Laurie Ferguson (Reid, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Consumer Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

I join with other opposition members in commending the government’s decision to enhance our forces in Afghanistan. The announcement was made by the Prime Minister last Wednesday. I also welcome the indication that there will be a review in six months time of the adequacy. Tom Hyland, in an article on 14 August cited by other members, noted:

The public is left ignorant of what is being done in its name, while soldiers and their families go without recognition.

I also would amplify the comments made by many opposition speakers that we are in this sorry situation today because of the government’s previous decision on Iraq and the way in which the eye was taken off the ball in Afghanistan. One can note many comments about the current picture there. In the Observer of 9 July the leader article commented:

Victory, however, will not be easy and will require much clever diplomacy, military will, deft handling of Afghan politics and, above all, a far greater commitment than the West has so far shown.

It also noted:

... one recent study found that international aid to Afghanistan equals £30 per person, as compared with £400 in Bosnia and £130 in Iraq.

It also went on to comment:

... the West’s political leaders must be explicit about what is at stake and what is needed. They must win popular support at home. This will be particularly vital if the effort needs to be sustained, maybe over decades.

Certainly the degree of secrecy associated with Australia’s participation is not the kind of attitude that is going to win that national support. Another article in the Guardian of 5 July by Simon Jenkins summarised the situation:

By last December it was abundantly clear that Helmand—

that is a province, of course—

and the eastern border provinces were no longer friendly territory. Aid workers were running back to Kabul. Information indicated that insurgents of every tribe and origin were reforming in Pakistan ...

We have a coalition of Taliban, warlords, drug dealers and various dissident elements raging a campaign at the moment which is characterised by large-scale destruction of schools, murder of teachers and anonymous night-time messages left on teachers’ doors indicating that they will be killed if they persist in running schools, particularly for girls. The situation was summarised by Declan Walsh on 28 June. He said, when speaking of President Karzai, who in 2004 garnered 54 per cent of the vote, that it:

... looks increasingly isolated—

that is, the regime—

inside his fortified Kabul palace.

Of course, it is not the first time that this government has unfortunately left a situation where dereliction of duty has led to very severe consequences for individuals. The fate that is besetting large numbers of Afghans at the moment was perhaps earlier indicated in Timor. In the last week or so we have had a statement by a previously prominent Indonesian foreign affairs official and a current spokesman for the President about the way in which Australia played a major role in persuading the Indonesians to move towards a vote for the Timorese people. However, I note an article in the latest copy of Dissent magazine by Adam Hughes Henry where he talked about:

The ethical condemnation of the government of East Timor, the newest and one of the poorest nations on earth, by Howard should be cause for serious reflection and analysis. The Defence Signals Directorate (DSD) was aware prior to the 1999 ballot that the Pro-Integrationist Militias were nothing more than proxies of the TNI (Indonesian Army). The Howard government also refused to accept US assessments that UN peace keepers would be required to protect the 1999 UN-operated independence ballot from potential chaos. Having consistently argued that the Indonesian military were best equipped to handle security Howard and Downer watched the post-referendum rampage by TNI-supported militias raze Dili. Tens of thousands of Timorese were forced at gun point into West Timor refugee camps.

So that sorry situation, which saw many Timorese needlessly die because of the great trust by Australia put in Indonesian authorities as protectors rather than the murderers, has been repeated. The reason I mention that is that I recall day after day in this parliament, when after too many years the opposition finally reversed its position on Timor, the ridicule that was heaped upon the foreign affairs spokesman, Laurie Brereton, for saying that we could not trust the Indonesians in the current conduct of that plebiscite.

The reason I raise this is that once again in this situation we had Labor’s foreign affairs spokesman and the member for Bruce, after their return to Australia in April 2004, very clearly cautioning their view of the collapse of the situation in Afghanistan. Once again, they were ridiculed and told they were worrying too much, things were under control and Australia had it well and truly covered. But we see of course how the decision to wind back our engagement there and to emphasise Iraq has led to the deterioration that we now witness in Afghanistan. Quite frankly, as the Leader of the Opposition has said, the situation in these two countries is very different. In Afghanistan, historically, because of a very unprincipled and, one might even say, moronic intervention by the Soviets, we have a situation whereby the US had recourse to Islamic fundamentalists to overthrow that government—a situation where my enemy’s enemy is my friend. Today we live with this problem and we see the way in which the Afghan people are suffering.

As I say, this has been a serious misjudgement and dereliction by the government. Also, we have a situation in Afghanistan where there has historically been clear complicity by the Pakistani security forces in setting up these extremist Islamic forces. One does not totally dismiss the possibility that there is still a degree of collaboration and a degree of reticence about pursuing these forces. We have a situation where the Taliban—having, for all their many faults, suppressed heroin during their period in government for religious reasons—are now increasingly seeing heroin as a way of financing their insurrection.

The opposition does not see a parallel with Iraq in this. It does not see it as a uniform, one-dimensional war on terrorism. The situation is very different. We have a situation here where clearly external forces were utilised by the United States and Pakistan in the short term to overthrow an unpopular central government under Soviet tutelage and this instigation has, as for many times, been foreign, non-Afghan and has included people from the Middle East, Pakistan and South-East Asia. Of course, the concern for us is that there are many instances on the record where training is being undertaken to induce terrorism. It was only after September 11 that the West decided that the regime in Afghanistan might not be the greatest on the block and that they might be an international danger. Up until then, they had been coddled and supported because they were seen as a lesser evil than that central government.

I want to divert for one moment from talking about the broader Afghan issue to say that this issue does particularly affect my constituents. I was interested to note a recent response to a question on notice I had placed about the settlement of refugee humanitarians in New South Wales. It is interesting to note that the three municipalities in my federal electorate—Parramatta, Holroyd and Auburn—take 30 per cent of the New South Wales refugee humanitarians. I can assure you that on a daily basis I have Hazaras coming in who raise their continual insecurity. There might be a few ministers in the current Afghan government who come from the long suppressed Hazara minority, but one cannot be totally sure that, because of the presence of those ministers, the Hazaran minority is protected from a traditional pattern of denigration, intimidation and discrimination.

Equally, we have the situation where a large number of people were adherents to the previous Najibullah pro-Soviet government. They have tended to be Farsi-speaking Western oriented people from the intelligentsia, educated at the Kabul polytechnic or at the university, who have no future back in Afghanistan regardless of the nice words that can be said about democratic processes in that country. You even have cases where a small number of claimants of Pashtun ancestry who are in a different environment today where the Afghans government is heavily influenced by non-Pashtuns would claim that they are discriminated against—and these are legitimate, although you and I might disagree with these people.

So what happens in Afghanistan is not just a philosophical question for me and my constituents. We have a large Afghan population. They have local institutions. They are involved in local mosques. I want to put on the record my appreciation for a number of those people who work for the community: Sayed Zobair, whose wife and children tragically fell into the blowhole at Kiama some years ago and whose daughter suicided with a friend a year later in memory of her mother, and also Mr Hamid Hassib from the Shia community. I am pleased to have been involved with them in helping to establish their religious centre near my office. What is happening in Afghanistan—this failure of the government to keep themselves focused on Afghanistan, their diversion, now seen as a total disaster, into Iraq, which has only led to an outbreak of internecine and interreligious conflict—directly affects our electorate.

The other point I would make about these figures is that we often have lectures from people in inner city municipalities of Sydney, people who have very hard views that we should not combat fraud in immigration, we should not worry about it and that it is irrelevant. It is very interesting to see that these people are often in electorates that do not seem too keen to take refugee humanitarians. As I said, Holroyd, Parramatta and Auburn took in over 1,000 refugee humanitarians in the last year. Some of these other figures are also quite interesting. The municipality of Marrickville—31—are improving. I have to concede that that figure of 31 is an improvement. In the municipality of Leichhardt, two refugee humanitarians were settled there last year. If I go through this list, Pittwater took one and Burwood 10—a pattern of very intense support for refugee humanitarians. They love them deeply, but they do not seem too keen to settle them. It takes a lot more than putting up banners about supporting refugees and refugee week et cetera. It is a matter of having a community which knows there are real settlement issues and social issues but which is prepared for its migrant resource centres and its municipalities to go out and assist these people in their settlement.

As they say at school, they are improving but I would like to see more effort from these inner city municipalities to make sure that we do not hide behind issues such as supposed support of foreshore and supposed support of open space to deny greater densities and greater public housing. I have seen a lot of these municipalities. They seem to have a very strong penchant to oppose public housing under these guises. They can really help refugee humanitarians in this country if they get those views out of the way and make sure that they are able to settle a lot more people.

I associate myself with the comments of a variety of earlier speakers who welcome this decision to enhance our military presence in Afghanistan. It is sad that, unfortunately, the situation has deteriorated, particularly in the south, in a country where the integrity of many warlords has always been very doubtful—and that even stretches to the family of the President, quite frankly. There have been a lot of reports about his brother and his alleged involvement in the drug trade. The military situation here has severely deteriorated. Outside of Kabul, the government’s writ does not seem to often have much authority. One would hope that this review in six months focuses on the need to protect the Afghan people, the need to protect the families of my constituents and the need to make sure that we successfully resist moves by the Taliban and al-Qaeda and their associates to reimpose a theocratic state suppressing women and basically suppressing human rights.

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