Nick Champion (Wakefield, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Manufacturing and Science) Share this | Hansard source

I'd like to thank the member for Makin for bringing this very important motion to the House for discussion. I'd like to thank the Chief Opposition Whip and the member for Dunkley for their words on this very important matter.

Like the member for Makin, I've been moved by the correspondence of some of my constituents about this matter, including firsthand accounts of the repression that is going on in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. From the outset of the debate, I want to say this is a debate about human rights. It's not a debate about China's territorial integrity. It's not a debate about how China governs itself. We have a good relationship with China. We want to maintain that good relationship, and as part of that good relationship we want to raise these very important human rights issues in this region. It's important for us to do that as a good friend of China and as a participant in world affairs.

Labor's position on this matter has been made very clear by Senator Penny Wong, who's our spokesperson on foreign affairs. We are deeply concerned about reports and accounts of mass detention of the minority Uygur population and other violations of human rights in this region. It's important to note that it's not just us; it's also the UN human rights chief, Michelle Bachelet, who said the panel had brought to light 'deeply disturbing allegations of large-scale arbitrary detentions of Uygurs and other Muslim communities, in so-called re-education camps across Xinjiang'.

This is a tremendously important matter. There is a system that I think could be best described as Orwellian—a very concerning sort of police state that's occurring in this region. For those members who are interested and for the public who are interested, The Economist had a very good article on 31 May 2018 which goes into some detail about the sorts of surveillance and programs that have been put in place and, of course, the mass detention of people. I'd like to quote directly from that article. It says:

Under a new party boss, Chen Quanguo, appointed in 2016, the provincial government has vastly increased the money and effort it puts into controlling the activities and patrolling the beliefs of the Uighur population. Its regime is racist, uncaring and totalitarian, in the sense of aiming to affect every aspect of peoples' lives. It has created a fully-fledged police state. And it is committing some of the most extensive, and neglected, human-rights violations in the world.

One of the titles is:

The not-quite-Gulag archipelago.

The article continues:

The government is building hundreds or thousands of unacknowledged re-education camps to which Uighurs can be sent for any reason or for none. In some of them day-to-day conditions do not appear to be physically abusive as much as creepy.

The article then goes on to quote the numbers of people in these camps, stating that Human Rights Watch says there may be as many as 800,000 people. Timothy Grose, from the University of Indiana, puts the number of people in those camps at between 500,000 and a million. We are talking about vast numbers of people. These camps are an open secret on the internet. If people want to look at The Atlantic, they have a good article which uses open-source material to establish that these camps exist.

It's not just these camps; there are other programs in place—of human surveillance, of tracking apps, of using peoples' health records against them, of sending government officials to live with individuals. All of these things are deeply concerning to Australians and deeply concerning to Australians of Uygur extraction or of Uygur origins. Their friends and families are subject to such conditions. We want China to perhaps have another look at these programs. It strikes me that they may be wildly counterproductive to the ends that China seeks, which is peaceful coexistence, no doubt, and economic growth in this region. The counterproductive nature of this sort of surveillance, this sort of police state and this sort of repression can be very bad indeed. We'd just encourage China to have another look and to perhaps put some reforms in place to end this repression.

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