Media Release
19 June 2003
Labor deliberately untruthful and misleading over Bali
The Labor Party’s desperate attempts to score political points out of the Bali tragedy have gone too far. Labor has been caught out playing cheap politics on Bali in a number of ways.
This morning Labor’s Spokesman, Kevin Rudd, peddled a blatantly misleading and untruthful line about what information the Government had prior to the October 12, 2002 terrorist attack that killed 202 people, including 88 Australians.
Mr Rudd claimed that “Mr Downer received specific intelligence on Bali.” Mr Rudd knows that is not true.
The Report of the Inspector General of Intelligence and Security into this issue (Blick Report) found there was “no material that specifically warned of the attack.”
The Office of National Assessments submission to the Senate Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Committee inquiry refers to two mentions of Bali.
One was a 27/9/01 ONA report which included a judgement about Bali that was “not made on the basis of specific intelligence reporting.”
The other was an ONA verbal briefing on 18-19/6/02 where again a judgement was “not made on the basis of any specific intelligence.”
Mr Rudd must have known all these facts because they already had been placed into the public domain by the Government.
Labor is obviously playing political games with this issue because it has known about the ONA report of 27/9/01 for almost six months. The report was provided as an attachment to the copy of the Blick Report given to the Leader of the Opposition to read in December last year.
If this information is so important, why has Labor been sitting on it?
Labor has also been provided with detailed briefings on intelligence matters relating to Bali.
Rudd again exposed Labor’s agenda when he asked a question in Parliament today about why the Canadian Government warned travellers on October 4 2001, not to travel to Bali.
What Mr Rudd failed to say was that the Canadian advice was rescinded four days later. He must also have known that at the time of the Bali attack the Canadian advice closely matched that of Australia’s.
Labor knows there was no warning about the Bali attack. It also knows our travel advisories for Indonesia were strong at the time of the attack, closely matching those of other countries such as Canada, US and UK.
Yet Labor seeks to create an entirely false perception. Why?