Bruce Billson (Dunkley, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Sustainable Development and Cities) Share this | Hansard source

This evening I rise to support the sentiment of the motion moved by the member for Fremantle and would like to put on record my acknowledgement of the previous speaker and others. The current circumstances in Sri Lanka and what the way forward might look like are sensitive issues. I want to clearly state that I grieve with everyone in this parliament for the 100,000 Sri Lankans of various backgrounds who have lost their lives during two decades of fighting and conflict. As the former parliamentary secretary for foreign affairs, I travelled to the north of Sri Lanka on Heroes Day. I flew into Jaffna. It was not a good time to be in a government-of-Sri-Lanka military aircraft landing at Jaffna, which was a stronghold of the Tamil community and very much part of the area that is now feeling great pain. You could not help but see why feelings were so strong. We landed at a military air force base and drove a distance—the distance a mortar round would fire—to an area that had been cleared out, where magnificent villas on the north of the island had been someone’s proud home, where vegetation now grew through those buildings and where the upper storeys had snipers following our travels as we moved into that now populated area of Jaffna. It was the day after Heroes Day, when the Tamil community pays respect to those who have lost their lives in this conflict.

The signs on the walls were of soldiers ripping out the hearts of children. The mood was tense and it was very clear that people were tired of fighting, because this fighting has been going on for so long. People could not see the way forward. In fact, my contribution was to offer a peace dividend to the Sri Lankan government and the people involved in the conflict to try and find a way of bringing peace to this island. You could sense everyone wanting to get on with their lives. So many resources have been burned up in 20 years of fighting, killing and tragedy, where young children have been engaged in war, where families have seen their sons stolen in the middle of the night to be recruited as soldiers in a battle that gave us suicide bombers and some of the worst activities around and where we now see reports of the government shelling displaced persons’ camps and, in return, displaced persons are being used as human shields. This is a tragedy that needs to be got past somehow. I hope that the current military position encourages people of goodwill to come forward and work out what the future looks like. I think the government of Sri Lanka deserves, however it is elected, to have territorial integrity on the island. Then we need to move forward. We have seen people of Tamil origins, particularly in the east, losing their lives for collaborating too closely with the government.

Throughout my role as parliamentary secretary, I handled and oversaw the day-to-day management of Australia’s response to the tsunami. There was the frustration of aid and assistance in Sri Lanka. After the tsunami, we visited places like Hikkaduwa, where we put in aid money to put in place proper waste water treatment so that there were livelihood prospects for the communities. All of that was wiped out by the tsunami. Then there was fighting over whose brand was going to go on the aid. If it was going to head north, the Tamils wanted to say it was from them; if it was going somewhere else, the government of Sri Lanka wanted to put their sticker on it. We just said, ‘For heaven’s sake, there are people who need help here.’ Our help has been there all the way through, supporting the efforts to secure peace and putting money into programs like the United Nations Children’s Fund. It was part of my responsibility to see that families were able to find where their kids had gone. In some cases, they actually bought the kids back so that they could go to school.

Landmines that still dog so much of this area need to be removed. In fact, the military base in downtown Colombo, where we took off on an Antonov troop carrier that was older than me, was surrounded by landmines. When you go to the war front, which has moved so many times over two decades, there are more and more landmines. We were there putting our money in to turn those battlefields into farming fields so that people could get on with a better life, with better prospects for their future. I hope that what comes out of this most recent military offensive—where the carnage and loss of life has been extraordinary, where the number of people who have been lost in this conflict total the number of Australians who have been lost in all wars—is that this island can find some peace and serenity and get on with it. To the extent that this motion encourages that and supports those who have been displaced, I support the motion. But let’s not get caught up in the histrionics. There is a lot of work to be done now.

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