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

Before I turn to the more narrow focus of the issue of Afghanistan I would like to talk about one of the things that parliamentarians have to understand about this deployment. Again I notice the long list of opposition speakers in this debate on the Afghanistan deployment and note that on this very serious issue we have an absence of government speakers. I find that very disappointing. This is the most dangerous deployment Australia is undertaking. You would know, Mr Deputy Speaker Lindsay, from our recent deployment to RIMPAC, the naval exercises of allied fleets in the Pacific, that we need to understand about the lives of our service people.

Last night, Mr Deputy Speaker, you had the pleasure, as did I, of joining a group of shipmates from HMAS Manoora, who did not gather to sing sea shanties but to reminisce about a wonderful time on HMAS Manoora, with the captain of that ship. We were well treated by the sailors. And again on HMAS Stuart we were treated very kindly by the sailors and the captain. It was a most valuable insight into the lives and difficulties of our service personnel.

We celebrated last night with our good shipmate Lieutenant Jillian Brownlie, who ran an extremely competent program for the Australian Navy, with six federal MPs on this very exhausting but important Australian Defence Force Parliamentary Program. I would encourage all my parliamentary colleagues to participate in this program, because it leads participants to comprehend military events that perhaps they would never have understood. With so few people currently in the Australian parliament having direct military experience, when this country is spending billions of dollars on the defence forces and sending people into real danger such as in Afghanistan, this program allows us to experience in a serious way what we are doing.

Certainly, like you, Mr Deputy Speaker, I have a much greater experience of the Australian Navy and the way it operates now, after seeing the difficulties that people have working on HMAS Manoora. They do a wonderful job. We worked with people from all levels of the ship, from observing helicopter operations through to the hot work in engineering and some of the more humble work in the galleys as well as duties on the bridge. But they all made it possible for Australia to send transport and armoured vehicles to our Army when the people of East Timor asked for order to be restored there. We could not have attempted to save Dili without our people in the Australian Army and Navy. It is all very well for us to pontificate here in the parliament. Without the pointy end, without people in the Navy taking 80 vehicles up and without the troops being in East Timor, order would not have been restored in Dili. Perhaps only now do I appreciate the great work that people do up there.

While I was on the naval RIMPAC exercises and on HMAS Stuart, I saw a test firing of the Nulka antimissile. This hovering missile has been produced by the Defence Science and Technology Organisation, DSTO. Friends of Australia in the US Navy said it was not possible to develop such a system. Of course it was developed between 1995 and 1997 and it is now deployed, we were told, on 50 per cent of the American fleet. The Nulka is designed particularly to handle the situations such as the apocalyptic scene that we all remember of the Exocet missiles going into the side of HMS Sheffield during the war in the Falklands. To see a $750,000 Australian designed system being successfully fired from an Australian ship, and hopefully successfully diverting inbound missiles from the Stuart, was proof of the success of Australian ingenuity, the hard work of the Australian Navy and the brilliant people—the scientists and technicians—who work at the Defence Science and Technology Organisation. All of that brings me back to the fact that Australian parliamentarians need to have a greater knowledge of our defence forces—our Navy, our Army and our Air Force—to understand, when we are deploying to difficult places like Afghanistan, the kinds of circumstances our people are in.

I will conclude on the RIMPAC exercises to say that I was very pleased with what I observed of the integration of females as sailors on all the ships we visited—not just on the USS Abraham Lincoln, which we were helicoptered onto, but particularly on the Australian ships. I noted that both captains advised me that having women sailors on board and active in all areas of the ship has, to some extent, raised the tone of behaviour on all of our Australian naval ships, and I think that is true throughout the armed forces. So that integration is working very well now after some initial difficulties.

I turn specifically back to my earlier remarks on Afghanistan and the deployment. I support the deployment to Afghanistan, as announced by the Prime Minister and supported by the Leader of the Opposition, but I agree with those who say that more thought needs to be given to the question of what our skilled and dedicated forces are there to achieve. Are they there just to pursue al-Qaeda and the Taliban or to help the government and the people of Afghanistan build a stable and democratic country? Afghanistan is frequently and correctly described as ‘terrorism central’ by the Leader of the Opposition. It was in Afghanistan that the September 11 attacks were planned, and the removal of the power of the Taliban regime was the first necessary step in the democratic world’s response to those attacks—the war on terrorism was our response to a war initiated by them.

Sadly—and this is commonly the case—the successful use of military force proved easier than the equally necessary political and economic follow-through. The US, having led the campaign to remove the Taliban, moved on Iraq with the enthusiastic support of the Howard government. Afghanistan dropped out of our public attention and off our radar screens and, as I mentioned, unfortunately all the promises made to the people of Afghanistan and to the government of Afghanistan in that new democratic transition by the very famous Berlin conference of donors have not been delivered on. If I were an Afghan or a member of the Afghanistan government—particularly the new democratic government—I would be feeling very aggrieved that there had been little follow-through by the countries that had promised so grandiosely to help with the reconstruction of Afghanistan, which was nearly destroyed by the protracted attention of communist and then Islamist totalitarianism.

The result has been the deterioration we have seen in the political, economic and security situation over the past year. There is a resurgence of warlordism fuelled by the narcotics industry. The Taliban has reasserted itself in the southern provinces. So now we find that the nation-building work that should have been done in 2002 and 2003 will have to be redone in 2006 and 2007 in more difficult circumstances. This gives Australia a great opportunity. There are few defence forces in the world with greater experience in nation building and a greater record of success than the ADF.

In East Timor, we arrived in a country which was totally devastated, depopulated and bankrupt. The ADF, aided of course by others but in the leadership role, helped the people of East Timor rebuild their country physically, economically and politically. But when difficulties arose this year, through the policies of the former Prime Minister of East Timor, we went back and helped to restore stability. In the Solomons, again, the ADF and other Australian organisations are taking a leading role in rescuing a failed state. We should now be deploying this expertise to Afghanistan.

One of the lessons of many conflicts over the last 20 years is that the role of the defence forces when deployed to a foreign conflict is no longer merely one of defeating an enemy militarily. Equally important is the stabilisation of the country in question once military success has been achieved. It is relatively easy to defeat a non-state army like the Taliban in the sense of driving them away from populated areas, but it is almost impossible to destroy them totally. Prevention of their resurgence is a politically more important task than a military one. We see in Sri Lanka a situation where that has not been achieved.

So what should the ADF be doing now in Afghanistan? Of course, the Taliban and other insurgent forces need to be contained, but equally important is the task of capacity building of the Afghan state to control its own territory, to meet the needs of its people and to defend itself against terrorists and insurgents. As outsiders, we Australians or Americans or NATO cannot police Afghanistan by ourselves; we can only help the Afghans develop the capacity to do so. This is a task in which others have tried and failed, admittedly under very difficult circumstances, but I have great faith in the men and women of the ADF. I believe that, if properly equipped and supported, they can achieve the same success in Afghanistan as they have achieved in East Timor and the Solomons.

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