Kevin Rudd (Griffith, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Foreign Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the honourable member for his question, and I know, having dealt with him, that he is acutely engaged as a local member with any of his constituents who end up in trouble around the world. We had a fair bit of that in the last 12 months or so. Also, we have sought through the department and my office to respond as rapidly as possible to any concerns raised by any member of parliament concerning their constituents who find themselves in difficulty abroad.

Beginning with the consular crisis in Egypt, this was a serious challenge for the department. Our embassy in Cairo acquitted itself well. The crisis operations centre on Egypt ran from 28 January to 14 February in support of Australians caught up in that crisis. In the case of Libya, an operations centre ran from 22 February to 7 March. In the case of Christchurch, a centre ran for an extensive period as well. It is important to bear in mind the number of calls for information which the department has had to respond to in this period of time. DFAT's emergency call unit received 26,000 calls from concerned loved ones and made a similar number of calls in seeking to confirm the safety of Australians. Over 400 Australians assisted to depart crisis areas, and that was on chartered flights from Egypt. We provided financial assistance to some 400 other Australians, including to assist them to depart the crisis zone. Over 11,000 Australians or residents were confirmed as safe.

In addition to that we deployed, of course, our own staff. In total, for these various consular crises we have deployed 89 additional DFAT staff from other posts, and this has made it very possible for us to undertake the task with which we had been charged. I also commend the department's increasing use of social media to provide advice to Australians where it has been possible to do so given that in some cases—namely Egypt—there were interruptions to the ability to deliver social media services.

In answering the honourable member's question, I will underline again what I have said previously in the parliament about the superb quality of our consular operations centre. They are a first-class group of professionals, and at a peak response time you had over 120 people working on the crisis each day, roughly the equivalent of two DFAT divisions. It is worthwhile saying at this point also in response to the honourable member's question that, when we surge for a major consular crisis around the world, what happens is that we actually take people from their regular responsibilities. As a result, you have a skeleton staff dealing with the normal functional and policy responsibilities of the foreign ministry, while everyone basically rallies to the pump to deal with the challenge of the day. When I visited the consular crisis centre myself during the major consular operations in Egypt and elsewhere, including in Japan, I saw staff who were drawn from policy level, the administrative level, the consular level itself and administrative assistants, frankly deployed from hither and thither, from the most senior to the least senior, all staffing the phones in order to do the right thing by Australians. So I would take this opportunity in this consideration in detail to underline the absolute professionalism of what our consular staff have done.

For the future—and this is where it is important as well for us to bear this in mind—I go back to one of the appropriations that we have sought additional support for in the 2011-12 budget, and that has been provided. That is additional funding of $4 million for the upcoming year to improve our consular services, and we will use those resources to more widely extend our use of social media. Finally, if we look to the year ahead we should be very mindful of the rolling instability in the Middle East, very mindful of developments in Syria, where I am advised we have a number of Australians who are in that country, continued instability on the Arabian Peninsula, most acutely in Yemen, and other parts of the Middle East as well, whereby our capacity to surge would again be put to the test.

Lastly, I say in response to the honourable member's question that the test of us all is this: when a natural disaster, not just a man-made disaster of the type we have seen in the Middle East, hits we have absolutely no warning at all. When a natural disaster hits, the ability to rapidly deploy puts all the department's resources into the field and we need to be constantly in mind of what further supplementation the department needs in order to undertake that in the future given the rising spate of natural disasters right across the East Asian hemisphere.

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