Mike Kelly (Eden-Monaro, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary for Defence Support) Share this | Hansard source

I rise as a member of parliament, as a member of the Defence portfolio team, as a member of the ADF and as a member of the rugby fraternity to farewell Lieutenant Michael Fussell. There is never any getting used to these casualties and, as the member for Fadden, Stuart Robert, knows, every time one of these things happens it is like losing a member of the family, and you feel it deeply—though not, of course, as much as the members of his family themselves. But it is a tight fraternity in the ADF, and his friends and colleagues and the members of his unit in Afghanistan will be feeling this keenly at the moment. All of our thoughts and prayers, I know, are with those members in Afghanistan at present.

We had a very special individual here in Lieutenant Fussell. He was a true leader. And it is very obvious, from the service record that has been outlined by many of the members who have spoken, what type of man he was. He was not only a keen sportsman but also, as he pursued his career, he achieved greatly through the Royal Military College and then, as he went on to the Royal Regiment of Australian Artillery, he qualified as a paratrooper—and that exercise in itself tells you a lot about the man. It is not an easy thing to step out of a perfectly serviceable aircraft. If anyone knows anything about paratroop training, they will understand that it is always the officers who are asked to step out of the plane first, ahead of the rest of the troops. So what we had, in Lieutenant Fussell, was really one of those men who are of the ‘follow me’ type, and a great loss he will be to the Australian Defence Force and to our community. Who knows what he would have gone on to achieve, not only within the ADF but in life in general.

Certainly, our thoughts and prayers are with Madeline and Ken, his parents, and his siblings, Daniel, Nikki and Nyah. It is worthy of note that this family has offered this nation two sons to the service of the ADF, and our thoughts and prayers are with Daniel, in particular, at this moment in the 1st Field Regiment of the Royal Australian Artillery.

It is also important to note that this casualty occurred as a consequence of contact with an improvised explosive device. The bulk of our casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan have been caused by these improvised explosive devices. They are an insidious threat not only to our personnel but also to NGOs and everybody who operates in these environments. We are facing an ongoing battle with insurgents and terrorists. It is, effectively, a cat-and-mouse game of measure and countermeasure that is being played in dealing with these insidious devices.

I would like to take this opportunity to salute the wonderful service of the men and women of the ADF’s Counter IED Task Force, led so ably by Brigadier Phil Winter. This task force is doing outstanding work. They are quiet achievers. They are not well known outside of the Defence Force—or, indeed, within it—but the work they do is as important as anything else that is being done within our organisation. The establishment of this task force has led us to acquire important capabilities and make improvements in the posture and the capability of the Defence Force in that it has forced us to acquire weapons technical intelligence capabilities associated with this effort. Those capabilities in themselves have enabled us to, if you like, get inside the loops of the insurgents and the terrorists that we are dealing with. The information that is yielded through this capability is essential and important to our ongoing effort against terrorism and insurgency.

Once again, I wish to draw attention to and salute the efforts of the Counter IED Task Force. We need to do more in this area to continue the battle of trying to stay one step ahead of the enemy. It was my privilege, as director of the Middle East strategy group within Defence, to pursue this effort with a lot of vigour because I was well aware, of course, of the threats being posed to our personnel. We will reach out to our allies and to any in the international community who are pursuing research and development in this area to further the benefits to our personnel of greater force protection, technologies, measures and assets. That is an ongoing effort around the world as we speak, and certainly it has been my privilege, in this current portfolio position, to assist in pursuing that effort.

As the member for Melbourne Ports emphasised, when we suffer casualties in Afghanistan it is important to remind the Australian community and the parliament and reassure the family of the member who has been lost that the war in Afghanistan is important and the deaths we have suffered are not in vain. The war in Afghanistan is important for a number of reasons in relation to our national interests and the cause of international peace. Probably about 20 per cent of the drugs on our streets emanate from Afghanistan, so the effort in Afghanistan is important in relation to our fight against drugs nationally. It is also important because, as the member for Melbourne Ports highlighted, Afghanistan was a haven for terrorism, and not just in relation to the infamous 9-11 attacks. Certainly, Afghanistan was a haven for terrorism throughout the South-East Asian region. The Bali bombers, who caused such havoc, in particular to Australian citizens, received their succour and support from the terrorist infrastructure that existed in Afghanistan. It is currently being rebuilt in the ungoverned spaces in Pakistan today, in the federally administered tribal areas of North Waziristan and South Waziristan and in the North-West Frontier Province. A great effort needs to be mounted there not only by Pakistan but through all the assistance that the international community can render to President Zardari and the Pakistani government.

It is important to deny terrorists that safe haven. We cannot win a counterinsurgency effort in Afghanistan without denying them that safe haven and continuing to assist our brothers and sisters in Afghanistan—and I acknowledge the presence of the ambassador here today—in building good governance and infrastructure and a better future in Afghanistan. That is how we will win this counterinsurgency. As a counterinsurgency rule of thumb, these conflicts are won by a combination of about 20 per cent military security and about 80 per cent social, economic and political factors. We need to make a better effort towards that 80 per cent and mesh our military and civil construction efforts much better, as has been highlighted many times. We continue to promote that effort internationally and now we have equipped ourselves nationally to improve our ability to do that through the establishment of the Asia-Pacific Civil-Military Centre of Excellence in Australia, which is based in my electorate.

The other key point to make about the war in Afghanistan is the potential for the spillover of that conflict to destabilise the region generally. Of course, one of the most significant risks there is in relation to Pakistan itself, a nuclear-armed state which we cannot afford to allow to become an ungoverned space or, indeed, to fall into the hands of Islamic extremists.

All this is to say that Lieutenant Fussell’s death and the efforts of all of our men and women in the ADF continue to be of importance to our national security and to the international effort for peace and security. I salute the service of those men and women. I salute the service of Fuss and I tell Fuss today: we will not forget you.

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