Teresa Gambaro (Brisbane, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Citizenship and Settlement) Share this | Hansard source

Australia’s contribution to the war on terror is absolute: the need to restore sovereignty to the people in Afghanistan, to promote universal values of liberty and democracy, and to ensure the security of Australia and our allies is paramount. There is a simple fact that those who do not support our troops in Afghanistan do not understand—that is, the war on terror is real, it is happening now and, if we do not take a stand, it will continue to haunt the world for generations to come. Let us not forget the same totalitarian Islamist movement we are fighting in Afghanistan was responsible for the deaths of 3,000 people in New York on 11 September 2001, 202 people in the Bali bombings in 2002, 191 people in Madrid in 2004 and 56 people in London in July 2005. It is sad to say, but the list goes on and on. I say ‘people’, because it is not only the victims who have been affected; it is also their partners, their parents, their brothers, their sisters, their friends and their extended families—and, in some cases, children have had to deal with the loss of a loved one from the atrocity that is a terrorist attack.

I am full of pride to share the site of the Enoggera Barracks with the member for Ryan, Jane Prentice. Of the 1,550 troops that Australia has committed to Afghanistan, I am honoured to announce that the 6RAR Battalion is a significant contributor to the war effort. To the men and women of the 6RAR Battalion who are over in Afghanistan, who are about to go or who have been: as a nation we are privileged to have such fine representatives of a great nation furthering freedom and liberty across the world.

The Mentoring Task Force is led by the 6th Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment, most of whom call Brisbane home. Involved in the Mentoring Task Force are several Brisbane based units, including the 2nd Combat Engineer Regiment, the 1st Field Regiment and of course the 6th Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment. Australia’s military contribution to the International Security Assistance Force includes around 1,550 Australian Defence Force personnel, who are deployed within Afghanistan. Of these, 1,241 are deployed in Oruzgan province and around 300 in Kabul, Kandahar and elsewhere in Afghanistan. I am proud that Brigadier McLachlan at the Enoggera Barracks and the 6RAR are doing their best in leading the mentoring of the Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police.

As an international community we need to promote the same freedom and democracy that we celebrate here in Australia. In the case of Afghanistan, we need to promote modernisation at the expense of extremism. We need to develop an environment where societies celebrate diversity through tolerance for everyone with the exception of the intolerant. This simply cannot be accepted in Afghanistan and anywhere in the Middle East or throughout the world with the Taliban and al-Qaeda active and recruiting people to their unjust and immoral cause. We simply cannot miss the opportunity to stand for liberty and freedom simply because the journey is a long and tough one. As a nation we simply cannot allow the threat of terrorism to fester and the oppression of Islamic fundamentalism to continue indefinitely.

The recent AUSMIN talks are a sign that Australia is here for the long haul and that we will only withdraw when certain conditions are met and not on any given time frame. I was glad to see that the US Secretary of State and US Secretary of Defence, in Hillary Clinton and Robert Gates, share the same view as we have here in Australia. Can I also add that President Obama has recently recommitted to staying the course in Afghanistan. These recent comments by our American allies are an important reaffirmation of the US-Australia alliance by both countries.

The Taliban treatment of women and ethnic minorities is one of the worst, if not the worst, examples of Islamic fundamentalism the world has ever seen. There are positive signs appearing since the ISAF invasion in 2001. Under Taliban rule, Afghan women and girls were not educated beyond the age of eight and were not permitted to work. As a consequence of this, many of the teachers, being women, have now been forced to leave their jobs and the schools have been shut down. Women were not allowed to go to the doctor without a male relative, resulting in many illnesses that women face going unreported and without medical treatment. In the Taliban-run Afghanistan, women were regularly beaten. They were stoned, flogged to death and had their limbs cut off. But it does not stop there. At the peak of this tyrannical Taliban rule, windows in houses were blackened on the off-chance that someone saw a woman inside. This sort of behaviour would certainly not be accepted in Australia. We would not tolerate this type of behaviour if it were committed by any country in our region. So there is no reason why we should accept it in Afghanistan. We can look at three important development indicators that prove my statements. The literacy rate for men is 49 per cent and for women it is 18 per cent. School attendance in Afghanistan for boys is 66 per cent, yet for girls it is 40 per cent. The differences are appalling.

I am a Liberal because I believe in four fundamental freedoms: the freedom of the individual, the freedom of choice, the freedom to pursue excellence and the freedom to seek reward for effort. Under a totalitarian Islamic rule, none of these freedoms is achieved. This is another and just reason as to why we as a nation have committed troops to Afghanistan. In the defence of liberty we cannot allow these atrocities to continue or, at the worst, spread around the world in the form of sharia law, home-grown terrorism and transnational terrorist bodies—for all of which Afghanistan and the Taliban are fundamental and ideological nuclei.

To those people who wish to withdraw Australia’s military commitment to Afghanistan, I would like to make one important point and that is of the Spanish experience. In 2004 Spain was attacked by a terror cell associated with al-Qaeda. After that unfortunate and heinous incident, spurred by fundamental Islam, the government of Spain changed and the Spanish government started contemplating a withdrawal from the Middle East. But this did not change the fact that al-Qaeda was actively trying to continue to kill innocent, mainly Christian, civilians through terrorist bombings not only in Spain but throughout Europe.

Australia’s role in Afghanistan is equal in importance to our other counterterrorism efforts in the region. We are currently involved in policing, training and enforcement with Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore. Australia also engages with regional partners on intelligence sharing and gathering, through ASIO, ASIS and the AFP, and Australia is a major contributor to rebuilding efforts through AusAID.

Let us not forget what terrorist groups are capable of. We must not allow a recurrence of the Bali terror attacks in Indonesia in 2002 when 202 people, including 88 Australians, were killed, or the Jimbaran Beach attacks in Bali in 2005 when 26 were killed, four of those being Australians, or the 2009 Marriott bombings in Indonesia, where seven were killed, including three more Australians, by fundamentalists that were linked to the Taliban.

If as a nation we are serious about stopping these events, we must continue to support our military efforts. If we are willing to commit police and intelligence officers, why would we be unwilling to follow it though with troops on the ground in Afghanistan, which is the breeding ground and, more importantly, the training ground for international terrorism?

Since 2001, Australia has committed nearly $750 million in development and reconstruction assistance to Afghanistan. As of the last budget and this financial year, the annual AusAID budget for Afghanistan is around $106 million, which is delivered in line with the development priorities of the Afghanistan government’s Afghanistan National Development Strategy and through the World Bank’s Afghanistan Reconstruction Fund. Australian aid is being used to support agriculture and rural development, the promotion of good governance, the protection of vulnerable populations and for the improvement of efficiency and spread of basic service delivery to the Afghani people. While the coalition supports these contributions, we need to ensure that they are done with absolute financial integrity through all recipients and to ensure that the maximum amount can get to the people in need and not be used to perpetuate needless bureaucracies, which is so often the case with aid funding.

The idea that Australian troops or the ISAF engagement as a whole is making the Afghanistan situation worse is simply fanciful and utter rubbish. An article in the Australian recently showed a snippet of the attitudes of the Afghani people in Oruzgan province, where the majority of the Australian troops were based. They gave unqualified support for the Australian efforts in the region. The article began by saying that Afghans in Oruzgan province had painted a bleak picture if the Australian military contingent were to pull out and not be replaced. Most agreed that schools would close, people would retreat to their homes and major security gains made in the past few years would evaporate. The locals are supporting our efforts to train their police force and the locals are enjoying the new-found liberty and security that our Aussie soldiers are able to afford the Afghan people.

If we leave Afghanistan now, the situation will simply go back to where it was before we started. The girls schools will close, women will once again have no more rights, democracy will be dead and the community at large will be scared to leave their homes because of the sheer brutality of the Taliban. Australia’s deployment in Afghanistan needs our 100 per cent support. We owe it to the Afghans, who are relying on our support for their own security; we owe it to the international community in the support of liberty and security and the spread of democracy; and we owe it to all the Australians who have died in terrorist attacks at the hands of the Taliban, al-Qaeda and its networks. Most importantly, we owe it to the 21 diggers who lost their lives—three of whom were from the Brisbane area—and their families to finish what we are now so close to achieving. At a moving ceremony at Anzac Place in Brisbane on Remembrance Day, the RSL Queensland President Doug Formby acknowledged their great service to our great country. To those families in the Brisbane electorate who did lose loved ones, you have made the ultimate sacrifice and we are eternally grateful for your sacrifice. Your husbands, sons, brothers and fathers will not be forgotten.

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