Tony Smith (Casey, Liberal Party, Deputy Chairman , Coalition Policy Development Committee) Share this | Hansard source

Ten years and three days ago I was sitting in the living room of my home at the time in Box Hill North. My wife, Pam, had just gone to sleep. I sat on the couch watching the Channel 10 late news. And then the world as we knew it came to a sudden, shocking and brutal end. I vividly remember the newsreader sounding perplexed as she talked through and tried to make sense of the breaking news. I woke Pam and, like untold millions of others, we sat transfixed by the sight of Manhattan burning on our TV screens. In New York, Washington and the Pennsylvania countryside, as we know, thousands of innocent people were dying, felled by the evil hand of an evil terrorist movement.

So both Pam and I were awake when, at about 1.30 in the morning, I received a call from a very good friend—a former work colleague who was working with the National Australia Bank at the time. At this very time I was on the staff of the Federal Treasurer and, with the Wall Street district under lockdown, the bank was naturally concerned about what this all meant and about the impact of the atrocity on the world financial markets and the Australian Stock Exchange. So, like those of countless other institutions in the market, NAB senior management had been called in and were burning the midnight oil. Even in times of profound trauma, habit does not desert us as humans, and Richard politely began the conversation by inquiring, 'I hope I didn't wake you?' But, as soon as the words had left his mouth, he realised how ridiculous they were given what was unfolding as the world was careening into war. That night, sleep, for all of us and all our fellow Australians, was not possible. It would also have been disrespectful. It would have been profoundly dishonourable simply to go about our normal lives while so many innocents were losing theirs.

That terrible night it was soon apparent that not just America was under fire; as former Prime Minister John Howard so rightly said, the attack on the United States was an attack on us as well. Of course, in some obvious ways, our American cousins are different from us. They play baseball; we play cricket. They drive on what we consider to be the wrong side of the road. They have a representative republican form of government and we have a Westminster parliamentary system. But, of course, in the larger scheme of things, these are just nuances—minor distinctions that contrast with the far greater commonalities that unite our two nations. Australians and Americans share a common devotion to democratic values and individual rights. We share a common provenance in the traditions of Judeo-Christian culture and the English common law. Government of, by and for the people are the political watchwords in Washington and here in Canberra. America was targeted on 11 September 2001 because it exemplifies the principles of liberty and freedom that we hold dear but which are anathema to the dark, medieval mindset of radical Islam. Just because the United States is at the top of the jihadi target list, we all know it does not mean that nations that share their values, like ours, are off the hook. Osama bin Laden's 1998 declaration of holy war against the Jews and crusaders contained a fatwa that commanded the killing of the Americans and their allies, civilian and military. There is no need to remind the House that Australian diggers have been proudly fighting for these values and for freedom alongside American sailors, soldiers, airmen and marines in every conflict since World War I, so it was pretty obvious that when al-Qaeda was declaring war on America's allies they had us in mind as well.

In the first post September 11 manifesto, bin Laden upped the ante and made mention of Australia. He was enraged by the fact that so-called crusader Australian forces had taken part in the liberation of East Timor. Less than a year later the threats came to fruition when 88 Australians were killed in October 2002 in the suicide bombing attack in Bali. So, as we all know, we are part of this war, whether we want to be or not. Putting our heads in the sand and magically wishing that the enemies would disappear will make us not safer but more vulnerable, and that is why we must stay the course in Afghanistan and wherever else required.

The words of Edmund Burke seem particularly relevant in this debate. In his Letters on a Regicide Peace, Burke wrote:

We are in a war of a peculiar nature. It is not with an ordinary community, which is hostile or friendly as passion or as interest may veer about: not with a state which makes war through wantonness, and abandons it through lassitude. We are at war with a system, which by its essence, is inimical to all other governments, and which makes peace or war, as peace and war may best contribute to their subversion. It is with an armed doctrine that we are at war.

What was true for Britain's 18th-century conflict with the guillotine-mad Jacobin in France is doubly true for our 21st-century fight with the suicide-bomb-mad jihadi Islam. Then, as now, as has been said so often in this parliament, steadfastness is the order of the day.

As we reflect on the 10th anniversary of September 11, we should resolve in the spirit of Lincoln that the innocent dead shall not have died in vain, and we should resolve to defend our values, our freedoms and our way of life from those who seek their destruction.

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