John Forrest (Mallee, National Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Regional Development) Share this | Hansard source

I imagine that many colleagues are not familiar with the Akha people. They are a people who occupy the mountain regions of South-East Asia, across Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam, China and Laos. That is why this motion is before us today—to bring some attention to their situation. We are quite familiar with disenfranchised national groups all around the world, whether they are in Palestine, Sri Lanka, Africa, China or Latin America, but this is one distinctive group with their own language that has gone under the radar to some extent over the last 50-odd years.

Their tortured history goes back five centuries, and it is due to their cultural differences. They are not a tribal group like the other 10 or 12 tribal groups in the region. For example, they do not have anything like the concept of war. Even their hunting weapons are not warlike. They are a distinctively different group, with their own language, as I said. I came across this group almost by accident, led by members of my constituency in Swan Hill who were providing volunteer support and donations to an organisation called Children of the Golden Triangle Inc. They are a non-government group who for the last 15 years have been providing assistance and outreach services to the Akha people to meet some of their urgent needs. At that time I was asked to assist that organisation towards its goal to achieve deductible gift recipient status as an overseas aid fund. That was achieved late last year, and I was very grateful for the support of the Hon. Bob McMullan, Parliamentary Secretary for International Development Assistance. They were battling for five years to achieve that status, so it was quite a thrill for them to finally get it. The generosity of the Australian people never ceases to amaze me—and we have seen recently, in the response to the terrible fires in Victoria and the floods in North Queensland, how generous the Australian people are.

It was quite a coincidence that, when this contact came through my office, I was researching an area that is a favourite hobby of mine, weather modification—both deliberate and inadvertent. I was impressed by international publications on the effect of deforestation, particularly by smoke, in South-East Asia and Brazil. This led me to the people of South-East Asia and particularly the Mekong hinterland—which is the upper part of the Mekong catchment—who for many years have been using a method of deforestation which is to slash and burn. The creation of carbon in the atmosphere has been having a dramatic impact on the precipitation outcomes right throughout the region and, I suspect, even some impact on the Australian environment. So it was interesting that both of those things came together.

So I journeyed up to the facility run by Children of the Golden Triangle Inc. You have to remember that this particular tribal group and other tribal groups in the region have a tortured history, with 500 years of oppression. It is the region of the terrible period of the opium trade. Because of their economic depression and their unwillingness to fight, they simply ran away from their oppressors.

This particular language group have suffered badly and, as a result, their economic depression has caused a whole range of outcomes that have affected their survival dramatically. For example, they have the highest child mortality rate of any dispossessed language group anywhere—50 per cent. There is the terrible subject of child trafficking, which has had shocking outcomes for parents who were fundamentally conned because of their vulnerability and have found their children taken away and involved in the sex trade right throughout South-East Asia. Some terribly tragic human stories are associated with these people.

Then along come members of an Australian organisation like Children of the Golden Triangle, who have reached out for the last 15 years and with the assistance of donations from Australians, people of goodwill, have established an education facility. They call it the Akha Training Centre. It is located in the north of Thailand, in a little village called Maei Suai. I had an opportunity to visit them, and I was greatly impressed with their work—and deeply disturbed that, circulating throughout the internet, is some terribly scurrilous blogging about the nature and intent of their work. I was so determined to do something about this, to increase the exposure of this group in Australia, that I proposed the resolution that is before us. I seek leave to table a report that I prepared as a result of my visit in late January.

Leave granted.

Thank you. What I would like to see happen is that AusAID agencies take a little bit more of an interest in the activities of CGT. From my detailed inspection, having spent some time with the people there, I can say that their work achieves goals far above any we set when we consider Millennium Development Goals to bring people out of economic depression. Their programs principally focus on capacity building of the Akha people themselves, teaching them language skills. I met quite a number of the young people, from the young boyhood and girlhood years to late teens, who now speak three languages—their own language, Thai and English. I was quite impressed to see CGT, in that 15 year period, bringing the Akha people right through the education system—even to include university studies in Chiang Mai, where the nearest university is, some hour or so away from where the training centre is located—and to see the transformation of these youngsters, who now have opportunities. All of them wish to come back and do something for their own people. I was quite impressed. And for anyone to criticise their intentions on the internet to me speaks more about the people making the criticisms than an organisation that is achieving an enormous amount.

But I was disappointed to discover in Bangkok—I brought some of the organisers from Maei Suai down to Bangkok to speak with the AusAID counsellor and other people in the mission there—that recently Thailand has withdrawn its bilateral agreement for Australian aid. So Thailand no longer qualifies for AusAID support. But I do call on AusAID to assist. There are so many of these people scattered through the north-west. It is estimated that something between one million and two million Akha people are spread across the highlands of the Mekong upper catchment. Opportunity still exists to assist this organisation to reach into countries other than Thailand—into Laos, right next door, Vietnam and even into China itself. These people are stateless—nobody wants to know them. The King of Thailand himself is to be commended on his outreach, not just to the Akha people but to a number of the tribal groups across the north-west, funding support for alternative agri-forest activity, trying to find a way to get them out of this dependency on slash and burn—it is called swidden farming. So I am asking that AusAID support that.

The other problem, which I have not mentioned, is the massive number of these people, and people of other tribal groups, now streaming across the Myanmar border into Thailand, creating the need for refugee camps. I think the UN needs to do so much more about that oppressive regime in former Burma to bring them to account for the oppression of these peaceful mountain people and other cultural groups like them that they are creating.

I commend this resolution and thank members for their willingness to speak on this. They may have had some difficulty in finding out what it was. I know other colleagues have said to me, ‘What is this all about?’ I guess I am reflecting my own ignorance, because only 18 months ago I did not know a lot about the Akha people, but they are just another group that has got under the radar and deserve our consideration and support.

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