Michael Keenan (Stirling, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I oppose this motion moved by the member for Calwell for a number of reasons. I think it is an extraordinary motion that we are debating here today. The member for Adelaide has really belled the cat by saying that she is campaigning for freedom for Mr David Hicks—which I think is a very different thing from what this motion actually proposes to do.

I do share the concern that has been expressed by all members in this debate about the time it has taken to charge and try Mr Hicks. It is obvious to everyone that it would have been preferable that this happen sooner. It is worth noting that a lot of this delay has been due to the fact that the process itself has been challenged through the US Supreme Court.

I do not think we should take this motion’s concern about the process and somehow parlay that into a statement that we need to bring Mr Hicks home to Australia. The Australian government has advice that, if we were to do that, he would be unable to be charged under our system. It strikes me as absolutely ridiculous to ask for him to be brought home to a situation where he could not be charged.

As this issue has gathered pace, I have been pretty surprised that people seem to have forgotten how Mr Hicks came to be in American military detention, so I want to remind the House of a few pertinent facts. I hope that some of the people who have taken to sloganeering, saying ‘Bring Hicks home’, will listen to some of these facts because I think they are quite important. There have been times in this debate, in this House and also in the wider community, when I have thought that Mr Hicks had been charged with some misdemeanour, some relatively minor crime. In fact, he is facing the extremely serious charges of attempted murder and providing material support for terrorism. This is a man who, by his own admission, chose the path of violence to defend militant Islam, a man who was so supportive of al-Qaeda and its actions on September 11 that he chose to defend the regime that harboured these evil people. In a letter home to his parents he described himself as ‘a full member’ of the Taliban—a full member of a regime that tortured children and violated the human rights of the people of Afghanistan in the most barbaric of ways. By his own admission, Mr Hicks has trained with Lashkar-e-Taiba, a known terrorism organisation. By his own admission, with that terrorist organisation he engaged Indian soldiers across the line of control in Kashmir. This is a man who said in a letter home that he aspired to be a martyr fighting the friends of Satan, who were, in his mind, the enemies of Islam. These enemies, according to Mr Hicks, included the Western societies that he believed were dominated by Jewish interests.

Astonishingly, this motion demands that Mr Hicks be brought back to Australia even though the government has said that it has advice that he could not be charged and tried here, so members of the Labor Party are saying that they are happy to see Mr Hicks return home to become a free member of the community and to face no recriminations for his actions. That is an extraordinary thing for somebody in this place to champion. The proposer of this motion has taken what I consider to be a rightful concern about the length of Mr Hicks’s detention and has turned that into saying unequivocally that he needs to be brought home—when he cannot face charges here—to be free in our community. That is an extraordinary response. It is an incorrect response. The correct response is to do what the Australian government has actually been doing, and that is to pressure its US counterpart to process Mr Hicks through the system more speedily. This approach has actually yielded results. We saw that when the charges that were to be laid were announced within the last fortnight.

A lot of this motion deserves further scrutiny, particularly the idea that somehow hearsay evidence is alien to a system of charging people under these circumstances. In fact, hearsay evidence has consistently been used as evidence before such things as military commissions and international criminal tribunals. That precedent goes back to Nuremberg. Hearsay evidence can be admitted under the military commission system where it is considered to have probative value. However, it may be excluded where the evidence is demonstrated to be unreliable.

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