Don Randall (Canning, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In this place on 1 June I believe I may well have unintentionally misled the House with certain information I gave in my speech on the appropriation bills. I was talking about the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam—the LTTE—which is the terrorist organisation in northern Sri Lanka. I said:

... I understand that this weekend in Britain the Tamil terrorist leader Prabhakaran will be in London celebrating his daughter’s 20th birthday.

I had been given that information by a Mr da Silva, and I checked it twice. Unfortunately, although I endeavoured to check the accuracy of the claim with the foreign affairs department through Mr Phillip Stonehouse, that information did not come back to me soon enough. After much email and return comment, I cannot with any certainty say that that information is correct. If I was wrong, I apologise and I withdraw that statement.

However, what has been told to me by Mr Phillip Stonehouse and by other email contacts is that the person being referred to was probably not Prabhakaran, the leader of the LTTE terrorists, but Balasingham, the LTTE’s international spokesman, who lives in the UK under some sort of refugee status—which I find a bit strange in any case. The inference was that this spokesman was travelling freely outside of Sri Lanka because of his role in the peace talks in Norway. That seems quite fanciful, because Britain proscribes the LTTE as a terrorist group. He would probably be picked up by Interpol or some other organisation in any case.

If I have inadvertently misled the House, I would like to correct the record. But I still stand by every other statement about the LTTE in my appropriation bills speech. The LTTE are a terrorist organisation. Subsequent to my speech, I wrote to the Attorney-General and to the foreign affairs minister asking that Australia do as the European Union—including Britain—the United States and other countries such as Canada have done in proscribing the LTTE as a terrorist organisation. I will continue to make sure that this Australian government that I represent heads down that path because the LTTE are a disgraceful organisation and they brutally kill, maim and terrorise the normal population of their country.