Opinion: Has there been a cover up over what happened to MH370? The families deserve answers
The disappearance of MH370 is now the greatest mystery in aviation history. A new book suggests a lack of transparency on the part of investigating authorities, writes Peter Gleeson.
Opinion
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PLANE missing. Malaysian Airlines flight from KL to China. Australians on board. It was a simple and typically succinct email from my chief of staff, Matthew Connors, and it came at 9.46am, Saturday, March 8, 2014.
When a big story happens in a newsroom, a sense of organised chaos emerges, as reporters and photographers are assigned to their stories. In those first, frenetic hours, as we learned more by the minute, it became increasingly clear that this was not a typical airline crash.
As the day wore on, the overwhelming question kept recurring – where is this plane? It had literally vanished. How could a plane with 239 people on board just disappear from the face of the earth?
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The disappearance of MH370 is now the greatest mystery in aviation history, costing six Australians their lives, including Brisbane couples Rodney Burrows, 59 and his wife Mary, 54, and Robert Lawton, 58, and his wife Catherine, 54.
As the editor of The Sunday Mail on that fateful day, it was important that, as a newspaper, we not only gave readers the facts as we knew them, but treated the story with sensitivity and responsibility, for the sake of the victims’ families. To this day, the families of the Brisbane victims have only spoken to The Sunday Mail.
COVER UP
What we now know is that while there are several credible theories – including pilot mass murder-suicide, hijack or an explosion – there are serious questions as to whether Australia’s aviation regulator is treating the victims’ families with the respect and dignity they deserve.
In his compelling book, The Hunt for MH370, The Australian’s Ean Higgins makes it clear that the Australian Transport Safety Bureau is not telling us everything it knows.
This lack of transparency is extraordinary. What have they got to hide? The ATSB has been remarkably vague, obfuscating at every turn on this investigation.
Higgins also raises questions about the decision-making by the ATSB on where to focus the search for the aircraft in the southern Indian Ocean.
Higgins says: “In my efforts to get to the truth … the ATSB and the Joint Agency Co-ordination Centre have engaged in some repressive media practices not usually consistent with public sector agencies in a democracy.
“They tried to have me taken off the story for persisting with questions they didn’t want to answer, an attempt the editors rejected.”
As it became more desperate to suppress The Australian’s reportage of criticism of its search finding, the ATSB hired a top law firm to issue warnings to the editors to “refrain’’ from its style of coverage – warnings the editors tossed aside and exposed’’.
WHAT DID HAPPEN?
As for what happened, Higgins says aviation experts believe the most likely scenario is that the plane’s captain, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, hijacked his own aircraft as part of a cunning act of mass murder-suicide.
There are other well-credentialed theories that it was a hijacking gone wrong, a fire on board caused by lithium batteries, accidental depressurisation, and a theory that North Korea hacked into the control systems and caused the crash. Even aliens have been put into the mix.
Whatever the scenario, the Australian Government must be much more proactive and open with any ongoing findings or search efforts.
The key issue here is that the national aviation regulator knows more than what it is letting on, and that’s not acceptable in a democracy like Australia where truth and accountability are fundamental to our way of life.
Five years on, the families of those who perished on MH370 deserve the truth. The cover up must end.
FORGET THE RULES JUST PLAY TO WIN
THE “whatever it takes’’ difference between the Labor Party and the LNP has been laid bare with the row over whether the conservatives should put Treasurer Jackie Trad (below) last on their ticket in the seat of South Brisbane at the next election. Last election, the LNP put the Greens last, and Trad got home off the back of LNP preferences.
This time they are putting Trad last, which will almost certainly cost her the seat in an electorate that has one of the highest Green votes in the state. That’s assuming she runs in South Brisbane, which she says she will.
Yet many within the LNP are upset that the party wants to put “politics’’ over ideology. Call me crazy but I would have thought that a decision that rids the LNP of Labor’s best and most effective parliamentary weapon would be a pretty solid outcome, even if it meant putting the Greens in front of Labor on a how-to-vote card. Trad is anti-mining, pro-abortion and won’t address the state’s debt problem.
That’s way more destructive than anything the Greens can serve up. And let’s face it, the Greens don’t have the numbers to enact legislative change, unless people like Trad acquiesce them for her own political reasons.
Labor plays politics for keeps. It’s do or die. They have the killer instinct. That’s why they spent so much money on winning the Longman by-election. They knew defeat would probably cost Bill Shorten his job and send them into internal division, likely costing them the next general election.
The LNP, however, plays by the rules. The sooner the Liberals realise Labor doesn’t do the same, the closer they will be to winning. If Labor was in the LNP’s position – a stroke of the pen on preferences getting rid of Deb Frecklington or David Crisafulli – they’d do it in a heartbeat.
IN BRIEF ...
Nice landing by Eagles
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Country superstar Vince Gill and the late Glenn Frey’s son Deacon blended in perfectly to the new-look act. The band performed three encores.
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