Column - The media is bound by blood to Gillard

ONLY one resignation has been demanded by our politicians since about 50 more boat people were lured to their deaths.

That resignation, I'm astonished to report, is my own.

Last Thursday, a day after the Christmas Island disaster, my paper received this letter:





"Dear Editor.

"Andrew Bolt has blood on his hands. He stridently insisted on the invasion and killings in Iraq which led to millions fleeing. Some of those millions ended up in the ocean off Christmas Island on Wednesday.

"Andrew Bolt's call, while bodies were still in the ocean, for Julia Gillard's resignation ... lacked human decency.

"He should resign.

" - Senator Bob Brown"

There are many remarkable and deceitful things about this demand from the powerful Greens leader.

Is it appropriate for politicians to demand the resignation of journalists with whom they disagree?

Does Brown seriously believe I had the power to order a US invasion?

Does Brown truly regret the toppling of Saddam Hussein, sparing many more lives than it cost?

Has he any proof that those who died last week, many of them Iranians and Kurds, were fleeing the 2002 invasion of Iraq?

Can he explain why they've chosen only now to come to Australia, not stopping in Pakistan, Malaysia or Indonesia on the way?

And isn't he a contemptible hypocrite, having himself rushed out press releases within hours of earlier disasters, using the Black Saturday fires to promote the Greens' global warming policies, the Bali bombings to denounce the war in Iraq and the 2007 shootings of two good Samaritans in Melbourne to advertise the Greens gun laws?

But Brown's letter is extremely telling for another reason - one that applies to so many of my fellow journalists, too.

I cannot recall Brown calling before for a journalist to resign. Clearly, something stung him badly this time, and I think I know what it is.

Try a guilty conscience.

Try the horror of being confronted by the consequences of the weaker boat people policies Brown supported.

But widen the picture. It's not Brown alone who has singled me out for vilification after these deaths. Journalists have done the same, especially in the Fairfax media, where I've been denounced as a "village idiot" and worse than a "worthless bloodclot".

But as is so often the case with such invective, while I have been abused, I have not been disproved, and the reason for this fury is clear.

The fact is many journalists, just like Brown, have been forced to contemplate the carnage wreaked by policies they promoted out of a lazy desire to seem good.

The bodies in the ocean tell them how lethally wrong they were.

That is why my demand that Gillard resign, her Government having blood on its hand, has so outraged them.

If the Government has blood on its hands for persisting in policies that have lured so many to their deaths - more than 200 now in at least 10 known disasters since 2008 - what of the journalists who backed them?

In their guilty rage they have lashed out at me. But, far worse, they have shielded Gillard.

Barely one has held the Prime Minister to account for those policies. Too soon, they cry.

Yet it's not too soon for journalists such as David Marr to blame the navy, or a Dennis Atkins to blame the meanness of the Australian mob, or a Heather Ewart to wonder if the Christmas Islanders could have done more.

But Gillard is spared almost all such blame and questioning. It is sick.

And, I repeat, it is a sign of the media's complicity and guilt.

In the six years before 2008, Australia saw on average just three boats a year arrive with asylum seekers.

It is beyond question that tough steps taken by the Howard government had in large part put the people smugglers out of business, after a spike of boat arrivals from 1999 to 2001.

Temporary protection visas, disruption schemes in Indonesia, detention in desert camps, curtailing of access to our courts and, above all, the "Pacific Solution" - sending arrivals to Nauru and Manus Island - had stopped not just the boats, but the drownings at sea.

As I said in 2006, to the self-serving moralisers who gleefully accused prime minister John Howard of "crimes against humanity", the results of his policies were a lot less cruel than the laws his critics supported.

It is in fact the former laws supported by "human rights" activists that proved so deadly. That was because illegal immigrants thought we were such an easy touch that they got on leaky boats which sank during the voyage, drowning many hundreds.

Since the laws were changed, not one more drowning has been recorded. Cracking down on illegal boat people has saved lives, not cost them.

This is the link that Labor and the journalists backing its more "compassionate" agenda refused to acknowledge or pretended not to see, preferring to seem good than achieve it.

And so in 2008, many journalists cheered as Labor dismantled the Howard laws that had stopped the boats - and the drownings .

They cheered especially the ending of the "Pacific Solution", thereby linking themselves not only to the "reforms" but to their fatal consequences.

The Age hallelujahed that "yesterday a stain was removed from the soul of this nation".

The Australian's Mike Steketee added: "Australia at least has a policy it can justify in terms of basic humanity."

The Sydney Morning Herald's Adele Horin cried "a shameful era is over in Australian politics".

And so on, almost without exception.

See now why so few journalists dare now blame these same policies for what followed? Because what followed was death, just as predicted.

From the start, the Government was warned weaker laws would bring back the boats. The Australian Federal Police said so, as did Indonesia and the International Organisation for Migration.

Even boat people said again and again they'd been tempted by Labor's "compassion" to take to the sea.

An Afghan in Indonesia last year told The Australian: "I know Kevin Rudd is the new PM ... I have heard that if someone arrives it is easy."

Another Afghan there told the 7.30 Report: "(Labor) are accepting asylum seekers ... We pray for the Labor Party, for Kevin Rudd."

An Iraqi told the ABC: "Kevin Rudd - he's changed everything about refugees. If I go to Australia now, different."

A former people smuggler told the Courier Mail: "The immigration rules in Australia were changed and everyone knows it and that's why so many are now coming."

And with the boats - 200 of them - came the deaths.

Here I'm stuck. The Age's Michelle Grattan on Saturday accused me of "not a little distasteful triumphalism about prior warnings", but I don't know how else to prove the Government was warned its policies were costing lives than by quoting earlier warnings, and I also don't know which other journalist issued warnings I could quote.

If Grattan had said before last week the Government was luring men, women and children on to sinking boats, I'd have gladly quoted her instead.

But she never did. Not once did she speak, as the tally of known deaths jumped from five, to 14, to 25, to 42 and then, even before last week's tragedy, to as many as 170 or even more.

I confess: Many times I did write of these deaths and warned of more to come unless Rudd and Gillard changed the lax policies that were tempting boat people to risk not only their own lives but those of their children.

From April 17, 2009: "At least three boat people now dead. So how much kinder do Kevin Rudd's policies seem now?"

From November 6, 2009: "Twelve more dead. Now will the Rudd Government finally see that its 'compassion' kills?"

And so on, a dozen times or more.

Sorry about this "triumphalism", Michelle. It's actually anger, though - anger at not only the murderous vanity of this Government, but also at the refusal of so many self-serving media commentators to even report the deaths that were the consequence of the policies they praised as the restoration of our "lost humanity".

AS for Gillard, she did not want to know. Fourteen months ago, she rejected my latest tally of deaths, saying she had "no evidence" for them.

Last week came an even more unforgivable admission:

Journalist: Prime Minister, based on where this boat has come from and getting as far as Christmas Island, it then becomes quite feasible that there are or have been many other boats that have perished in the oceans and Australian authorities haven't noticed it?

Gillard: ... I'm not going to extrapolate or engage in hypotheticals about things you've got no facts on and I've got no facts on ...

Journalist: Prime Minster, have you had advice about how many other boats may have -

PM: No. I haven't.

Clearly, Gillard had never bothered to check how many people were dying as a consequence of her policies, even after being warned a year ago the toll was in the dozens already.

Not even when the death toll reached up to 170, as calculated from sketchy reports of the nine sinkings we at least knew about, she did not check.

But now she can no longer feign ignorance. Now the bill for the policies she largely authored is presented in ways even the media cannot ignore.

This time we've all seen the pictures of the latest boat to be smashed to pieces, with bodies of men, women and - God spare us all - babies slipping under the huge waves.

Remember those Labor policies the journalists cheered? See the results.

But now you see why they won't grill Gillard about the "reforms" that brought this harvest. To blame her would be to blame themselves, too.

And so this hunt for other scapegoats, whether people smugglers, the navy, the Indonesians, or even "the weather".

But never blame Julia. Never blame, by extension, her media supporters who cheered her mischief.

No, better that their accusers be driven into silence, than that the guilty be named - and the next boat saved.