Duncan Kerr (Denison, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

This House would do well to heed the remarks of the member for Lingiari in his current role and in his former role as member for the Northern Territory. The member for Lingiari has had probably the most long-standing involvement with the East Timorese community in Australia of any parliamentarian, and he has had a record of speaking about the circumstances of that country—formerly when it was part of Indonesia and as it went through its turmoils—that every other member of this House could learn much from. I think those remarks are ones which we ought to reflect on.

I might make my own comments about the deployment of Australian forces in East Timor. The member for Lingiari put his finger on one of the greatest errors that was made in the judgment of the international community but more particularly the Australian foreign affairs establishment when it proposed and then executed a decision to wind down the UN presence after independence. It was a decision taken against the wishes of the government of East Timor, which was concerned about the stability of the new nation and looked to the international community to have an ongoing presence beyond that which was ultimately mandated. I think that the member for Lingiari is too gentle when he reflects on those that participated in the decision, because largely the international community took its lead from the advice tendered by Australia—that is, the United Nations brought its engagement and deployment to an end because the Australian government pressed it to do so.

The problem that we face now is similar to the circumstances and lack of foresight that applied in the Solomons. In both instances the Australian government took a short-term decision—in the case of East Timor to wind down a deployment that prevented an escalation of violence and in the case of the Solomons not to involve itself in making any effort to prevent the breakdown of civil order in that country. They were decisions which in the end resulted in Australia having to commit far greater resources of far greater substance at far greater risk than would have been the case had earlier decisions been made on a more sustainable basis.

There is an old proverb that we all know and that was drilled into us as kids if we come from an Anglo-Saxon background: a stitch in time saves nine. Two instances have confronted the Australian foreign affairs establishment in our own backyard, in the South Pacific and in our near north, where we have failed, where we have not understood the dynamics of the local community and where we have not applied ourselves intelligently to the security circumstances of those countries.

In East Timor after independence we were part of an international force deployed on the ground to assist in the building of a new nation. The nation had been riven by internal conflict in the past, where the actions of elements previously loyal to the Indonesian regime had been in conflict with Fretilin and other forces seeking independence for East Timor. That conflict saw a huge proportion of the population of that now independent nation killed in circumstances which were vividly displayed in a recent fictionalised series that the ABC put to air about those tragic events.

When we were pressed by that government in its frailty to continue to have troops and a presence on the ground from the international community, we took a short-term, penny-pinching decision: ‘No, let’s go home. It’s time to go home. Leave that country to its own resources. Let’s withdraw.’ The tragedy is that, when we did that and then the tensions that were inherent and under the surface bubbled to the top, we had to come in with a military solution, which was inefficient because it was not effectively a policing solution and which came in after lives had been lost.

In the same manner, if we go to the instance of the Solomon Islands, I was part of a joint delegation of this parliament that went to the Solomon Islands. We were confronted with a request from the Prime Minister of the Solomon Islands that Australia make available seven Australian Federal Police officers to be part of a regional group—that is, from Papua New Guinea, Australia, Vanuatu and perhaps Fiji; I cannot remember the precise break-up that they were speaking off—to assist in law enforcement because they felt that circumstances were becoming so frayed that their country might be on the brink of something quite terrible. What surprised me as we left that meeting with the Prime Minister, and as I turned to the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, who were hosting us, was that we had gone into that meeting without that important knowledge being made available to us. As parliamentarians we were not supposed to know that the government of the Solomon Islands had made that request. It was an embarrassment to our high commission that the Prime Minister had made that embarrassing request to us.

The delegation was not stupid. The delegation had subsequent meetings. We met with the Leader of the Opposition and we said, ‘What do you think about the Prime Minister’s request?’ The Leader of the Opposition said: ‘We support it. This country is facing the possibility of breakdown and whilst we, of course, oppose the government of the day and would like to see ourselves replace it, we recognise that we are on unsound ground and we need some local police to prevent an outbreak of violence in our community.’ Then we went to the chief justice of the Solomon Islands and we asked the same question. The chief justice said, ‘The constitutional position doesn’t leave this in my hands, but my personal view is that our country faces the prospect of disintegration unless we have such assistance.’

On coming back to Australia I immediately wrote to the Minister for Foreign Affairs drawing attention to these requests and saying, ‘There was a foreign affairs, but also a national interest, imperative in us responding constructively to those requests.’ Again, sadly, we did not; we did not take the stitch in time. When the country fell into the chaos that it did with loss of lives, with an insurrection, with a coup, we then had to bring in the military and a stabilisation force. We withdrew it and we had to go back again. We have had these patterns of not anticipating, not thinking through the kinds of engagements that we are so vitally involved in in our own backyard.

If there is one place where Australian diplomatic intelligence and diplomatic strength on the ground matters, it is in the South Pacific. Here we are the regional superpower. It may be in the order of status within the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade that a posting to Italy or a posting to Vienna is infinitely more desirable, but in terms of our national interest such postings should be significantly less important in their status and in their resourcing than those in our near neighbourhood, where we actually are the superpower, where what we do matters, where the countries actually request of us assistance and where our decisions either to grant that or to refuse it have the kind of profound implications that they have had in the Solomon Islands and in Timor-Leste, and may have in Papua New Guinea and other countries where the potentiality for discord, and even for breakdown in civil governance, cannot be entirely discounted.

That is why I am concerned in this instance to use these reflective moments to, firstly, say we honour those who have responded to the call in our military to go to East Timor. We make no criticism of them, but they have had to come in after the Australian foreign affairs establishment dropped the ball in terms of its decision and got out cheap. In the same way we had a much higher cost in the Solomons, where we did not take advantage of an opportunity before the country descended into chaos to stabilise situations, and we have had two military interventions which have had significant costs to that country and to the relationship generally between the peoples of it.

These are important lessons that we need to learn. We need to be ready to anticipate and to act with some understanding of our regional importance. I think that the time has long ceased where we can have an order of priority in terms of our diplomatic establishment that allows our postings to be determined on the old traditional method, where the greatest seniority applied to people holding European and old-world positions.

This is our sphere of influence. This is where what Australians do matters. We also have to think carefully about the point that the member for Lingiari spoke about—that is, we have to beware of becoming an army of occupation. If we do go into these countries, we have to carry the international community with us and be blue-hatted where that is possible. We also have to beware that we do not find ourselves in exactly that situation in Iraq, where we are now being invited to reconsider our mission. The Prime Minister of Iraq has said that he expects foreign forces to be out of the country by November 2007, and in all but two provinces he expects foreign troops to be out by the end of this year. Those provinces do not include the provinces in which Australia currently has its troops. A good friend knows when to leave. When a host starts making hints like that, you start making plans to get out. The Australian government has to listen to this; otherwise it will be perceived not only by the extremists in Iraq but also by large sections of the population that Australia is overstaying its welcome. Sadly, Bush and Blair seem to have a tin ear. They have not responded to what is a signal of growing national impatience in Iraq about a perceived foreign occupation of that country.

If we do not have a little more sophistication in our response, but simply go along as clones of the Bush-Blair strategy of saying there is an indefinite occupation and an indefinite commitment of our troops—notwithstanding the judgments of the local national government—then we will risk being seen as an army of occupation, and not only by the al-Qaeda related people or even the former Saddamist loyalists but also by a widespread group of persons in that country. In the same way, if we do not build a coalition that presents us in Timor under blue helmets—

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