Michael Danby (Melbourne Ports, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am glad to have this brief opportunity to speak on the tabling of this report, Australia’s relationship with the Republic of Korea; and developments on the Korean peninsula. I thank the honourable member for Fadden, Chair of the Foreign Affairs Subcommittee, and the other members of the Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade who took part in this inquiry, and also the highly competent staff of the committee secretariat—who are sitting over there on the advisers benches—who have helped us greatly with their usual efficiency in compiling this report.

There are two completely different matters to be discussed in terms of Australia’s relationships with the Korean peninsula. The first is our flourishing relationship with the Republic of Korea, which in the past 50 years has grown from a war-ravaged backwater to become one of the world’s most prosperous and dynamic economies and a flourishing democracy. South Korea is now one of Australia’s most important trading partners. The report makes some valuable recommendations on the further development of our relationship with South Korea, all of which I support.

I note the very friendly relationship that exists between our two countries. Recently, for instance, I had the honour of taking the South Korean Ambassador to an Australian film showing here in Parliament House. He remarked to me that, in his view, The Proposition was an Australian western—a very perspicacious judgement.

I also note some very good political developments both in South Korea and in the US Congress. At the second session of the 109th Congress, Senator Brownback moved a concurrent resolution which was very similar to the words of the South Korean foreign minister, Ban Ki-moon, on 28 July. Both of them seek to integrate not just our strategic concerns but our concerns about human rights and other issues in a wider framework—perhaps similar to the Helsinki framework that had such beneficial effects in Europe—in North Asia.

The other matter that we need to consider in relation to North Korea—apart from the security question, which I will address in the Main Committee—is that of human rights. I recently discovered the wonderful Google Earth website, which provides detailed satellite photography of the entire surface of the earth. If you zoom in on the border region between North and South Korea, you will see a remarkable thing. On the south side of the border, right up to the border fence, you see neat, well-tended farms. On the north side, there is nothing but wasteland. This is the same country with the same soil, the same climate and the same people. Also, there are lights at night on the South Korean side and complete darkness on the North Korean side.

We are sometimes told that North Korea cannot feed itself because of natural disasters. This is nonsense. The reason there is famine in North Korea is simple: the imposition of an irrational political and economic system that makes it impossible for the country to grow enough food. There has been no greater disaster in Korean history than the reign of Kim Il Sung and his son Kim Jong Il, who for 60 years have subjected 23 million people to one of the worst types of Stalinist oppression in history, including the collectivisation of agriculture. Collectivisation has produced food shortages everywhere it has been attempted. Only in North Korea has it been persisted with to the point of mass starvation.

The report draws attention to the critical human rights problems which flow from the situation inside North Korea. The first of these is the determination of the regime to control and manipulate all foreign aid so that it benefits the regime itself and feeds only those that the regime wants to feed—the party, the army, the security apparat and the elite. This poses a dilemma for government aid agencies, which naturally want to help the suffering people of North Korea. But just handing over food aid to the regime does not achieve this; it merely feeds the regime’s supporters, as I have said, while the workers and peasants go hungry. If Australia is to provide aid to North Korea, it must be targeted at those who need it and it must be directly delivered to them by aid agencies.

I understand and respect the urgent desire of aid agencies to give direct aid to the people of North Korea and their request that aid be delinked from political considerations. But the fact is that there is no way that aid and politics can be delinked, because of the nature of the regime itself. The regime does not care whether people in North Korea starve; it only cares about its own grip on power. To give aid to such a regime on its terms does not help the people of North Korea; it only prolongs their misery.

The second issue is the question of North Korean refugees. As the regime has grown more corrupt and less efficient at controlling its borders, hundreds of thousands of people have fled into China and a smaller number into Russia. Both governments refuse to recognise these people as refugees and, when they catch them, hand them back to North Korea. The UN estimates that 100,000 Koreans are living illegally in China—I have seen figures as high as 300,000—and, because of China’s attitude, they cannot be helped by the UNHCR.

This is an issue on which Australia can and should be doing more, given our much vaunted human rights dialogue with China. We should be raising at the dialogue the issue of Korean refugees being moved to South Korea in an orderly way. We should be protesting to both China and Russia about the forced repatriation of Korean refugees, which usually leads them straight to a labour camp and frequently to a death sentence.

I commend the report. I am very pleased that the ongoing relationship between our two countries— (Time expired)

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