Sharman Stone (Murray, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I join others in supporting this motion. As a patron of the Goulburn Valley Vietnam Veterans Association and also as the proud mother of an Australian Army officer, I can say that I have some sense of what it must have been like for the mothers, the wives and the sisters of the Vietnam veterans as they returned from that service some 40 or 45 years ago and were treated with such dishonour and disrespect by the Australian public. I can understand the scars that are still felt by my Vietnam veterans. Even though long ago our Vietnam veterans had their special recognitions and their welcomes back to the country, literally decades after they should have taken place, I can still understand their grief and their deep sense of hurt as a consequence of the way we treated them.

I have to say that a lot of it was the fault of the media of the day. The Vietnam War was the first to be telecast almost every evening into the lounge rooms of ordinary Australian families. I do not think the media took the responsibility that technology gave them seriously or undertook their responsibilities properly. They were driven by the American media behaviour and, with very poor understanding of what was really involved, the edited highlights were often the worst possible way to demonstrate to the Australian people just what efforts were being made—the humanitarian efforts in particular—and how our Australian servicemen and servicewomen not only were following in the footsteps of the glorious Anzacs of the First World War, the Second World War, the Malayan emergency and all of the other conflicts we have been involved with but were in fact building on the reputation of the courageous and honourable behaviour and performance of Australian servicemen and servicewomen. Today, in particular, we recall the Battle of Long Tan. It was August 1966. A company of the 6RAR was engaged in one of Australia's heaviest actions of the war in a rubber plantation near Long Tan. On the nights of 16 and 17 August 1966—almost exactly 45 years ago—mortar and rifle fire was directed at 1 ATF base from the east. A Company of 6RAR was required to search for the firing positions to the north-east of the base and B Company 6RAR was dispatched to search the area to the east towards Nui Dat 2. On 18 August, A company returned to the base and D Company 6RAR relieved the B Company. After an exchange of information and a lot of intelligence, obviously, they followed up a possible enemy trail into the Long Tan rubber plantation. The 108 soldiers of D Company then held off an enemy force estimated at over 2,000 for four hours in the middle of a tropical downpour. An extraordinary thing. The survival of the company and their victory can be attributed to the extraordinary courage and discipline of its members and to the decisive command at each level as well as the devastating effects of the artillery that came in to support them—and this was in very close proximity to each of their positions. Then there was the helpful location of the final company position on a shallow reverse slope that provided some protection from the direct fire. There was also a timely and heroic helicopter ammunition resupply and finally the disruption of enemy plans for further attacks on D Company by the movement, combat action and arrival of the APC-mounted relief force. A number of Australian components were involved in the Long Tan battle, without for a minute taking away from D Company, who were central to the victory in which they were outnumbered.

When the Vietcong withdrew that night, they left behind 245 dead but carried away many more casualties—we will never know how many. Seventeen Australians were killed and 25 wounded, and one of our serving men died of wounds several days later. Many of our service personnel went into Vietnam with jungle warfare experience they had learned from our glorious Anzacs, who fought off the Japanese invasion in PNG during the Second World War. Australians understood the perils of jungle warfare but never before had there been such use of explosive devices and civilian populations—the Vietcong were able to literally disappear into the jungle and come back and fight another day. Australian soldiers, sailors and airmen involved in the whole of the Vietnam conflict were magnificent.

It is ironic that the Australian RSL did not always welcome the Vietnam veterans when they returned to Australia. That is another shameful chapter of the RSL's history. But today, especially in my electorate of Murray, the RSLs are led by Vietnam veterans, who are taking over from the now very elderly Second World War veterans and Korean War veterans. The Second World War men are typically in their mid- to late-80s, but it is the Vietnam War veterans who stand up proudly now and honour all of the previous service men and women in Australia's war histories, and put aside their own insults and grief as a result of what they experienced when they returned. I have a great deal of respect for the way they do that.

The veterans had to wait 40 years to be officially and publicly acknowledged for their extraordinary efforts. They were, after all, trying to stop the advance of communism at a time when communism was a great threat to the globe. Today, we laugh a bit about the reds under the bed notion, but in the 1960s and 1970s this was a very real threat to those countries in the immediate path of communist intentions but also ultimately to Australia. Prime Minister Menzies, the Prime Minister of the day, knowing that Army Reserve numbers were low, introduced national conscription, which of course had been first introduced for the Korean War episodes of 1951. National service, or the Nashos, became part of the mixed understanding and public concern at the time and we had people hiding from the draft or burning their draft cards and talking about harassment and non-democratic processes. I can very well remember my fiance at the time, the night that his marble went into the barrel. It was based on your birth date. His marble did not come out of the barrel and so he was not conscripted, but if he had been I am sure he would have honourably served, like his son has and is now, having served in Iraq and East Timor. That period of national service also tended to be forgotten for a very long time and I want to commend our coalition government under John Howard who minted the first medal to recognise national service in Australia. I still give out those medals to national servicemen who have never before been officially understood and recognised, even when their service was in the 1950s for several months. The point is that they were prepared to serve anywhere that their country asked them to, under any conditions. These national servicemen should never be forgotten. Some, of course, lost their lives in the Vietnam conflict. They fought beside the regular Army, Navy and Air Force to the very best of their ability.

I want to commend the Vietnam veterans, particularly those who were involved in the Battle of Long Tan, but also to reinforce that we are living in different times. I am sure this is a bipartisan thing, that all parties and Independents in this House and in the Senate regret the behaviours of the public of Australia back in the seventies and eighties, until the nineties when we fully understood where we had been very wrong. I want to particularly commend the Vietnam veterans in my electorate who now are shouldering the responsibility of looking after the welfare of one another. They are very concerned that this government has cut back on the funding for welfare support services for the volunteers who have trained to do that counselling. That is a serious problem because most of my Vietnam veterans do not have the spare cash to pay for the transport, the fuel and the time that they spend trying to support one another and to advocate for their fellow Vietnam veterans when they often need to. So I do ask this government to rethink their slashing of the funding for the counselling services, particularly for the Vietnam veterans.

I also want to commend my own special groups that I have called boards of trustees—I have one for each shire in my electorate—and what they do. They are clusters of Vietnam and Second World War veterans and community people who go around to all of the tiny towns or places where my towns have disappeared and they look at the cenotaphs, the honour boards, the old tree avenues of honour and they consider the condition of all of those memorials. Where they are destroyed or degraded or just simply weathered away, those boards of trustees and I come back together and say: 'Where do we apply for funding? How do we cut the grass, trim the trees, replant the trees, put back the fences, and rescue the honour boards?' Indeed, we have rescued some from tips. 'How do we make sure that not one name of a serving man and woman, from the Boer War through, is ever forgotten?' I have to say that one of the things we have been doing very actively is adding the names of Vietnam veterans to those honour boards and rolls and cenotaphs which typically were not added in the seventies and eighties. Now they are there, and I am proud that they are.

This is an important motion. I support it as the local patron. I also say that we abhor war in any guise, but Australians have always fought above their weight in helping to defend our own country and support the freedom of others who have not the power or the means to defend themselves. Long may that always be so.

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