Michael Hatton (Blaxland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Like the curate’s egg, this motion is good in parts. Parts (1) and (5), unfortunately, are largely government self-promotion. Any government could make similar comments about the maturing relationship between our country and Vietnam, the fact that there is $81 million worth of aid et cetera. Point (5) goes to support of democratic freedoms and, in particular, human rights dialogue with Vietnam—which was initiated, in fact, by the Keating government. These matters are par for the course for a government trying to put their approach. I do not really think they are pertinent in this motion.

Points (2), (3) and (4) definitely are pertinent. In fact, what was discussed previously was a much stronger motion about the situation of people in Vietnam. These are real people, real flesh and blood, people who have been imprisoned, people who are under house arrest—such as the journalist Nguyen Khac Toan, whom I spoke to about two weeks ago and prior to that a couple of months ago. He has a policeman standing right outside his house, just three metres from his front gate. Our conversation was abbreviated because the secret police in Vietnam use very sophisticated gear that they have brought in at a cost of more than half a million dollars to electronically intercept and flood those kinds of conversations involving people who are part of the civil and human rights movement in Vietnam called the April bloc, who, under immense pressure, are still spilling their blood and fighting the fight for true democracy and real rights in Vietnam.

As good as points (2) and (3) and (4) are, we actually should have a much tougher motion coming out of this House. I trust that we will be able to do that on a bipartisan basis in the future. Why? Look at the Hoa Hao Elder Mr Le Quang Liem. He leads about three million Hoa Hao Buddhists in Vietnam. I spoke to him just a couple of weeks ago. What he told me—and what other people fighting for a real life for all the people in Vietnam have said—is that they need support from outside. They not only need their voices to be heard on our radio stations and to be beamed around the world; they also need support from this parliament and from the Australian people—not mealy-mouthed support, not conditional support, not support which puts the thrust on a bit of self-promotion, but support which says this: the government of Vietnam is communist in nature and communist in practice; it is a dictatorship directed against the people of Vietnam.

All of the people mentioned in point (3) are not just individual cases, individual though they may be; they are emblematic of what it has cost the people of Vietnam because they lost the war in 1975. This is a people who suffered 1,000 years worth of occupation by the Chinese. This is a people who were occupied by the colonial power of the French but fought them and did away with them at the battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954. This is a people who then had an ongoing war which split their country to pieces, which saw people killed, massacred and imprisoned and the country defoliated. This is a people who, in the end, saw the liberty of so many constrained and the lives of so many foreshortened or simply taken away by the cruelty of this regime.

So we should not speak in an unconditional way about what is happening in Vietnam. It costs me and others in this parliament not one single drop of our own blood to say that we support those people in Vietnam. They are the ones who pay the price on a daily basis. The people here in Australia who escaped from Vietnam, from torture, from the pressures on their families, from imprisonment over long years—what do they want? They want it to be noted in this parliament that, when the Prime Minister went to Vietnam, he went to a memorial for our soldiers at Long Tan and a memorial for the North Vietnamese soldiers and for the Vietminh soldiers, but the ARVN soldiers, from South Vietnam, were not memorialised. I understand the diplomatic niceties in this, but it goes to the very heart of the way my constituents and the Vietnamese community in Australia think about this issue. I can support points (3), (4) and (5) in this motion, and I can accept the advertising and self-promotion, but we need to be as hard as we can be to condemn the Vietnamese government and support the movement for freedom and democratic rights. (Time expired)

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