Andrew Wallace (Fisher, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I too rise in support of this motion and I thank the member for Mackellar for his outstanding work in bringing this motion and also in relation to his outstanding work in the committee upon which he serves.

I'm a lover of history and I think it's important that we get a bit of a better understanding about where these Geneva conventions came from. Having done a little bit of research on this, I'm advised that the Geneva conventions had their genesis by a gentleman by the name of Henri Dunant. He was a Genevan businessman who was on his way to a trade mission meeting with Emperor Napoleon III's staff in Italy. On his way to this meeting, he stumbled across a battlefield. It was, I understand, a dreadful sight. Based on what he saw at that battlefield, there were many combatants who were treated very badly, particularly if they had been wounded. He took it upon himself to be an agent for change. That was back in 1859. In 1863, the works that Mr Dunant did led to a meeting of various states. I think it was then only 12 states that met, and they concocted what was to then become the first Geneva convention.

The first Geneva convention dealt with the care of wounded soldiers and their repatriation. That then led to two more conventions, the second and third Geneva conventions of 1906 and 1929 respectively. Once again, they dealt predominantly with the care of wounded combatants. Interestingly, the one that Henri Dunant developed, which became the first Geneva convention, led to the establishment of the Red Cross. We now know that the International Committee of the Red Cross is an organisation that operates worldwide and, as the previous speaker said, does absolutely remarkable work, some 160 years later, in relation to natural disasters and in times of warfare. I want to send a big shout-out to two of my constituents who have done some terrific work with the Red Cross. Mike and Lyn Gahan are absolutely tireless workers for the Red Cross, and my hat goes off to them because, as we speak right now, they're probably in a place that none of us would want to go to.

The Geneva conventions then led to the 1949 fourth Geneva convention. We saw in the conflict of World War II that the first, second and third iterations of the Geneva convention didn't adequately address the harm that warfare does to civilians. Whilst I was representing the Australian parliament in the Inter-Parliamentary Union just a few months ago, I sat in on a discussion with an African parliamentarian who gave the most harrowing story of her own rape and the treatment of her village in times of warfare. We here in Australia may at times think we're doing it tough, but it's times like that, when you sit and listen to a parliamentarian talk about how she was raped and villagers were slaughtered, that really put things into perspective. That's why the Geneva conventions are so important and why Australia signed up to them.

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