Janelle Saffin (Page, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

A lot of eloquent words have already been spoken in this place by many members of parliament on all sides and they are words that I, like other members, wish to associate myself with. I know there is a collective feeling of what people feel and what we share about September 11 in 2001. It has been said that that day changed our world, and it certainly did in many ways. I always hope, as everybody does, that when we do change we can change for the better and come out of catastrophic, terrible, tragic experiences for the better. Terrorism is an ever-present threat but it is across societies and it is an ever-present threat across the ages; it is not new. Sometimes we have to look back through history to know that it has existed throughout time and manifests itself in different ways at different times in our history, with different people targeted. As a society and as people who are parliamentarians and part of government and opposition and make laws, we have to be mindful that we can be as ready as we can be to avert terrorist threats and also to respond if a terrorist act takes place, but not to be in a situation where that guides all of our actions, because that can take away the freedoms that we sometimes take for granted. We have to be as mindful and as vigilant in guarding our freedoms as we do in guarding against terrorist threats.

There has been a lot of talk about where we were when this dreadful event took place. I was asked and said I was in Sydney. I had come home from work. I was then in the state parliament, in the Legislative Council, and got home late at night. My housemate sang out to me and she said, 'A plane has crashed into the Twin Towers.' We both said, 'Oh my God,' thinking how terrible it was. Then, sometime later—it felt like only a short time later—she called out that another plane had hit the Twin Towers. I said, 'Oh my God, a terrorist attack.' That is what we both immediately thought. For the first plane we did not; we just thought it was a terrible accident. For the second one, that was our response to it. Like everybody, we could not take ourselves away from the TV. We were glued to it for most of the night and were ringing people. I rang friends of mine who live in New York City to see how they were. I could make contact with some of them and for others it took me quite some time. They were scared, and they were heartened that we knew and cared. That was important.

I also remember hearing a fellow talking on the radio about Americans being on planes and going to land at Sydney airport and that they did not know that this had taken place. They were going to walk out of the plane into finding out what had taken place in their country. I rang my friend Mick Reid, who was then the Director-General of New South Wales Health. He had already actioned it, but I said I hoped we had people at the airport to meet the American folk coming off the planes, and they did. I was able to communicate that to some of my friends. In 2004-05, I lived in New York City for a few months, while attending the UN General Assembly for Timor-Leste, and I saw the daily human and physical impact, even several years after 2001. There have been a whole lot of effects. People talked about the hole in the sky, because that is how it came to be seen by New Yorkers—the hole in the sky where the Twin Towers had been. After a while I too came to see that hole in the sky in the way the locals did. It was somewhere that I frequently walked—I would walk around the financial district, because I am a walker, so I go out walking a lot—and I would see the hole. One of the things that also happened was that when planes would come through the airspace above New York City, people would react. I can understand, in only the smallest way, how locals feel about that, because after a while you do start to react; you look up with a bit of a start because a plane is coming.

All major catastrophic events change us; they cannot but do so. I hope that the victims, the survivors, their families and friends and all of the helping agencies, including the firefighters, who were the heroes, can find some peace in their lives, in ways we may not comprehend. I hope that, at a societal level, we can use this experience to make decisions more intelligently, that we can learn not to give up freedoms to terrorism and that we can think and reflect upon the reasons we go to war and upon some of the issues that have followed, including the practices that have developed. When I say practices, I mean that there is a body of counterterrorism conventions—quite a lot of them—and we implement them. We are obligated to by the UN Security Council—all member countries of the UN, including Australia, do that. But there is also a body of jurisprudence on human rights, and that accompanies those counterterrorism conventions, but sometimes it is overlooked. I would hope that all countries that are implementing those counterterrorism conventions are mindful of that body of human rights jurisprudence that accompanies the implementation of those conventions. There is also a Security Council resolution on that issue, so I hope that we can look at that.

Locally, the question was: what were you doing on the day of the attacks? It is true: we all remember exactly where we were and what we were doing. Some of my local people have said in the Northern Star newspaper:

We woke up early to hear it on the radio and couldn't believe what we were listening to. It was unimaginable.

That was Marlene Farell, from Casino. I think it sums up how most people who heard it felt when it happened. Warwick Herbert, from Lismore, was at home when it happened. He said:

We saw the second plane hit on TV and thought 'this can't be happening'.

That, again, is a feeling that we all had.

In conclusion, I would like to say that it is to the victims, their families and friends and to all those people who helped that I think our thoughts are best directed at this time.

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