Next week's public inquest by the WA Coroner, Alastair Hope, into SIEV 358 (Kaniva), which capsized halfway to Christmas Island on 21 June 2012, drowning 90 people, is welcome.
The SIEV 358 case encapsulates key questions as to why these tragedies (18 in the past four years, resulting in over 950 deaths) too often happen at interfaces between Australia's border protection system, Australia's maritime search and rescue system, and the under-resourced Indonesian maritime search and rescue system.
It raises issues of Indonesian and Australian Search and Rescue (SAR) responsibilities in the so-called Indonesian SAR Region, and of coordination of Australian Border Protection Command (BPC) and Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA) responses to a notified SAR emergency.
Readers of my series of Eureka Street articles on asylum seeker boat sinkings will know that, in my assessment, mass deaths occur when the rescue responsibility baton is passed too late, fumbled by the recipient agency, or should not have been passed at all.
Australia's two official agencies most concerned in rescuing at-risk asylum seekers — BPC under the authority of Customs, and the AMSA Rescue Coordination Centre (RCC) — routinely get it right. Many lives are regularly and without fuss saved by BPC ships. Just over the past week, Jason Clare issued four 'BPC assists vessel' media releases for events that probably occurred within the so-called Indonesian Search and Rescue Region (SRR).
Often, AMSA RCC is not involved at all. But sometimes, BPC declares a SAR situation, and AMSA then becomes the lead Australian agency. Sometimes AMSA is the first to know of distress. AMSA then has to decide whether to pass the baton to its Indonesian counterpart BASARNAS, a vastly less well-resourced agency.
There is a large official documentary trail on SIEV 358 in the public arena. The official Customs report awaits public release. But FOI searches late last year uncovered many apparently complete official chronologies and talking points prepared for possible use in Senate committees.
It seems there are three kinds of possible systems failure the Coroner might examine.
First, there is the apparent initial failure by AMSA to launch a full-scale Australian SAR response as soon as it received the first located distress call at 0130 AEST Wednesday 20 June from the boat, then in international waters 38 NM south of Indonesia. Second and third, there are questions of whether BASARNAS and BPC each took effective SAR action in the ensuing 37.5 hours.
Over the first 9.5 hours, AMSA negotiated a transfer