Alexander Downer (Mayo, Liberal Party, Minister for Foreign Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the honourable member for Boothby for his question and for his interest. The United Nations Security Council has now given some consideration to this issue. The views of the Security Council are unanimous and clear in terms of their condemnation of the nuclear test conducted by North Korea. The Security Council will now be considering what further measures it can take.

As I pointed out to Secretary Rice last night, and as is well known, the Australian government believes that the Security Council should act under chapter 7 and that specific sanctions should be imposed on North Korea. It is my guess that the Security Council is likely to do that. There will be debate amongst members of the Security Council, however, over what sort of sanctions to impose. I am sure they will agree fairly rapidly to sanctions that have a bearing specifically on nuclear programs and perhaps missile programs, but further measures over and above that will obviously have to be debated in the Security Council.

Today, I called in the Ambassador for North Korea, Ambassador Chon, and said—it will not come as a surprise to anybody—that the Australian government and, more importantly, the people of Australia condemned in the strongest possible terms the actions of North Korea in conducting a test. I told the ambassador that we would support Security Council sanctions under chapter 7 and that, over and above that, a measure that we would take immediately would be to deny visas to North Koreans who apply for visas to visit Australia except in exceptional circumstances.

I made it clear to the ambassador that a nuclear test by North Korea was a threat to the peace and stability of a region which has enjoyed relative peace and stability for quite some time, particularly North Asia. I made the point to the ambassador that what the North Koreans had done had been not only in clear defiance of the wishes of the international community, which is united in its opposition to North Korean nuclear testing, but also significantly in defiance of representations made by North Korea’s longstanding supporter, China; that this had put China in an embarrassing and humiliating position, and I regarded that as unacceptable. I thought that what the North Koreans had done was deeply offensive to a country on which it depended for its food aid and other forms of assistance and for its trade in such a significant way.

I finished the discussion by pointing to a satellite photograph in my office, which I have had there for quite some time, of the Korean peninsula at night, which shows South Korea lit up and North Korea in the dark, and explained to him that this was a regime which had manifestly failed in looking after the interests of its ordinary people, yet was spending billions of dollars on developing nuclear weapons and nuclear weapons programs, and that this was completely unconscionable in the view of the Australian people.

In conclusion, in terms of diplomacy, the Leader of the Opposition asked the Prime Minister a little earlier about foreign ministers and the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. There were a range of meetings along those lines—not precisely as described by the Leader of the Opposition—recently in New York, including the annual meeting of foreign ministers which I co-chaired, on support for the ratification of a comprehensive test ban treaty. We will continue our vigorous diplomacy, which, in Australia, as the Prime Minister has said, has been pursued by both sides of the House over many years, in support of the non-proliferation regime. It was our government that brought the comprehensive test ban treaty to the United Nations General Assembly and had it adopted there by a very large majority, and we continue to push for ratification.

The problem is not that most countries are about to proliferate; the problem is the extremist regimes that are defying the views of the international community. What do we do in a situation where we have international norms, which most countries adhere to, but where a country like North Korea has withdrawn from the nuclear non-proliferation treaty altogether and defied the wishes of the international community? Certainly, we should use all of the strength that the Security Council can muster to address this issue.

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