It was the mid-’90s when I started my career in journalism. The reports I would seek out and try to emulate were those from places, countries, regimes where journalists were kept out, banned, jailed, killed for trying to report.
ack then it was countries such as Timor-Leste, West Papua, Myanmar that inspired me. Here were regimes trying to hide things at all costs. Occasionally some reporter would get through, usually by stealth, pretending to be a tourist, an English teacher, anything other than a journalist.
They would come out with some footage or a report on the human rights abuses being carried out by secretive regimes. People such as British journalist Max Stahl, who filmed the Santa Cruz massacre of East Timorese by Indonesian troops in 1991, were doing work, I believed, that made a difference, righted wrongs and led to definitive changes in government policy for the better.
These were troubled places, run largely in secret by cruel regimes. They were black spots that seemed almost not to exist. Australia has become that place. We have our own black spots. We ban reporting. We threaten whistleblowers with jail. In these black spots, people die.
When I started in journalism, Australians weren’t involved in the “war on terror”. We were seen internationally as benign and neutral. We lectured other countries with a clean conscience, or so it seemed, and were perceived as a nation that respected human rights. I travelled abroad and found that Australia was regarded as a generally decent place: fair, egalitarian, multicultural. All those traits we still like to think apply to us as a people, as a nation, seemed to me as a young man reflected in how I was treated overseas.
But these past few weeks have been devastating for Australia’s international reputation. First we had the release of more than 2000 “incident reports” from the detention centre on Nauru which, despite Australia’s legal feints and obfuscation, is run by Australian companies and staffed by Australians. The reports document rapes, self-harm, suicide attempts and violent treatment of the 500 or so men, women and children held there indefinitely by the Australian government. The release was followed by denials and silence by the Turnbull government. Then Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young was denied permission to visit Nauru. Then a delegation of Danish parliamentarians was denied permission to visit Nauru. Then the independent MP from Tasmania, Andrew Wilkie, was denied permission to visit Nauru. Needless to say no journalists, Australian or otherwise, have been allowed to visit Nauru since the release of the documents. This is our black spot.
Just a day after being formally rejected for a visa to visit Nauru to inspect the conditions there, Andrew Wilkie talked to me about what he thought the government was trying to hide …
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John Martinkus
