Craig Kelly (Hughes, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am pleased to rise to support this motion moved by the member for Mackellar and I thank him for it. This motion acknowledges that 15 October 2017 marks the 200th anniversary of the death of Tadeusz Kosciuszko, who is known to Australians by our famous Mount Kosciuszko. Kosciuszko was born on 4 February 1746 and died in October 1817. He was a Polish-Lithuanian military engineer and a military leader who became a national hero of Poland, Lithuania, Belarus and the United States. In fact, I'll go further than that. I'd say he is a hero to all people who loved freedom, liberty and equality. He fought in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth struggles against both Russia and Prussia and also on the American side in the American Revolutionary War. As supreme commander of the Polish National Armed Forces, he also led the 1794 Kosciuszko Uprising.

Born the son of a Polish-Lithuanian noble, he could easily have lived a simple life of pleasure, but he didn't. He gobbled up liberal ideas from a young age. In his 20s he travelled to France, where he was exposed to writers like Rousseau and Voltaire. During his trips to America he even became a close friend of Thomas Jefferson, who described him as 'a pure son of liberty'. In fact, when Strzelecki, the famous Polish explorer, was exploring and discovered what was our highest mountain and was considering that he should name it Kosciuszko, he said these words:

… although in a foreign country on foreign ground but amongst a free people who appreciate freedom and its votaries, I could not refrain from giving it the name of Mount Kosciusko.

It is a great honour that we have our highest peak named after such a famous and important person in history.

The Polish people for centuries have had to fight for freedom. At no time in Polish history was this perhaps greater than during the Polish resistance in World War II. Much has been written of that resistance. Poland was one of the few occupied nations that produced no major traitors or collaborators. The Polish operatives secured valuable intelligence or destroyed Nazi infrastructure in daring missions. The pilots of the Polish government in exile matched and exceeded their Western comrades in the air. Only when the cracks started to appear in the communists' control in the 1980s could they enter public discourse.

It was Poland's great legacy to be sandwiched between the fascists to the west and the communists to the east. And after having survived the tribulations and the resistance during World War I, they found themselves again oppressed under communist tyranny. When Lech Walesa and the rest of the Polish resistance finally led that nation to freedom, I'm sure they would have gone back to the great spirit of Tadeusz Kosciuszko, who wanted freedom, liberty and equality for all Polish people.

We congratulate the Polish nation on the great achievements that they have made since the fall of the Berlin Wall. We wish them all the best and, with not only all the people in Poland but all people of the world, we share in the celebration of this great man's achievements.

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