BBC film uses CCTV to tell Kenyan story
Some liken her to Pauline Hanson, others to Sarah Palin. One thing is certain: Jacqui Lambie, the straight-talking, combative Tasmanian, is shaking up federal politics and injecting a breath of the real world into Canberra.
A single mother, reformed alcoholic and former army corporal, Lambie is one of three Palmer United Party (PUP) politicians who — with five other crossbenchers, including one closely aligned with the PUP — hold the balance of power in the Senate.
The 43-year-old arrived in Canberra in July with next to no political experience, and having not been in the workplace for 14 years. Now she is being courted by Prime Minister Tony Abbott, as he seeks to get unpopular budget measures passed, and the mining magnate Andrew Forrest, who wants her to champion his blueprint for welfare reform.
Lambie’s own pronouncements — ranging from her taste in men (rich and “well hung”) to advocating the adoption of a New Zealand-style system of parliamentary seats reserved for indigenous Australians — have guaranteed her an almost continuous media spotlight while providing rich fodder for newspapers.
In Parliament because “God performed a miracle and put me in this place”, as she told the Senate earlier this month, she refuses to kowtow even to Palmer, who enlisted her after she ran out of money to fund an independent campaign. “I don’t back down to Clive Palmer,” she told the ABC’s Australian Story. “Even a billionaire needs to be told, every now and again.”
Lambie, always clad in her trademark yellow, is not just an attention-seeker. She burns with real passion about the problems of her home state, especially unemployment; about the rough treatment, as she sees it, of military veterans; and about the interests of “the elderly, sick, needy and disabled . . . the battlers, smallbusiness owners and workers”.
The ultimate political outsider, she cares because she comes from that background. The daughter of a truck driver and factory worker who split up when she was 13, she grew up in public housing in Tasmania’s depressed northwest. After injuring her spine during army training, she had to fight the Department of Veteran Affairs for years to get compensation.
Her language is raw and to the point. The Prime Minister is a “political psychopath” and “bare-faced liar”. Unemployed young people, the targets of welfare cuts, already feel “like a bucket of s**t”. The high transport costs paid by Tasmanians are an “outrageous, stinking, filthy injustice”.
Jacqueline Maley, a Fairfax Media columnist, told Australian Story: “Jacqui Lambie is completely unvarnished by the
Senator Jacqui Lambie, in her trademark yellow suit, was sworn in in July.
[She] is completely unvarnished
by the political machine. Jacqueline Maley,
Fairfax Media
political machine. You might say that she’s rough as guts, but she resembles real people more than anybody else in Parliament.”
Malcolm Farr, political editor of the News Corp website, concurs. “It’s part of the brilliance and resilience of our political system that this woman . . . can make it to the Australian Parliament,” he says.
During her maiden speech, Lambie stunned many listeners by declaring that she has Aboriginal ancestry, as a descendant of the revered Tasmanian chief Mannalargenna. The claim was dismissed as “not factual” by Clyde Mansell, chairman of the Tasmanian Aboriginal Land Council. Lambie promptly warned Mansell to “watch your step with me” and offered to have a DNA test.
Regardless of that issue, she is contributing to the national conversation about indigenous disadvantage and recognition. No less a person than Noel Pearson, one of Australia’s most widely respected indigenous leaders, has described her proposal for dedicated seats in federal parliament as “one model” meriting proper debate. Even Abbott did not rule out “serious discussions” about it.
Lambie has talked candidly about the depression, alcoholism and painkiller addiction which she battled after leaving the Australian Defence Force, where she had been a driver and military police officer.
Palmer calls her “a straight shooter”. Sometimes she would be well advised to keep her powder dry. Like when she declared that Australians who support sharia law “should probably pack up their bags and get out of here”. Or when she defended Palmer after he criticised the Chinese as “mongrels” who “shoot their own people”. Just as Palmer was damping down that row, Lambie sprang in to warn that “we can’t ignore the threat of Communist Chinese invasion”. That earned her the nickname “Lambo” in the Courier-Mail.
Andrew Wilkie, the Independent Tasmanian MP, believes she has already outgrown the PUP and could be re-elected in her own right. He told Australian Story: “If she can survive [the pressure] . . . and develop more confidence and a more sophisticated understanding of public policy, I think she could have quite a long and successful future in the Parliament.” A Briton whose wife was murdered in Nairobi’s Westgate shopping centre massacre has told for the first time of their ordeal as Islamist militants unleashed the mayhem that ended with 71 people dead, and of the moment he realised that his wife’s life was ebbing away.
Niall Saville, now 36, had been sitting with his South Korean wife, Moon Hee Kang, 38, in a hamburger restaurant facing the street when the attack began with a grenade explosion at 12.30pm, followed by heavy gunfire, one year ago today.
Saville, a development economist, dived into the restaurant, then realised his wife was not behind him.
“I saw her crawling on the ground, clearly in a lot of pain, her legs looked very bloodied,” he recalled.
Despite sheltering beside a metal counter, the couple soon found themselves being stalked by one of the four gunmen from the al-Shabaab militant group, linked to al-Qaeda, who were purportedly sent to avenge Kenya’s military incursion into neighbouring Somalia.
“I was looking at his face. He was young. He looked at me and he fired,” Saville said.
But the gunman, now believed to have been a Norwegian citizen, Hassan Abdi Duhulow, was not yet satisfied. At pointblank range he repeatedly shot the couple.
That moment is among dozens of similar incidents in footage recorded that day by the many CCTV cameras in the shopping centre, much of it never before seen publicly.
It has been pieced together for a BBC film, Terror at the Mall, with much of the story narrated by those of different nationalities and faiths who survived the deadly attack. The footage paints an unflinching portrait of indiscriminate violence and terror — including the sight of the badly wounded Saville and Kang trying to reach out to one another as they lie on the floor behind the counter.
Saville realised his wife “was clearly on the edge” an hour after they were shot, he said.
“She was shaking from what must have been a lot of blood loss — clearly in a lot of pain, clearly very scared,” he recalled.
Amber Prior, who had been shopping with her 6-year-old daughter and 4-yearold son, was shot in the pelvis while hiding behind the meat counter.
“You’re just lying there waiting to see when it’s going to be you, when it’s going to be your turn,” she said. “I put my arms over my son and I put my leg over my daughter, then the footsteps got closer and the shooting began.”
As she lay bleeding on the floor for more than half an hour, too terrified to move, others around her died.
Eventually, the gunmen returned to ask if any children were still alive.
Previously unseen CCTV footage shows the extraordinary moment when Prior managed to stand up, despite her injuries, and beg for the release of her children, who were unhurt.