deaf to suggestions that the inquiry's powers be extended.
Perhaps it is not necessary yet at least. But it may well become so if the inquiry searches hard as its terms of reference allow for the political and bureaucratic interface with the police investigation. Andrews will give evidence, but it is now clear that other cabinet ministers involved in the ''management'' of the affair should be called to tell what they knew. The Immigration Department's submission adds helpfully that it does not have documents ''that may have been produced or circulated exclusively within [Andrews's] office'', and, some might now suspect, Mr Clarke may not yet have information about what transpired in the prime minister's office, the attorney-general's office and the cabinet's national security committee. Presumably only with such information at hand can some of the affair's real lessons be learnt, and informed judgment be made about the continuing, and very puzzling, AFP insistence that its handling of the matter has been exemplary.