Season 1999

E1. Blood Sport

Feb 8, 1999 · 60m

Four Corners goes behind the scenes of the Sydney Organising Committee for the Olympic Games (SOCOG) and finds a ruthless and secretive world of deals and power struggles that has produced a long list of casualties. The program features interviews with all the key players behind the Sydney 2000 Games - Rod McGeoch , John Coates, Michael Knight, SallyAnne Atkinson, Phil Coles and many others

E2. Schizophrenia

60m

Around 12 years ago Tony Jones first reported on the lives of people with schizophrenia. It was a story of lives lived in quiet desperation. He finds that in the intervening years nothing much has changed.

E3. A Race To Survive

Feb 22, 1999 · 60m

Four Corners tells the disturbing story behind one of our worst sporting disasters. How was it that some of the world's most experienced yachtsmen sailed into a storm they couldn't survive? And once they did, what did race organisers do to help them?

E4. When Good Men Do Nothing

60m

This buy-in from BBC Panorama is a story about the price to be paid when good men do nothing. A former Australian war crimes investigator blows the whistle on a United Nations coverup of the holocaust in Rwanda. In a follow up interview he claims that the cover-up continues today.

E5. The Vatican's Verdict

60m

Four Corners looks at the crisis in the Catholic Church -- how the Vatican turned against the Church in Australia and why.

E6. A Licence to Kill

Mar 15, 1999 · 60m

Video journalist Mark Davis went into East Timor and captured shocking evidence of Indonesian-backed militia groups having a 'Licence to Kill'. Davis managed to attain interviews with militia leaders, the aftermath of a killing in Dili and footage of the pro-independence guerrillas in their mountain hideout.

E7. Crash Through Or Crash

60m

In the weeks leading up to Dick Smith's shock resignation as head of Australia's air safety body, CASA, award-winning reporter Liz Jackson began investigating the bitter behind-the-scenes conflict between Smith and his industry opponents. What emerges is a compelling account of how and why Smith and his plans to reinvigorate aviation safety foundered.

E8. Rebels

60m

The Rebels is Australia's largest outlaw motorcycle club. They join a growing global tribe of bikers, described by law enforcement agencies like the FBI, as "more dangerous than the mafia". Reporter Chris Masters takes us inside a so-called outlaw gang, where we stare our fears directly in the face.

E9. Critical Mass

60m

Four Corners goes inside the company called Pangea to examine a scheme that's provoked accusations of secrecy and back-door influence peddling. A scheme that forces Australia to confront its role in the nuclear world

E10. Eviction of a Nation

May 3, 1999 · 60m

The systematic eviction of his own people from his own state of Kosovo crowns a decade of murder and tyranny in what is left of Slobodan Milosevic's Yugoslavia. Now what are the true goals of the NATO forces which oppose him? In this report, Chris Masters looks into a future at war with the past.

E11. Rogue's Gallery

60m

The booming business of art fraud is putting the credibility of an industry now worth more than $300 million a year on the line. Sally Neighbour reports.

E12. Deep Trouble

60m

In this major investigation, Andrew Fowler reveals the scandalous state of the Navy's new Collins class submarines. So far, none of the six submarines, commissioned for a cost of $5 billion, are battle ready and are fit to go nowhere. Commodore Mick Dunne, appointed by the Navy to investigate, speaks about his fears for the submarines and the men and women who crew them.

E13. Dot for Dollar

60m

Sally Neighbour investigates the frauds and fakerys that undermine the credibility of Aboriginal art and exposes those who stand accused of exploiting Australia's most highly-acclaimed Aboriginal artist, Clifford Possum. The program reveals the affects of sharp operators and rapid commercialisation of an industry in which production lines of non-Aboriginal workers manufacture and sell "authentic" Aboriginal artefacts

E14. In Harms Way

60m

This program traces the lives of four people attempting to beat heroin addiction. It's also an investigation into the politics surrounding the availability and range of treatments for Australia's heroin addicts. It questions whether the debate on heroin is obscuring the real task of finding solutions for addicts.

E15. CARE on Trial

60m

Liz Jackson tracks the negotiations and behind-the-scenes efforts by CARE Australia and the Government's envoy, Malcolm Fraser, to secure the release of aid workers Steve Pratt and Peter Wallace. Pratt and Wallace had been imprisoned in Belgrade and convicted of passing secret military information to foreign organisations. The program also examines the consequences their trial may have on the future of CARE and other aid organisations.

E16. The Price of Power

60m

After negotiating the landmark GST deal with the Government, Democrat's leader Meg Lees and her party are under seige, accused of selling-out on important principles. Andrew Fowler reveals the decisions which is causing such dissent within the Democrat's ranks. With splits at all levels within the party, and deputy leader, Natasha Stott-Despoja, at odds with her leader, this program examines the price Meg Lees has paid for power.

E17. Blood on the Cross

60m

Mark Davis investigates allegations about the role of the International Red Cross and the British military in a massacre in the Southern Highlands of Irian Jaya in May 1996. The story of what happened has never been told before

E18. Double Jeopardy

60m

A recent hearing for a sexual abuse case allowed a seven-year-old boy to be subjected to hours of brutal cross-examination. The incident raises the question of how children should be handled as witnesses in court. Why is Australia's legal system failing our children at a time when they are most in need?

E19. Big Man Politics

60m

Papua New Guinea, our nearest neighbour, has a new prime minister, delivered to his people by a political system that includes kidnapping, bribes and thuggery. Can Sir Mekere Morauta drag the country back from the brink of political and economic chaos? Four Corners goes behind the security guards to witness Big Man politics, PNG style.

E20. Die by Wire

Aug 2, 1999 · 60m

The BBC's Panorama reveals the dangers of kapton wire -- a type of wire used in over one third of the world's aircraft.

E21. War of Words

60m

This month Australian primary school students will sit the first national reading and writing test - part of the government's efforts to improve literacy in the face of statistics released two years ago by Education Minister Dr David Kemp, which showed that about one in three eight- and nine-year-olds couldn't read and write properly. Four Corners examines the evidence that has fuelled the Government's literacy crusade, a crusade that has led to workplace programs and the implementation of a compulsory literacy scheme for young people on the dole

E22. Dead Kid Walking

60m

This BBC Correspondent Special program looks at the moral question of capital punishment. Sean Sellars was 16-years-old when he murdered his parents in their sleep. Six months previously he murdered a convenience store clerk for no apparent reason other than the thrill of killing. In this program Sellars is interviewed about his crimes, his life on death row and his imminent execution. In the case that divided American opinion like no other death row case, Dead Kid Walking highlights the issues involved in the death penalty and juvenile justice.

E23. The People Smugglers' Guide to Australia

60m

Australia has long feared a kind of gravitational drift from the north. And this year the fears have been brought home by the arrival of large boatloads of people, particularly from Fujian in China. But these arrivals are not new. For years now illegals have been entering Australia. This program looks at how it is done, and who gets through

E24. Sea of Trouble

60m

As the world's fish stocks dry up, foreign fleets are targeting Australian fisheries. Four Corners tells the story of how foreign fishermen raided a fishing ground on the edge of our territorial border and how neither law nor diplomacy was able to stop them.

E25. Seeds of Doubt

60m

This program examines the failure of Australian regulators to put in place and independent regime addressing genetically modified food importation. It reveals how government, industry and science rushed headlong into the new world of genetic food whilst keeping Australian consumers in the dark -- eating unlabelled and unapproved genetically modified food.

E26. Silenced Majority

60m

When the East Timorese voted for independence from Indonesia on 30 August it was a vote for their own punishment. On the day our troops leave to head the East Timor peace-keeping force, Chris Masters' report looks at the calculation behind the chaos that has led to this situation.

E27. Crossroads

60m

This program tells the story behind the disintegration and death of Rod Ansell, the man known as the model for Mick Dundee in the movie "Crocodile Dundee". On 3rd of August Rod Ansell ambushed and killed Sergeant Glen Huitson in a police shoot-out on the bitumen highway linking north and south Australia. Peter George investigates the killing of the two men and examines the cultures most endangered by urbansiation and identifies what was lost when Rod Ansell and Glen Huitson were caught in the corssfire of myth and reality

E28. Driving Aden Ridgeway

60m

In this portrait of Senator Aden Ridgeway, Liz Jackson accompanies him to his political and spiritual homes. The 37-year-old Senator is Australia's only Aboriginal member of Federal Parliament. With his party, the Democrats, holding the balance of power in the Senate, Aden Ridgeway's power is considerable. Already he has exerted his influence.

E29. The Humanitarian War

60m

In March NATO went to war. It was a war fought in the name of human rights, yet NATO's determination not to take casualties extended the war and suffering. The main players of the war tell their story for the first time - how Operation Allied Force was won.

E30. The Vanishing

Oct 18, 1999 · 60m

Four weeks ago '4 Corners' produced 'Silenced Majority', the story of the referendum ballot and its immediate aftermath. 'The Vanishing' continues the story of the East Timorese people, but this time from the other side of the border. After the announcement of the referendum result, thousands of people of East Timor were killed and hundreds of thousands became refugees. By the time Interfet forces arrived on September 20, nearly half a million East Timorese had vanished - forced from their homes by the Indonesian army and their proxies in the militas. Many fled to the hills and found sanctuary with Falantil, the East Timorese armed resistance, but most were loaded at gunpoint onto planes, boats and trucks and transported across the border to West Timor.