Luke Simpkins (Cowan, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Vietnam Veterans Day is commemorated on the anniversary of the Battle of Long Tan, it being arguably our finest moment in the Vietnam War. It was on that day, 18 August 1966, that D Company and supporting troops took on a vastly superior enemy force in the Long Tan rubber plantation. In that desperate fight, against such terrible odds, victory was achieved. I pay tribute to the courage and bravery of the members of D Company and those who shared the fight with them that night.

Some people in this country talk of the Vietnam War as a defeat. It is not correct to say that we were defeated. When the last of our troops left Vietnam in 1973, the war had not been lost. Our soldiers had not been defeated and we and our allies had not been driven into the sea. At the start of 1973 the Paris Peace Accords had resulted in a cessation of the fighting, so when we left Vietnam the north had been stopped. Our soldiers had fought with distinction and overall success in Vietnam from the days of the Australian Army Training Team Vietnam, 'the Team', all the way through the war until the withdrawal. Thousands of our soldiers have the right to be proud of their achievements but, as we know, they were treated terribly upon their return. That constituted what I think we all acknowledge is a national disgrace. Although subsequent events have at least partially redressed that terrible wrong, the pain is something that will always live with our veterans. It is most definitely the case that when you look back upon the Vietnam War and compare it to the Korean War or even the Second World War there is a big difference between a war where you could walk out of the jungle one day and be back on the streets of Sydney the next day, and a war where you could be on a boat for one or two months coming back from Europe and have the time to wind down and hang out with your mates under less arduous circumstances. So when you see those sorts of comparisons it makes the treatment of our Vietnam veterans at the time even worse because they were repatriated back to Australia and almost thrown directly out on the streets into circumstances of great adversity. People did not have a great regard for them at all and that was, as I said, a national disgrace.

Australia was not the only country, particularly in the late 1960s and early 1970s, where there was a lot of opposition to the war. It seems that many civilians took on the side of the North Vietnamese communist government; that was the case in the United States as well. Big protest marches took the simplistic line of how evil we were in prosecuting the war and how our opponents were, in some ways, the epitome of goodness. I think the only real comparison that can be drawn between the Vietnam War and the current war in Afghanistan is the way left-wing opponents of the war always see those who we are fighting as legitimate freedom fighters or some other romanticised view of such people.

The first point that is always overlooked is that our involvement has never been about colonialism or permanent occupation. With Vietnam, it was not like the French in Indochina or the Dutch in Indonesia; instead, it is about being in these places—Vietnam or Afghanistan—to achieve stability. The other major point that is always overlooked by the political opponents of these sorts of wars is that our enemies in these wars do not represent what the local people want. The people of the south of Vietnam wanted their democracy to succeed; they did not want a communist government. It is the same in Afghanistan: they do not want the Taliban and their allies from other Arab Islamic countries to control their country; they want control of their own destinies. That is the mission that we continue to support.

In returning to the issue of Vietnam, I still consider it a great tragedy that we and the United States did not remain in Vietnam to ensure the communists complied with their obligations under the Paris Peace Accords. The people of South Vietnam wanted a democratic future—that has not been a reality. When Saigon fell to the communists on 30 April 1975 the communists were not pleasant or nice people. They treated their opponents brutally. An example is that, despite their wounds or injuries, the soldiers of the South Vietnamese army who were in hospitals were thrown out of those hospitals and told to go back to their families. They still suffer to this day with the disabilities and injuries they were suffering from when they had to leave the hospitals. I also pay tribute to the Vietnamese veterans of the Vietnam War who now live in Cowan in Western Australia and elsewhere around this country because they still undertake significant fundraising for their comrades who still survive in Vietnam. They raise money and send those funds back to Vietnam to alleviate the suffering of those treated so inhumanely by the communists.

On around 30 April each year I attend the Black April commemoration service in Kings Park in Perth with the veterans and the leaders of the Vietnamese community. On those days we remember the high hopes that were held for democracy in Vietnam and how very distant the reality has become. We remember the examples of the brutality and the inhumanity with which the communists treated their adversaries. We talk of how the hardworking people of Vietnam, the families and friends of Vietnamese Australians, continue to be held back by the communist government of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. It is a government that serves itself and its elites before it serves its people.

It is in that context and in the light of the history of the Vietnam War that I pay tribute to our soldiers, our airmen and our sailors who served in the Vietnam War. Theirs was a noble cause, a cause where the weak needed to be defended and they were defended while we were participating in that war. We should be proud of the achievements of our troops in the Vietnam War. They fought with great honour and great distinction. They achieved their tasks. They protected South Vietnam and the people of South Vietnam. They fought to defend a democratic dream, and that was the right thing to do. The Vietnam War had been halted by a ceasefire on 27 January 1973, four days after President Nixon had declared that peace with honour had been achieved. The reality was that treachery and betrayal would follow in 1975, and it was only then that defeat came and not at all during the Australian involvement. So once again I pay tribute to every Australian serviceman and servicewoman who served our country, our national interests and the great cause of democracy in the Vietnam War. As I said, theirs was an honourable effort; theirs was a distinguished effort. We should always remember and do whatever we can to look after them in the future.

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