Anthony Albanese (Grayndler, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Fremantle for his question. Indeed, it was a great day last week when Professor Sean Turnell was released after 650 days in detention by the Myanmar regime—650 days in a Myanmar prison. It was one of the great honours of my life to have the phone call with him when he landed in Bangkok at around about the same time that I did the other evening. It was fantastic that he was able to reunite with his wife, Dr Ha Vu, an economics lecturer, in Melbourne on the weekend after 22 months apart and they were able to be flown home to Sydney.

Mr Turnell is a great Australian. He's very proud to be an Australian, and we should all be proud of him. What was extraordinary about the conversation I had with him was that he was just busy thanking people—thanking the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade; thanking the foreign minister, Penny Wong; thanking the embassy staff in Yangon and in Bangkok; and thanking the Australian people, who had campaigned so strongly for his release from that hellhole in prison. When I spoke to him, he spoke about getting food in a bucket but said that the Australian embassy would deliver food for him, food hampers with an Australian bag with the crest of the emu and the kangaroo. The emu and the kangaroo, of course, don't go backwards. They only go forwards. He would put the bag facing outside of the cell so that those people who had incarcerated him would see his pride in Australia. He is a great Australian. He, of course, is a highly respected academic. He developed a speciality in the Myanmar economy and he worked as a long-term adviser to Aung San Suu Kyi, who he met in the 1990s. He continued to live in Sydney, but he travelled regularly to Myanmar to provide advice to that country on how they might develop. He was detained on 6 February 2021, five days after the military coup.

I do want to thank our friends in ASEAN, who made strong representation; our friends throughout, including the Cambodian Prime Minister, Hun Sen; and others as well from Vietnam, Thailand and Indonesia, who were solid in their support and in supporting Australia's representation. It was a great day when he was released. I pay tribute to him for his courage, his determination and his resilience, and I wish him and his family all the best.

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