A Fairfax journalist admits he wants Abbott's boat policies to fail In today's column I asked: You thought me too harsh? At least one of the journalists demanding the Coalition release information helpful to people smugglers is honest. Take a bow, Jack Waterford, of Fairfax's Canberra Times: There are many people, including me, who want to see our shameful policies fail. Of course, if those policies fail, more people will drown but what does Waterford care of the consequences? Still, credit to Waterford. Now for more journalists to admit they, too, would rather boat people drown than Abbott succeed. Journalists from the Guardian Australia and the ABC go a long way to sabotaging the boat people policy by revealing Australia (note: under the Rudd Government) monitored the phone calls of even the Indonesian president and his wife: Material leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden reveals that Australia's intelligence gathering in Indonesia has gone all the way to the president. Documents obtained by the ABC and Guardian Australia, from material leaked by the former contractor at the US National Security Agency, show that Australian intelligence attempted to listen in to president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono's telephone conversations on at least one occasion. The documents also show that they tracked the activity on his mobile phone for 15 days in August 2009. The top-secret documents are from Australia's electronic intelligence agency, the Defence Signals Directorate (now called the Australian Signals Directorate) ... They show that Australian intelligence actively sought a long-term strategy to continue to monitor the president's mobile phone activity. The surveillance targets also included senior figures in his inner circle and even the president's wife Kristiani Herawati (also known as Ani Yudhoyono). Also on the list of targets is the vice president Boediono, the former vice president Yussuf Kalla, the foreign affairs spokesman, the security minister and the information minister. Rudd and his Ministers should take the blame for the inevitable fall out. But guess who the media will gun for instead? Oh, and the answer is not "the media."