If you were of a suspicious cast of mind, you might wonder exactly why the story of the Prime Minister “considering” a reshuffle over the weekend suddenly appeared last night, as the fallout from the Sydney siege continued, amid talk of possible failures by NSW Police, ASIO and the Australian Federal Police, and the bizarre misleading of the Prime Minister himself by the AFP on Man Monis’ gun licence.
A suspicious person might wonder if the story were a deliberate attempt to distract the press gallery from pondering the mess the government is now in as a consequence of possible bungles by its most important security agencies, agencies even senior ministers are publicly questioning. It won’t distract voters, who couldn’t care less about the reshuffling of ministers they know nothing about anyway, but it might help keep pesky journalists off an issue of profound sensitivity for the government.
The inquiry announced by the Prime Minister on Wednesday with NSW Premier Mike Baird is a bare-bones effort, the absolute least the government should be doing, a quick, in-house six-week review of nearly two decades of information about Man Monis, how security agencies dealt with him and what happened on Monday and Tuesday morning in the cafe. One of those weeks is Christmas; how far the review will get beyond a desktop analysis must be seriously questioned. Anthony Byrne, Labor deputy chair of the Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security, wants more, telling Crikey “the Prime Minister is right to initiate an inquiry. But an independent judicial inquiry is likely to do a better job of assuring both the community and, particularly, the victims’ families and survivors, that what happened is being comprehensively examined.”
Make no mistake, despite the imminence of the festive season and the summer break, Man Monis and the siege will remain top of mind for voters, and not in a way that the Coalition might initially have thought. The calls for a proper inquiry will continue to grow.
Central to an Enquiry, and in no way disregarding any of the issues thus far broadly canvassed, is scrutiny of how the actual siege itself was handled. The lamentable outcome demands an independent review. Police leadership and their deployment of required assetts. Access to detailed information, including first hand knowledge of released hostages surely provided alternative options to those pursued?
Only a truly independent examination of all actions will be acceptable.
Agree with your points and those by g’day bull. Cannot be internal. Use of commandos who are trained, and deployed, with specific skills that may not have been appropriate here. Also need to know the key negotiation strategy and tactics. I heard a prophetic interview on Al Jazeera with a British negotiator in the early stages of the siege who went through tje various stages as experienced by all players. Significant in this was the period when a hostage took matters into their own hands….
Any inquiry should also be linked with government agencies’ demands for more surveillance of ordinary citizens via our metadata.
From what we know so far, police and other security agencies don’t seem to have been very clever at analyzing information that was readily available.
How much would it take to improve “intelligence”, to get it up to “fool-proof”, beyond window-dressing standard?
Or might that simply be a case of a hair-cut, from the top, and trim the politics from the sides?
[“Keelty” (from Howard slap-down through Haneef and beyond) to Wilkie, still reverberate.]
You can literally hear them scrambling to find a palatably spinned outcome before they finalise any internal inquiry details.
No doubt they will draw on their AWB ‘lessons learned’.