After five months of painstaking investigative work by the Senate Select Committee into a Certain Maritime Incident, there is now much public evidence that the Australian Government and its border protection agencies do not have clean hands in the sinking of SIEV X. 2000 pages of Hansard testimony and furnished documents make this clear.

What remains to be seen now is what our public institutions - our Parliament, our political parties, our national media, and we the people of Australia - will do with the highly disturbing truths that have already emerged about SIEV X.

Whatever happens from here on, the community owes a huge debt to the patient yet persistent forensic interrogations by four Senators in particular: Peter Cook, John Faulkner, Jacinta Collins and Andrew Bartlett. We also are indebted to Senator George Brandis for his perhaps accidental contribution to public transparency, in pressing for a great deal of previously classified information about the scale and methods of Operation Relex to be made public. His initiative in April to have the Australian Defence Force (ADF) table details of 12 naval interceptions began a healthy process of public revelation of remarkable facts about Australian intelligence gathering, disruption activity, air surveillance and naval interception - hitherto carefully concealed from the public...