Soldiers without borders, p.34
Soldiers Without Borders, page 34
Both Papalia and his wife had long been fed up with the Liberal government in Canberra and his political angst had been festering ever since his boat people days off northern Australia. He was certainly motivated for a political career. It was just a matter of deciding what was best for the family.
In the end they agreed and he joined the ALP that day. After a tweaking of the membership rules and with Carpenter’s support he won the pre-selection two weeks later from a field of 11 candidates.
‘Once that pre-selection rubbish was out of the way the support was overwhelming.’
One of the biggest challenges for the family was preparing the two boys, aged 10 and seven, for the media circus and the change of focus in their dad’s life.
‘When I won pre-selection I said, “I want to shield my family from the camera”, but if you say you are married with kids, the next question is, “Where are they?” So we figured the best thing at the pre-selection was to get that out of the way, so we took my wife and boys to Kings Park with Alan and did a doorstop with all the press in Perth and my boys are standing there completely overawed.’
Papalia went on not only to win the seat on 3 February 2007 but also, unexpectedly, to increase Labor’s majority by 1.09 per cent. He was sworn in when the WA State Parliament resumed on 27 February 2007.
In his maiden speech Papalia told the story of his grandfather’s painful experience of being interned as a potential terrorist in his new country.
‘I love my country and will willingly do anything to defend it against a threat,’ the new Member for Peel told the parliament. ‘However, I am gravely concerned when minority groups are used as scapegoats and targeted for political purposes. I believe the best way to defend this country against internal threats is to promote inclusiveness.’
Papalia regards his military service as a major asset in his new career.
‘It gives you a mental fortitude, I guess, a conviction you can achieve what might not otherwise have been the case, then you’ve got all the other benefits of detailed planning, risk analysis and risk assessment. That is one of the greatest thing they offer in the regiment. I employed that as a patrol boat captain, in conflict, I use it every day.’
He regards teamwork and team spirit as vital ingredients in politics as well. It seems unlikely that he will become a political hater. ‘I have respect for people on all sides, all types of politics. I went to war and I didn’t hate the people on the other side, so I’m not going to hate the people on the other side of the chamber.’
Chapter thirty-seven
THE NEAR POLLIE
Pete Tinley knew he would cop a razzing when he went to the stirrer’s parade at Campbell Barracks during the fiftieth anniversary celebrations of the SAS in September 2007, and he wasn’t disappointed.
As a former major and regimental operations officer, he had been one of the key officers who helped secure some plum roles for the unit during the US-led campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. Yet here he was just a few years later the Australian Labor Party candidate for the federal seat of Stirling in suburban Perth and therefore a supporter of a troop drawdown in Iraq.
Apart from abuse and the odd ‘communist’ reference from some Vietnam-era soldiers and vehement anti-Whitlamites, most of the barbs were good humoured and not intended to be spiteful. Fortunately the tall, imposing Tinley has broad shoulders and a sunny disposition, so he took it all in good humour.
Most military personnel are by nature conservative and in the broad sweep of history, conservative governments have tended to give soldiers greater resources and more work. That was certainly the case with the Howard government, which dramatically boosted defence spending, including half a billion dollars on the special forces, and handed them plenty of operational work from East Timor to Afghanistan and Iraq.
Tinley knew that his decision to run for Labor would rattle a few cages in the military, but he was committed. After 17 years in the SAS he had learned the wisdom of rolling with the punches and sneaking in through the back door rather than breaking down the front one.
That ability to adapt goes right back to the SAS selection course, which he completed twice—as a digger and an officer—when young men are tested to the limit through 22 days of food-and sleep-deprivation.
‘The SAS selection course is the starting point, or the genesis if you like, for personal growth,’ he says. ‘It’s the point where you discover your personal inventory of skills and talents.’
During selection most candidates experience an epiphany, a moment when the decision is taken to leave their former self behind. Tinley’s moment arrived as a wave of energy that swept over him, a determination to do what he could with what he had.
‘It’s almost like a survival thing.You give up on effort you’ve put behind you, you don’t worry about it, and you give up worrying about what’s going to come to you in the next challenge, and you just live for the moment,’ he says. ‘And a lot of guys have taken that sort of stuff into the field where you don’t worry about what is happening next, you fight the moment. It’s that capacity to concentrate and focus on that particular point, that level of excellence that makes the SAS quite different from other organisations. The mission is paramount, the mission is above all else and that’s it.’
He joined the ALP in 2001 as part of his transition from the military to civilian life. The military takes a heavy toll on families and he had been divorced in the late 1990s before going to Staff College in 2000. He knew his next step up in army rank would be in Canberra and he was not prepared to put an entire continent between himself and his two young sons permanently. So he returned to Perth, intending to take up a reserve posting on the road to transitioning out.
However, the incoming commanding officer SASR, Lieutenant Colonel Gus Gilmore, asked him to be his operations officer. He jumped at the chance, but his path out of the army would not be reversed.
‘That’s one of two distinctions I will make about people who make a successful transition. Those who use the years, and I do mean years, depending on their time in service, prior to their eventual separation to shape what they want,’ he says.
‘The other aspect of it is that those guys who’ve been successful have been drawn out of the place, as opposed to pushed out of the place. They’ve been drawn out by a passion for the next challenge and for me it was starting a small business.’
In Tinley’s case the Tampa adventure, 9/11, Afghanistan and Iraq delayed his departure by five years, and what a five years they were.
When he arrived in the Middle East to begin planning Australia’s contribution to the US-led coalition’s operations in Afghanistan, Tinley became a salesman as much as a military planner. While Gilmore sold the merits of the SAS to the American marines’ Brigadier General Mattis and other force commanders, Tinley walked the corridors of land headquarters in Kuwait telling anyone who would listen about the merits of the SAS. The son of a salesman put his skills to good use.
There was considerable pressure on both men not only to deliver the government’s intent of a meaningful contribution, but also to ensure the SAS was not placed on POW escort duty or search and rescue, as in the Gulf War.
‘That would have locked us out for the next one [Iraq] as well.’
The rapid pace of the Northern Alliance advance down through Afghanistan meant that speed was of the essence. ‘We had to get in behind whatever was going and fast.’
The men eventually won the SAS the crucial job of supporting Mattis’s headquarters from Forward Operating Base Rhino. The troops became Mattis’s eyes and ears and made a lot of powerful friends in the US military, virtually guaranteeing them a crucial role in the Iraq operation.
As Tinley left the Middle East in February 2002, he saw that US planners in Kuwait had turned their heads west away from Afghanistan and towards Iraq.
More than a year before John Howard told the Australian people that their troops would be going to Iraq, Major Peter Tinley already knew about ‘Plan 10/3 Victor’, the American contingency plan for the invasion of Iraq.
Formal planning for that mission began in mid-2002 and in October he was dispatched to Central Command in Florida and other US bases, such as Fort Campbell in Tennessee, to help position the SAS in the front row of the invasion plan.
When he arrived at Fort Campbell, home to the Fifth Special Forces Group, Tinley became aware that a lot of the information about Iraq was coming from just one place in the Pentagon. That was a special office established by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his ‘neo-con’ deputy Paul Wolfowitz, who was a principal architect of the Bush administration’s Iraq policy.
Tinley was convinced that the intelligence from that office was being shaped to support the invasion plan. Alarm bells sounded in his head because none of the material that he saw, and he saw a lot, post-dated 1996. He assumed that others further up the chain must have known something that he didn’t. Surely no one would go to war based on intelligence information that was more than six years old?
‘Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were running a special office out of the Pentagon, which shaped the intelligence, there’s no question—talk to anyone, I talked to other guys over at the CIA,’ he says.
Not that it made any difference to a professional army officer. ‘Once you put one hand on the Bible and the other in the air when you join the army you say you’ll go where you’re told to go and you’ll do your duty. I don’t think anybody in Australia would want anything different because the alternative is pretty chaotic.’
Despite this, Tinley now says that he and his colleagues were always sceptical about finding Scud missile launchers, which was their primary mission in Iraq’s western desert. It did have an upside for the diggers: at least they would be unlikely to face the threat of weapons of mass destruction. They still had a strong belief that Saddam possessed and would use tactical chemical or biological weapons.
Tinley’s observations support pre-war intelligence gleaned by British sources that all but ruled out the possibility that Saddam had any WMDs.
This material, seen by numerous Australian officers, including some on exchange with British forces, was ignored by the American, British and Australian governments, which by late 2002 had staked their entire justification for invasion on one issue and one issue alone—WMDs.
‘We were always sceptical that we were going to find Scuds when we wouldn’t actually get anything out of the American intelligence system,’ Tinley says. ‘In your planning you’re looking for actionable intelligence and targetable locations. Geography’s everything. You always say, “Where?” and we had had air defence issues we had to knock out. We suspected all along that we were unlikely to find Scuds because none had been seen for a long time.’
Apart from a strong sense of duty he was determined to put his own stamp on the intense operational planning to ensure its success.
‘Call it ego if you like, but I felt a sense of obligation to make sure that I put my stamp and my view on it all to help achieve a successful outcome in both those conflicts,’ he says. ‘I couldn’t imagine having not done it. It would be a failure on the part of the culture.’
The Iraq operation was the second time in his career that Tinley had been part of what was clearly a political deception.
In August 2001, six months after he had joined the ALP and in the middle of a federal election campaign, he was in the bush at Lancelin near Perth with Gilmore helping out with a selection course, when a 44,000-tonne Norwegian container ship called the Tampa hove to in the Indian Ocean alongside a sinking refugee boat and rescued 438 desperate souls trying to reach Australia.
Prime Minister John Howard saw this as a golden opportunity to play hard-ball and wedge the Labor opposition at the same time. When it became apparent that the captain of the Tampa, Arne Rinnan and his tiny crew were under duress from the large number of refugees, and were determined to land them at the nearest Australian port, Christmas Island, the government activated its elite SAS counterterrorist force.
Gilmore and Tinley were ordered back to Swanbourne to prepare the TAG to go to the island and to prevent any refugees from setting foot on Australian soil.
Tinley and most other senior military officers were in furious agreement that the ship could have been stopped and boarded by the navy and that using the SAS was complete overkill.
‘We looked at the credible threat and we looked at what was going to be achieved on the Tampa in the normal course of your tactical planning and…“Whoa, have we got an overmatch of capability here! A poor old box ship and a few refugees looking for a feed and a place to call home, well I’m going to throw the counterterrorist force at them, stand by”,’ he says.
After seizing the ship, the SAS men did a sterling humanitarian job liaising with the ship’s crew and assisting the refugees, including providing medical help, cleaning them up and feeding them, but it was their role as political soldiers that left a sour taste in many mouths.
One of the most unsavoury incidents involved the Norwegian ambassador to Australia, Ove Thorsheim.
Gilmore was on board the Tampa so Tinley was on the phone to special operations commander Major General Duncan Lewis in Canberra. Tinley, who was located in the island’s former Government House, believed Lewis was receiving his orders directly from Howard. Those orders were relayed by radio from Tinley to Gilmore and the squadron commander on the ship.
Tinley was seeking guidance about what to do with Ambassador Thorsheim. He was told to stop the ambassador from boarding the ship and was left in no doubt that the order had come from the very top of the Australian government, the prime minister himself.
‘We were invading the sovereign soil of the Norwegian country, a foreign country, on a flagged vessel of Norway. We were inhibiting the movement of an internationally protected person in the body of the ambassador of Norway who wanted to get on to the ship, which to my understanding was his universal right.’
The big fear in Canberra was that a request for asylum would be made directly to the ambassador. So a go-slow began and then suddenly and inexplicably the rigid hull inflatable boat (RHIB) that had been working perfectly and was due to carry Thorsheim to the Tampa, suffered a mechanical fault. And when the ambassador finally reached the ship he was prevented by an armed SAS soldier from accepting a letter from the asylum-seekers.
Tinley says the senior SAS men on the Tampa mission, the officers and the sergeants, knew they were engaged in a cynical political exercise. Initially there was some suggestion that pirates might have been involved or that some of the asylum-seekers who had pressured Captain Rinnan might have been armed, but it soon became apparent that it was simply a group of pathetic and hungry refugees.
The military term for boarding a hostile vessel is ‘ship underway capability’ and the SAS has finely honed skills in this area. They have been used against suspected drug vessels, fish poachers and now a 40,000-tonne container ship.
‘When we got there and it had to be done the guys just thought it was a waste of their resources and a waste of their time,’ he says.
The common feeling among the blokes as they left Christmas Island and returned to Perth was, ‘What was that all about?’
In his view, none of the men felt ‘used’, because they are employed to be used by government, but they understood clearly that the Tampa job was a blatant political exercise.
Tinley’s first marriage had foundered for a host of reasons.
‘Not the least of them was going away for seven months of the year,’ he says, ‘and the ego that you can sometimes develop in SAS. It hasn’t got a mortgage on egos but it’s got the down payment sorted out. That has to be continually managed because that’s the competitive nature of the person who goes there.’
He has since remarried and has another child and lives around the corner from his first wife and the boys. ‘I shared care for the boys because I take the responsibility of parenting really seriously and we’ve got two houses, one home, so those boys transition between two houses but they’re geographically very close. It is seamless, but not without its struggles.’
In late 2001 Tinley had no idea that politics would feature in his future. Sure, he had joined the ALP, but running for office was not on the radar.
By April 2005 the time had come to quit the army. Finally he was going to realise his dream of starting up and running a small business where he could apply his special forces pedigree.
‘So I started a manufacturing business, a little start-up company manufacturing paving and concrete products for the building industry,’ he says.
He thought he understood risk until he went into business.
‘You get on a helicopter in Kandahar and you can put a box around the risk and sort of assess where you’re going, assess the risk of whether you’re going to get shot at or not,’ he says. ‘When you go to start up a business and you underwrite it with your family home and a couple of investment properties you’ve cobbled together over 20-odd years and that’s your family’s future, nothing keeps you awake more at three in the morning than wondering whether you’re going to make wages this week.’
Tinley was inspired to make a run in politics by former federal Labor leader Kim Beazley and former WA Labor Premier Geoff Gallop. It was Beazley who phoned and asked him to run for the Liberal-held marginal seat of Stirling in the northern suburbs of Perth.
He soon realised that a fight for a marginal seat required full-time effort. In February 2007 he gave up the business to go campaigning for the federal election.
‘It was a fantastic adventure but I’ve got to say my wife runs that business now. As she says, “You start things, I’ll finish them.”’
He has no family history in politics and he comes from conservative stock.
When he told his father that he had been pre-selected to run in the 2007 election, his father said, ‘Oh, good.’
‘For [the seat of] Stirling,’ Pete Tinley added.
