A funny kind of innocence

Late last week, upon the release of the Moss Review, which examined the state of affairs at the Nauru Regional Processing Centre, the ABC reported:

The review also cleared 10 Save the Children staff from any suggestion that they coached the detainees into self-harming to embarrass the Coalition Government.

The ABC summation includes many helpful links, just to frame the review’s findings in the correct perspective. Two links remind us that Prime Minister Abbott was beastly to Gillian Triggs, while another directs visitors to an earlier ABC report detailing the Human Rights Commission president’s own findings, the thrust of which is that the Prime Minister is beastly to everyone else as well. A further link reminds us that Ms Trigg’s compendium of suffering was lavished by the ABC’s with sympathetic coverage. This morning (March 23), Radio National’s Fran Kelly was telling Australia that the 10 Save the Children workers had been “exonerated”

For some reason the ABC neglected to link to the Moss Review itself, which can be found in full here.

If Quadrant Online visitors click on the illustration atop this item, the section of the executive summary in regard to the fired Save the Children workers will be easily read.

“Cleared”, the ABC says, “exonerated” even. Unless the Macquarie Dictionary folks, the crew which   re-defined “misogynist” as “Tony Abbott” to accommodate Julia Gillard’s abuse of the language, have convened another late-night session, what the Moss Review did say, and quite emphatically, was that the Immigration Department erred in a matter of procedure and protocol.

Rather than ordering the ten off the island itself, the Moss Report advises that the bureaucrats should have contacted Save the Children directly and asked their administrators to remove the contract employees on whom suspicion of incitement and fabrication had fallen.

Why would the department have had its suspicions? Because fellow contractor Wilson Security, responsible for keeping order in the Nauru camps, told it so.

And what might have deepened Wilson’s shadow of doubt?

Well, there were all those breathless accounts of “children as young as eight” sewing their lips together, reports which Moss specifically refutes. Other press reports are substantially corrected or, more often, simply noted as “cannot be confirmed”. If there is ancillary wisdom to be gleaned from the Moss Review, it is its confirmation that that all things published by the Guardian or uttered by Senator Sarah Hanson-Young need to be taken with a pinch of salt.

And then there is this. Again, click on the image:

Please notice the last sentence: the girl, who couldn’t identify a leering man of whom she declined to complain, was reported as a “a victim” without her knowledge by a Save the Children operative.

And finally, this screen grab from the report: At least one of those Save the Children workers — “cleared’ and “exonerated”, according to the ABC — was flinging profanity via Facebook at then-Immigration Minister Scott Morrison.

The full Moss Review is available via the link below. It will make fascinating reading unless you are an ABC or Guardian reporter, in which why bother? It’s the narrative, not the facts, that matter.

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