Nick Champion (Wakefield, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is obviously a great honour to speak in the Federation Chamber, but this is a debate that should be going on in the House. It is a debate that should be had with all the members of the House. The Middle East, and in particular Syria, is a very important area of strategic concern, and what we have is a government that has gone from excessive and almost obsessive talk of death cults, on one hand, to a deathly silence, on the other. It is very important, given the strategic situation, that we actually discuss what is going on in Syria and the broader Middle East, because there are very big strategic shifts going on and we have a presence there in terms of our ADF personnel. And I know there are many personnel from my own electorate who are serving there. Obviously we have a big interest. We have a strategic interest and a common interest in humanity and in preventing armed conflict.

The situation could not be more desperate—hundreds of thousands of civilians have been killed by the Assad regime, by the Daesh regime and by various armed insurgent groups controlling various bits of territory. This has caused an avalanche of refugees, people fleeing this conflict. These people are legitimately fleeing to Lebanon and Jordan; both of their populations have expanded—in Lebanon's case, by almost a third. We now have a million people seeking asylum in Europe, with perhaps up to three million on their way. The ongoing conflict that is fuelling these movements of desperate and damaged people is accelerating because of the involvement of the participants on the ground—Daesh and the various armed insurgent groups of the Assad regime. It is also accelerating because of the presence of armed personnel of the nations of Iran and now Russia. We have problems in the lower part of Turkey; it is a very serious expansion of the conflict. And we have big things happening in this part of the world in terms of the emergence of Kurdistan—if not as a nation, then as a governing entity—reaching beyond the borders of Iraq. That has some very big challenges, given that this is pretty much the first time since the Treaty of Sevres that this has been contemplated.

We should be debating these big strategic shifts in the House of Representatives, and debating the causes of them: the breakdown of Ottoman rule; the breakdown of the model that replaced it, the Sykes-Picot agreement; and these nations of Iraq and Syria and others that were basically drawn by Europeans after the First World War. There has been very serious breakdown and very serious conflict. On top of that, we have the emergence of Iran as a regional player coming out of a self-imposed isolation in part, moving away from the development of nuclear weapons. That is to be welcomed, but we have to be very cautious in terms of Iran because they have killed and tortured their own citizens to prevent regime change in that country. We seem to have, as the member for Melbourne Ports articulates, a change of government policy in regard to Iran, which is very serious indeed.

To conclude, we should have a full debate, and every member of this House should participate in and contribute to that debate. We might learn something from one another, and we might think about what useful role Australia can play in diplomatic and military terms, in terms of our humanitarian policies and in terms of what expanded role we might play in this area to bring peace to what is a very troublesome and very troubled area of the world.

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