Why we need to talk about the de

We need to talk about the death penalty. Again. Indeed, as we mark the two-year anniversary of the executions of Myuran Sukumaran and Andrew Chan in Indonesia – as the Philippines prepares to reintroduce capital punishment for drug offences and our closest ally dispatches four Arkansas men by lethal injection in the space of eight days with all the procedural fairness of a round of Russian roulette – what better time to take stock?

The irony of Australia's stance on capital punishment – or one of the many ironies – is that for all our lofty aspirations about leading death penalty abolition worldwide we are no closer to a truly principled position. Or even a coherent one.

In fact, despite a 10-month inquiry by the Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade – launched three short months after Chan and Sukumaran's deaths in 2015 – and despite a landslide of submissions, nine public hearings and wide-ranging recommendations with bipartisan support, not much has changed. Not much at all.

Back in April 2015, in the days leading up to the executions, Australians were galvanised by the grim theatrics of Indonesia's death penalty preparations – the Kafkaesque pronouncements, the chest beating and political manoeuvering. We were no less horrified, though, by the complicity of our federal police in the whole affair because, let's face it, whatever their motives in relation to the apprehension of the so-called Bali Nine, it's not often that the decision making of our federal law enforcement authorities is disclosed in such egregious detail, or that the grim consequences of a particular course of action are so eminently foreseeable.

Prison inmates in the Philippines, a country preparing to reintroduce capital punishment.

So it's particularly disappointing to discover that our appetite for sharing information with death penalty states has not abated since the Bali Nine executions, or even since the Joint Standing Committee released its recommendations, which included severe restrictions around AFP information sharing with foreign law enforcement agencies in death penalty cases. Figures recently released under freedom-of-information laws reveal that the rate at which the AFP approves requests for information in death penalty cases – which hovered at around 92 per cent between 2010 and 2014 – was 92 per cent in 2015 and 96 per cent last year.

I say disappointing, but it's hardly surprising. And the reason it should come as no surprise is that the Australian government – yes, the same government that's making a pitch for a seat on the UN Human Rights Council and has vowed to lead the global charge for death penalty abolition – has rejected almost all of the recommended safeguards on information sharing put forward by the committee.

And if that weren't bad enough, then ponder the official government response which assures us that the AFP's death penalty guideline "is the most appropriate way to balance the need for effective co-operation on transnational crime and the commitment to protecting individuals from the death penalty" – despite the fact that said guideline currently permits information sharing with retentionist nations in almost every single instance. It's not what most would consider a balance, as such, but you'd be hard-pressed to argue it's inconsistent with the AFP's crime fighting remit, and it's a pretty reasonable indication, more to the point, of where our government's priorities really lie.

As for the committee's seemingly judicious recommendation that "high risk" requests for law enforcement assistance be directed to the minister for decision, even there the government has dodged responsibility, pushing it back to the AFP, at least in the pre-arrest phase (despite the fact that ministerial oversight at such a stage may well have altered the fates of Sukumaran and Chan).

So it's no mistake, it seems, that it wasn't the minister out there, fronting a hostile media in the days following the executions in 2015. Instead, it was a sombre-faced AFP Commissioner, Andrew Colvin, and his deputy Mike Phelan; two men convinced they'd done exactly what was required of them, but patently haunted by their decisions nonetheless. And the fact that the AFP had been cleared of any wrongdoing in a Federal Court didn't mean much to an anguished public, stunned by the executions.

And this is the whole problem, of course. Because the trouble didn't ever lie primarily with the AFP – who have probably copped more than their fair share of the blame for the Bali Nine debacle despite acting in accordance with the objects of the AFP Act and with a series of fairly unequivocal ministerial directives, the most current iteration of which is entirely silent on the death penalty.

No. The problem, instead, lies with a government that, despite all its posturing, has made it abundantly clear that it would prefer not to be on the frontline when difficult decisions need to be made. When it comes to the challenging task of tackling transnational organised crime in a way that recognises and protects our most fundamental human right – as other Western jurisdictions have done – this government and, indeed, a succession of Australian governments, have baulked. Which is a terrible shame, because if we truly want to strike a balance between tackling crime and protecting human rights, then it can only come from the top.

So, here we find ourselves, two years on. In fact, it's almost two years to the day since the Federal Police Commissioner stood before us all and gave us fair warning: there is no guarantee that a Bali Nine scenario won't happen again. Sadly, though, until we have a government prepared to offer more than hollow platitudes, in view of our current practices I think it's more accurate to say that it's only a matter of time until it does.

Sarah Gill is a Fairfax Media columnist.