Kim Beazley (Brand, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

On indulgence, today we remember the victims of the Bali bombing, the 202 people who died when terrorism exploded in two Kuta nightclubs on 12 October four years ago. We stop and reflect today on the terrible waste of lost lives: the fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, daughters and sons who died in violence in a place previously known to the world for its tranquillity and its friendship. We think today of the 88 Australians, so many of them so young, and those citizens of 22 other countries, all brutally murdered. We, too, think of others who have suffered. Some of the survivors are still recovering from their physical injuries. Their lives were altered irrevocably by the terror in Bali that night. We think of the families whose lives were ravaged and laid waste just as surely as the nightclubs at Kuta. We think of the people of Bali, now inhabitants of a paradise lost.

Four years on, we pause, we reflect, we grieve and we rail against the pointless, mindless carnage of it. We try to make sense of the senseless. We contemplate how best to honour the lives of those who suffered and died and their myriad stories of courage, sacrifice and humanity. There are now many monuments, both here in Australia and at the site of the bombing in Bali. The Prime Minister named several of them in the remarks that he made. They are very fitting tributes. But I do believe that the greatest memorial we can offer to the memory of the Australians who lost their lives is a pledge to protect the way of life that they held dear. We note that in that recently released intelligence report those who created these dreadful circumstances are assessed by the intelligence agencies of our allies as having got stronger in the course of the last four years. This is despite, as the Prime Minister has said, the most excellent work done by the Australian Federal Police, in conjunction with the police force of Indonesia, in bringing to justice those specifically associated with this atrocity.

The challenge, therefore, is still before us. We need to effectively fight terrorism here in our neighbourhood. We have to make absolutely certain that we both add value to the way in which this struggle with fundamentalist terror is conducted and are absolutely clear-cut in our priorities as to where it must be done: in protecting ourselves here and ensuring that people in the region are effectively protected. We owe it to the Australians who lost their lives in Bali. We owe it to the survivors. We owe it to their families. We owe it to all Australians.

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