Transcript
SUSAN MERRELL: I have looked at the apology and, talk about doing the least they could do, the words they used is that the Commonwealth State regrets that Australian officials facilitated the unlawful deportation of Mr Moti QC, and that was following the decision of the High Court of 7 December 2011. Now one could argue that what they're saying is that if the High Court hadn't found that they were wrong, that they would happily not have apologised. The behaviour was stunningly wrong and the reason I wrote the book is because that had not been known.
KOROI HAWKINS: By apologising for one small thing, does that open up a can of worms in terms of what else they could possibly need to apologise for, and to whom else?
SM: Absolutely. And it's not only the Australian authorities. Your former chief of police should be looking at his own behaviour and maybe contemplating if he has anything to be sorry for.
KH: In his role as the Solomon Islands' police commissioner, you mean?
SM: As deputy police commissioner, yes. The information I have came straight out of the courts. Read the book. Read the chapter on the deportation. Read how it went down. Read about Peter Marshall's involvement in this. In fact he was the one who co-ordinated it. And one can say that he was taking instructions from the Solomon Islands government, and perhaps he was. But as the High Court said, they always knew that the deportation was illegal.
KH: So we have two police forces from two different countries taking part in an activity that is illegal. But the other thing is how much of a line or separation then is there between political agendas and law enforcement in the region?
SM: Yeah, well, this is a question, isnt it. It brought up a lot of questions about the separation of powers; the executive lawlessness, which is the term that Julian likes to use, which there certainly was. when you have criminal charges being used to effect a political agenda. And once again, one can say oh no, these were heinous political charges and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Read the book, once again. No one who reads the book, I believe, could be in any doubt that they were completely specious charges, that the way that it was handled.. and besides that, there was an AFP minute that was educed into evidence in the court saying that the High Commissioner in Honiara, Patrick Cole, had urged the AFP to revive the charges that at that stage were five years old and had gone through two Vanuatu courts and had been found... they didn't even commit him for trial. And they said that theyn believe that the High Commissioner was urging this for political reasons. It's out of the horse's mouth. And this has never, ever really come out. That's why I wrote the book. People are still sayinjg to me online, oh that's that pedophile, and this is just not right. The record has to be set straight.
KH: It's quite interesting that a force that goes in to uphold the law and teach about accountability and improving law and order in the country, then goes ahead and colludes, so to speak, with the local police force that it's trying to build up and break a law that they know they're breaking.
SM: Exactly. It's interesting that you should say that because in the High Court of Australia, Justice Hayden said exactly the same thing. He said, we were supposed to be, we being RAMSI as well as all the other countries, we were supposed to have gone into Solomon Islands to uphold the rule of law. He said what happened has got nothing to do with upholding the rule of law. And this is when the commonwealth tried to say it wasn't us, it was Solomon Islands that decided this, you know, it had nothing to do with us. He said hang on, isn't that what RAMSI is all about? Weren't we there to be upholding the rule of law? So yeah the only people, as far as I can see, who had a handle on this were the justices of the High Court. The mainstream Australian press missed the story, missed the story completely. The angle they wanted was 'bad Julian Moti, good Australian government'. If you had anything else to say, they were not interested.
