Last week the independent online news journal New Matilda revealed that the Department of Immigration has a worryingly loose grip on the running of Australia’s immigration detention centres.
New Matilda published an analysis of the contract signed between the Department and the British company Serco. The contract, which New Matilda obtained under freedom of information laws, shows that Serco is subject to astonishingly low reporting requirements.
The contract also allows Serco to hire untrained guards to handle culturally and psychologically sensitive tasks in work that includes the protection of newly arrived asylum seekers.
Aside from its content, it is significant that the investigation took place at all.
In common with many publishers of serious journalism, New Matilda lacks a reliable funding stream. Last week Crikey publisher Eric Beecher used his submission to the Federal Government’s media inquiry to call for an Australia Council-style funding body to support such independent publishing. He wrote:
Without 'quality journalism', a democratic society would lose its greatest source of independent scrutiny. Most of the exposure of institutional corruption, incompetence or maladministration is the work of reporters and editors.
Matters of national importance are often unreported or glossed over by the major media outlets because they are considered insignificant or difficult. Sometimes a piece of news is genuinely disturbing. It contains more questions than answers and does not fit any of the usual formulas that give the average media consumer a 'feel good' experience.
An example is the report of the Christmas Island boat tragedy of 15 December 2010 that killed at least 30 asylum seekers. The coronial enquiry received scant media coverage, and this lack of scrutiny allowed the Federal Government to ignore it.
Tony Kevin wrote in Eureka Street in May that 'evidence is emerging of moral confusion and a propensity to hide embarrassing facts, within Australia's Border Protection Command system, on its obligations to protect lives' of asylum seekers in Australian waters.
He asked why the Australian Government’s powerful Jindalee Operational Radar Network detected neither the boat involved in the tragedy, nor another boat that left Indonesia on 14 November 2010 whose passengers have never been heard from since. A lone voice, he wrote: 'Suspicion grows that something quite unpleasant is being hidden from us in respect of the loss of these two boats.'
The government got off lightly largely because of the scarcity of media coverage of the complex circumstances surrounding the event. There were a lot of unanswered questions that would