Laurie Ferguson (Reid, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Consumer Affairs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I join with other opposition members in commending the government’s decision to enhance our forces in Afghanistan. The announcement was made by the Prime Minister last Wednesday. I also welcome the indication that there will be a review in six months time of the adequacy. Tom Hyland, in an article on 14 August cited by other members, noted:

The public is left ignorant of what is being done in its name, while soldiers and their families go without recognition.

I also would amplify the comments made by many opposition speakers that we are in this sorry situation today because of the government’s previous decision on Iraq and the way in which the eye was taken off the ball in Afghanistan. One can note many comments about the current picture there. In the Observer of 9 July the leader article commented:

Victory, however, will not be easy and will require much clever diplomacy, military will, deft handling of Afghan politics and, above all, a far greater commitment than the West has so far shown.

It also noted:

... one recent study found that international aid to Afghanistan equals £30 per person, as compared with £400 in Bosnia and £130 in Iraq.

It also went on to comment:

... the West’s political leaders must be explicit about what is at stake and what is needed. They must win popular support at home. This will be particularly vital if the effort needs to be sustained, maybe over decades.

Certainly the degree of secrecy associated with Australia’s participation is not the kind of attitude that is going to win that national support. Another article in the Guardian of 5 July by Simon Jenkins summarised the situation:

By last December it was abundantly clear that Helmand—

that is a province, of course—

and the eastern border provinces were no longer friendly territory. Aid workers were running back to Kabul. Information indicated that insurgents of every tribe and origin were reforming in Pakistan ...

We have a coalition of Taliban, warlords, drug dealers and various dissident elements raging a campaign at the moment which is characterised by large-scale destruction of schools, murder of teachers and anonymous night-time messages left on teachers’ doors indicating that they will be killed if they persist in running schools, particularly for girls. The situation was summarised by Declan Walsh on 28 June. He said, when speaking of President Karzai, who in 2004 garnered 54 per cent of the vote, that it:

... looks increasingly isolated—

that is, the regime—

inside his fortified Kabul palace.

Of course, it is not the first time that this government has unfortunately left a situation where dereliction of duty has led to very severe consequences for individuals. The fate that is besetting large numbers of Afghans at the moment was perhaps earlier indicated in Timor. In the last week or so we have had a statement by a previously prominent Indonesian foreign affairs official and a current spokesman for the President about the way in which Australia played a major role in persuading the Indonesians to move towards a vote for the Timorese people. However, I note an article in the latest copy of Dissent magazine by Adam Hughes Henry where he talked about:

The ethical condemnation of the government of East Timor, the newest and one of the poorest nations on earth, by Howard should be cause for serious reflection and analysis. The Defence Signals Directorate (DSD) was aware prior to the 1999 ballot that the Pro-Integrationist Militias were nothing more than proxies of the TNI (Indonesian Army). The Howard government also refused to accept US assessments that UN peace keepers would be required to protect the 1999 UN-operated independence ballot from potential chaos. Having consistently argued that the Indonesian military were best equipped to handle security Howard and Downer watched the post-referendum rampage by TNI-supported militias raze Dili. Tens of thousands of Timorese were forced at gun point into West Timor refugee camps.

So that sorry situation, which saw many Timorese needlessly die because of the great trust by Australia put in Indonesian authorities as protectors rather than the murderers, has been repeated. The reason I mention that is that I recall day after day in this parliament, when after too many years the opposition finally reversed its position on Timor, the ridicule that was heaped upon the foreign affairs spokesman, Laurie Brereton, for saying that we could not trust the Indonesians in the current conduct of that plebiscite.

The reason I raise this is that once again in this situation we had Labor’s foreign affairs spokesman and the member for Bruce, after their return to Australia in April 2004, very clearly cautioning their view of the collapse of the situation in Afghanistan. Once again, they were ridiculed and told they were worrying too much, things were under control and Australia had it well and truly covered. But we see of course how the decision to wind back our engagement there and to emphasise Iraq has led to the deterioration that we now witness in Afghanistan. Quite frankly, as the Leader of the Opposition has said, the situation in these two countries is very different. In Afghanistan, historically, because of a very unprincipled and, one might even say, moronic intervention by the Soviets, we have a situation whereby the US had recourse to Islamic fundamentalists to overthrow that government—a situation where my enemy’s enemy is my friend. Today we live with this problem and we see the way in which the Afghan people are suffering.

As I say, this has been a serious misjudgement and dereliction by the government. Also, we have a situation in Afghanistan where there has historically been clear complicity by the Pakistani security forces in setting up these extremist Islamic forces. One does not totally dismiss the possibility that there is still a degree of collaboration and a degree of reticence about pursuing these forces. We have a situation where the Taliban—having, for all their many faults, suppressed heroin during their period in government for religious reasons—are now increasingly seeing heroin as a way of financing their insurrection.

The opposition does not see a parallel with Iraq in this. It does not see it as a uniform, one-dimensional war on terrorism. The situation is very different. We have a situation here where clearly external forces were utilised by the United States and Pakistan in the short term to overthrow an unpopular central government under Soviet tutelage and this instigation has, as for many times, been foreign, non-Afghan and has included people from the Middle East, Pakistan and South-East Asia. Of course, the concern for us is that there are many instances on the record where training is being undertaken to induce terrorism. It was only after September 11 that the West decided that the regime in Afghanistan might not be the greatest on the block and that they might be an international danger. Up until then, they had been coddled and supported because they were seen as a lesser evil than that central government.

I want to divert for one moment from talking about the broader Afghan issue to say that this issue does particularly affect my constituents. I was interested to note a recent response to a question on notice I had placed about the settlement of refugee humanitarians in New South Wales. It is interesting to note that the three municipalities in my federal electorate—Parramatta, Holroyd and Auburn—take 30 per cent of the New South Wales refugee humanitarians. I can assure you that on a daily basis I have Hazaras coming in who raise their continual insecurity. There might be a few ministers in the current Afghan government who come from the long suppressed Hazara minority, but one cannot be totally sure that, because of the presence of those ministers, the Hazaran minority is protected from a traditional pattern of denigration, intimidation and discrimination.

Equally, we have the situation where a large number of people were adherents to the previous Najibullah pro-Soviet government. They have tended to be Farsi-speaking Western oriented people from the intelligentsia, educated at the Kabul polytechnic or at the university, who have no future back in Afghanistan regardless of the nice words that can be said about democratic processes in that country. You even have cases where a small number of claimants of Pashtun ancestry who are in a different environment today where the Afghans government is heavily influenced by non-Pashtuns would claim that they are discriminated against—and these are legitimate, although you and I might disagree with these people.

So what happens in Afghanistan is not just a philosophical question for me and my constituents. We have a large Afghan population. They have local institutions. They are involved in local mosques. I want to put on the record my appreciation for a number of those people who work for the community: Sayed Zobair, whose wife and children tragically fell into the blowhole at Kiama some years ago and whose daughter suicided with a friend a year later in memory of her mother, and also Mr Hamid Hassib from the Shia community. I am pleased to have been involved with them in helping to establish their religious centre near my office. What is happening in Afghanistan—this failure of the government to keep themselves focused on Afghanistan, their diversion, now seen as a total disaster, into Iraq, which has only led to an outbreak of internecine and interreligious conflict—directly affects our electorate.

The other point I would make about these figures is that we often have lectures from people in inner city municipalities of Sydney, people who have very hard views that we should not combat fraud in immigration, we should not worry about it and that it is irrelevant. It is very interesting to see that these people are often in electorates that do not seem too keen to take refugee humanitarians. As I said, Holroyd, Parramatta and Auburn took in over 1,000 refugee humanitarians in the last year. Some of these other figures are also quite interesting. The municipality of Marrickville—31—are improving. I have to concede that that figure of 31 is an improvement. In the municipality of Leichhardt, two refugee humanitarians were settled there last year. If I go through this list, Pittwater took one and Burwood 10—a pattern of very intense support for refugee humanitarians. They love them deeply, but they do not seem too keen to settle them. It takes a lot more than putting up banners about supporting refugees and refugee week et cetera. It is a matter of having a community which knows there are real settlement issues and social issues but which is prepared for its migrant resource centres and its municipalities to go out and assist these people in their settlement.

As they say at school, they are improving but I would like to see more effort from these inner city municipalities to make sure that we do not hide behind issues such as supposed support of foreshore and supposed support of open space to deny greater densities and greater public housing. I have seen a lot of these municipalities. They seem to have a very strong penchant to oppose public housing under these guises. They can really help refugee humanitarians in this country if they get those views out of the way and make sure that they are able to settle a lot more people.

I associate myself with the comments of a variety of earlier speakers who welcome this decision to enhance our military presence in Afghanistan. It is sad that, unfortunately, the situation has deteriorated, particularly in the south, in a country where the integrity of many warlords has always been very doubtful—and that even stretches to the family of the President, quite frankly. There have been a lot of reports about his brother and his alleged involvement in the drug trade. The military situation here has severely deteriorated. Outside of Kabul, the government’s writ does not seem to often have much authority. One would hope that this review in six months focuses on the need to protect the Afghan people, the need to protect the families of my constituents and the need to make sure that we successfully resist moves by the Taliban and al-Qaeda and their associates to reimpose a theocratic state suppressing women and basically suppressing human rights.

Michael Hatton (Blaxland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am happy to participate in this debate on Afghanistan and happy to speak in concert with all those who are in support of our troops, as was the member for Reid and other members on the Labor side and also those on the government side. Deploying troops anywhere means that their lives can be put at hazard. Deploying troops into a known war zone which is now more difficult and more dangerous than it was previously is an even greater burden. The decision cannot be taken lightly. I am sure the preparation of Australian troops to go to that theatre will be deeper, stronger and more purposeful than it was to deploy troops to Iraq because, whereas conditions in Al Muthanna province have been difficult and dangerous, the conditions that exist in Afghanistan, where our troops will be further deployed, are much more dangerous.

On this day, all Australians, particularly those who are directly affected by it, will be thinking of what this emblem means—the remembrance of the Battle of Long Tan when 18 Australians died. The 108 men of D company, 6RAR, fought a pitched battle in blinding rain against a vastly greater opposition. For several hours they held out. They were reinforced. They used artillery, and they had ammo supplied, brought in to them from helicopters. But 18 young Australians lost their lives in a war that the government sent them to—a war that was not of their own choosing. Because they were part of our military forces, they had to put their lives at hazard and they lost them.

On this particular day, it is important to remember that, in sending troops to Afghanistan, we have sent troops to many different theatres. Some people have already been injured and some people have died, and maybe more people will die over time. It is with a heavy heart that I say this, because I know just how difficult it is and how brave the people in our defence forces are. We need to make sure, particularly with what has been highlighted recently, that they have the best available equipment—the best equipment that is necessary and useful for that country—and that it is as up to date as possible. I have seen a fair amount of that. From the recent comments that have been made, we need to be absolutely sure that its quality is guaranteed and that the Defence Materiel Organisation ensures that.

It is a difficult day in many ways. When the Battle of Long Tan occurred I was all of about 16 years of age. In the following two years, a lot of my waking thoughts were about whether I would be in Vietnam and whether I would be in that situation, because we had a lottery as to whether people would be in or out. My birthday was not picked, but I had thought through those issues strongly. I did not go, but I worked, studied and played footy with people who did go, who were drafted and who were put in that situation. For people who are still alive today, and remembering those who lost their lives, there has to be a very good reason for people to go and a very good reason for us to say, ‘While we stay, others are in a forward position doing something significant and defending something that is good and strong.’

The Labor Party believes—and I believe this very strongly—that the commitment to Afghanistan is absolutely necessary. I also believe we should not have left when we did and left one single Australian soldier there. I think it was entirely a mistake that Australian, US and British forces formed the coalition of the willing to go into Iraq when they did. They could have finished off the problem with Saddam Hussein in Iraq 12 years before. It did not happen. One of the reasons it did not happen is that Iraq can simply dissolve into the three constituent elements that made it up in 1924. This is a country of convenience. It is dissolving, in front of our very eyes, into the Sunni and Shiite elements, and the Kurdish elements in the north. If civil war in Iraq breaks out, as it looks as if it will, then the Shiites in Iran will link up with the bottom part of Iraq and then press on top of Jordan and what will then be a very unstable regime in Syria. And the current difficulties in southern Lebanon, with Israel’s invasion and their attack on Hezbollah, will reach higher orders of magnitude as a result of that.

Those problems are directly linked to the situation in Afghanistan, and part of the background to it was quite well laid out by the member for Flinders in this debate. He took a broad strategic view and looked at the struggle in Afghanistan to oust the Taliban and the broad struggle against Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda—or ‘the base’, as it is known—and he looked at its background ideology and the drivers of the situation we face. He was quite correct. Most of the groups who are involved here take a very fundamentalist approach to Islam. They are part of what is known as Wahharbism, which is a sect that developed in Saudi Arabia a couple of hundred years ago—very hard line, very exclusionist. We saw its most frightening modern expression in the rule of the Taliban in Afghanistan. It is effectively a medieval force which seeks to take people back to an enclosed world and an Islam that is not outward or open and willing to deal with other faiths but an Islam that completely turns in on itself.

The member for Flinders spoke of the desire of the people leading these revolutionary groups. Bin Laden, of course, is a very wealthy upper middle class person, like most of the big revolutionaries in the past. He is not someone from the very lower working class but somebody who has been enormously privileged. He has been willing to be used by the West previously and the West was willing to use him in the period during the Cold War when we had a simpler world, when bin Laden and his forces were used as mujahaddin against the Soviet forces that were in Afghanistan.

The aim of these fundamentalists is, quite simply, to set up what we call a caliphate. If you look at the way bin Laden operated you see what they started to do. Over a period of more than 10 years, his attacks on Oman and northern Africa, and within Saudi Arabia after the first Gulf War, were based on the presumption that Saudi Arabia had been soiled by the presence of American troops and that all American troops had to be gotten out. But the direct targets for his campaign were governments in the Middle East which were Islamic but which did not have a hard enough form of Wahharbism. They were not of the brand that was demanded by him, they were not fundamentalist enough, they did not hate the West enough and they did not want to create a worldwide Islamic state in the Middle East. In the Asian version of that, we faced, with Jemaah Islamiah, an attempt to draw together all people who follow Islam under a caliphate within East Asia.

They have failed so far, but there were a number of attempts to set up a base—and al-Qaeda means ‘the base’—in an Islamic country in the Middle East. They found that too hard. They could not win people over and they changed tack. During the period when they were undertaking that, of course, there were the attacks on the USS Cole and on the US embassy in Kenya. There was a series of other attempts, such as the attempt to knock out the World Trade Center building in 1994, where they tried to demolish it from the car park underneath. But, increasingly, because they failed elsewhere, they took on the softer targets—civilians in the West. We know from the deaths of those thousands of people in the World Trade Center, in the Pentagon and in the planes that were hijacked—and there are those people who, luckily, will not die because recently the British were able to apprehend two dozen or so people who were planning attacks to occur around the fifth anniversary of the attacks in the US—that we are dealing with a very serious business. It is fundamental and it is the real reason why our troops are in Afghanistan.

I think it is very unfortunate that we went into Iraq, because it was the wrong war at the wrong time. Having got rid of the Taliban—an extraordinarily difficult thing to do—we were in a position where we could have run down bin Laden and not allowed him to escape. As the Leader of the Opposition quite rightly argued in his response to the Prime Minister’s statement the other day, trying a flash new way of being able to fight by proxy by paying bribes to local groups of warlords seemed like a good idea at the time but it was as dumb as anything because they just took higher bribes from bin Laden. So they took from both and it appears bin Laden was able to escape into southern Pakistan, which is still uncontrolled and a forbidden country to Western forces and even to Pakistani intelligence and military forces.

We have a real problem that, in Afghanistan and that part of Pakistan, the core of the assault on the West has not been run to ground and has not been, as George Bush referred to it, ‘brought to justice’. The Americans made a fundamentally incorrect decision, so our troops now going back to Afghanistan go back to an Afghanistan that is a lot more dangerous than the one that existed after the Taliban had been cleaned up in the first instance. Hamid Karzai, as Prime Minister of Afghanistan, has a very difficult job to try to bring back together the Pashtun people in the land of the Afghans as a coherent reality. I think it is highly possible, despite the fact that there is a layered series of warlords throughout the country. It is possible to bring these people back as an integrated entity and the country can be secured as a modern democracy, but it will be enormously difficult to do.

I agreed with almost everything the member for Reid said. It was well advertised that, during the period they controlled the country, the Taliban, apart from destroying one of the greatest Buddhist shrines the world has ever seen in an enormously destructive act, suggested that they had aborted the heroin trade operating out of Afghanistan by stopping people growing opium and so on. It is my information that that is not the case—that they continued to allow poppies to be grown and raw opium to be shipped out of Afghanistan, and they utilised that money to consolidate their regime. But it was part of their propaganda campaign to say that they were not the kind of group that people thought they were and that they really had a concern for peoples’ health and welfare and so on.

This is a tough and difficult area for our troops to go back into because, in the two years or so that troops were not there on the ground—only a small number were there—the assistance needed by the government of Afghanistan to rebuild itself was very great, and terrific efforts have been under way. The Taliban and al-Qaeda forces have re-established themselves and put themselves in a position to endanger the continued existence of the new government of Afghanistan. That would not have been the case if the field had not been deserted and Iraq had not been chosen as the place for the battle.

We are going to have a long, hard and bitter war in Afghanistan as a result of those decisions. Here again the member for Flinders is correct: this is not a short-term conflict; this is one where, if you go back and look at English history, you will find we are in for a 30-year or a 100-year war, and not many people will favour it. In his book the Clash of Civilisations, Huntington, an extremely good political scientist from the United States, is I think pretty much on the money in terms of the depth and strength of the battle we face. Any great ideological war that is founded on a religious impulse will be extraordinarily difficult to deal with, because most of the war is in people’s heads. It is not in terms of rationality but in terms of people’s emotional reaction to things. So we need to fight this on many levels. I can only give my strongest support to our troops who are going into a very difficult area. Good luck to them.

Ms Catherine King (Ballarat, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Treasury) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I welcome the opportunity to speak on the Prime Minister’s commitment of the Australian Defence Force to Afghanistan. This time the Prime Minister has correctly made a ministerial statement on the deployment of troops, unlike the disgraceful circumstance in which the parliament was informed of the decision to redeploy our troops in Iraq to Talil via a dorothy dixer in question time.

Unlike the members on the other side of this House, we treat the deployment of our troops, particularly to areas such as Afghanistan, as a very serious issue. The Liberals like to wrap themselves in military glory at any opportunity but, when it comes to this deployment, where are they? Very few members of the Liberal Party or the coalition have spoken on this deployment, and this deployment is one of the most serious deployments we have seen, certainly in the last two to three years. The most serious decision any government can take is to commit Australian Defence Force personnel to areas of conflict where there will be a significant chance that they will be killed or injured. Make no doubt: Afghanistan at the moment is extremely dangerous, and our troops are going into an area where they are highly likely to be seriously injured or killed.

I do not think the public realise just how dangerous Afghanistan is; we have become somewhat numbed to troop deployment announcements. The way in which troop deployments have been depicted in the media means that we often think we are sending them into peacekeeping areas and, because it sounds as though it is a peacekeeping operation, it seems as though the troops are going into a peaceful situation and therefore will be safe. Because we have not experienced the sorts of casualties—we have certainly experienced some injuries and I will talk about those a bit later—that other nations have experienced, I also think the Australian public are somewhat numbed by the announcements that are made and think that somehow our troops are going into areas that are safe.

But make no mistake: Afghanistan is extremely dangerous. All the more so because, apart from our initial commitment of troops, we and many larger nations took our eye off the ball in Afghanistan, and we left the Taliban, al-Qaeda and the local warlords to regain significant power. Afghanistan has deteriorated significantly, and the area our troops are being sent to is extremely dangerous. In certain areas, the Taliban and their allies in al-Qaeda are very much at large. News outlets report of the Taliban controlling the roads, acting as the police force and judicial authority and openly running offices to recruit fighters to their ranks. A senior British military commander in Afghanistan, Lieutenant General David Richards, has described the situation in the country as close to anarchy, with feuding foreign agencies and the unethical private security companies compounding problems caused by local corruption. Last month the Washington Post reported:

Taliban violence has intensified this year to its most severe since the hard-line Islamists were ousted nearly five years ago after refusing to hand over Osama bin Laden.

The reality is that insurgents are raging across Afghanistan, particularly in the south. It is a hotbed of terrorism. Terrorists are using Afghanistan to train and refine their skills and, in sending our troops to Afghanistan, we are placing them at significant risk—a risk that has been made even greater by the Howard government’s withdrawal of troops in 2002. Labor supported our original deployment to Afghanistan. We entered that war under the ANZUS alliance believing that, if we were to defeat terrorism, Afghanistan had to be at the heart of our operations. There was broad international support for the war in Afghanistan and the political will to deal with terrorism after the terrible aftermath of September 11. The government’s focus moved off Afghanistan and they withdrew our troops way too early in 2002.

Labor supported that decision, on the information the government gave us and in good faith that the security situation in Afghanistan was under control. The Prime Minister did not make public at the time the fact that our troops were being withdrawn. They were being withdrawn in the face of private diplomatic pleas that we not do so. John Howard withdrew troops, despite knowing that the job was far from done and in the face of those pleas, and he left Afghanistan to fester in the mess that it is in today.

Following the visit of our shadow minister and the member for Bruce in 2004, Labor took the difficult decision to call for Australian troops to get back into Afghanistan as soon as possible. We were ridiculed for that. The Prime Minister, in withdrawing troops from Afghanistan, left the job only half done. History, of course, shows that part of the reason for the early withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan was the government’s decision to commit troops to Iraq—that is, to a war, in case anyone has been beguiled by the government’s spin, we entered not to depose the evil dictator Saddam Hussein, who had been benefiting from the government’s ‘wheat for weapons’ deal, but to ostensibly rid the world of his stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. We now know those stockpiles did not exist. The government has now rewritten history on this and is now somehow claiming to all and sundry that it was always about bringing democracy and freedom to Iraq.

Iraq today is an absolute basket case. It has a form of democracy, yes, but the level of civilian and non-civilian casualties is enormous. Having gone into Iraq and literally destroyed all of its public and social infrastructure and institutions, the coalition of the willing is now significantly diminished and facing decades of being bogged down in what even American commentators are saying is a civil war. Insurgency is now rife and it has become, not having been so before, a hot spot for terrorism activity in the Middle East. Despite the fantastic work and the professionalism of the ADF across the areas of operation in Iraq and its surrounds, it is no longer clear to me what the overall objective is for Australia in Iraq or how it—out of all of our national security interests—is our top priority and most costly commitment.

Having recently been part of the Australian Defence Force’s parliamentary program, I was part of the first group of parliamentarians to be sent on an active deployment in the Middle East area of operations. I have to tell you that many of our troops are pretty sceptical about the government’s commitment in Iraq. It is my participation in the Australian Defence Force parliamentary program that has partly prompted me to contribute to this debate today. Having not come from a defence family and not having a policy background in defence matters, my exposure to defence issues has largely been limited to questioning civilian staff via the Joint Committee of Public Accounts and Audit about the various audit reports into Defence disasters in procurement that we review. Having the opportunity to spend time with the Australian defence forces on deployment as part of this program gave me a much better appreciation of the professionalism, the extraordinary leadership skills and the incredible dedication of Australian troops. I was the only ALP member and the only woman on that trip, and we were stationed both with the P3C Orions and on HMAS Ballarat in the Persian Gulf.

One great thing about the program we went on is that we did not do what politicians often do, and we see it in the media, which is fly in and fly out to our troops on deployment. We spent significant amounts of time having meals with our troops, working alongside them, playing sport with them in early-morning training sessions and really having the opportunity, without senior personnel around, to talk to our troops on the ground. In particular, I took the opportunity to talk to many of the women who are on deployment over in the Middle East about their experiences. There are two issues I have serious concerns about with respect to the way our troops on deployment are being provided for. The first is in the area of health services and mental health services. I seriously believe that particularly the mental health services provided for Australian Defence Force personnel whilst they are on deployment, post deployment and post leaving the Australian Defence Force are seriously underdone. I was told about this experience by the medical personnel in the Persian Gulf. There was only one doctor for all of the ships the coalition had within the Persian Gulf at the time we were there.

There had been serious psychiatric disorders displayed by some of our troops during that six-month deployment and there was inadequate provision for medical staff to be able to deal with those mental health conditions. That was raised directly with us by the medical people on the HMAS Ballarat. We are seriously underdone in relation to the number of psychologists and psychiatrists, given the nature of the work that those psychiatrists and psychologists are doing for our troops on deployment—and that is just in the area of mental health.

In terms of general health, when we were on the HMAS Ballarat there was one doctor. Again, the doctor on the HMAS Ballarat provided medical services for all of the troops and all of the other people within that gulf—an enormous number. There were 188 on HMAS Ballarat itself, and there were a number of other coalition ships. When HMAS Ballarat left to go to port in Dubai there were no medical personnel within the Persian Gulf at all. The sorts of conditions that they are seeing range from minor injuries that just happen with the nature of the ship, with people falling and cutting and bruising themselves, to breaking arms and legs—often those sorts of injuries occur—through to serious heart conditions, very serious heatstroke and right the way through to the very serious psychiatric conditions that people were exhibiting while on deployment as well.

I am seriously concerned and at every opportunity I have will be raising the issue of the way in which the Australian Defence Force personnel have access to mental health services while on deployment, when they experience a mental health condition and also post their departure from the Australian defence forces. The reason I feel so concerned about this issue is that I, like many people in this place, work with an enormous number of Vietnam veterans. I have some very close friends—I would like to call them my friends—who are Vietnam veterans, and I see the pain and the sorts of conditions that they are experiencing because they were not treated properly for mental health issues on deployment and certainly post deployment and I see what those experiences have meant that they have had to face with their families.

The second issue that was raised with me whilst I was on the Orion P3C base in the Middle East area of operations was one of equipment. I have raised this previously with our shadow minister directly. We arrived on the shooting range with the ground force protection personnel to learn how to fire several weapons, and immediately on arriving there those personnel threw down the webbing and they said: ‘We want to tell you as politicians that this webbing is absolutely useless for the task that we have to do. We’ve all gone out and purchased our own webbing at $300 a pop. This webbing is dangerous. Our weapons tangle in it. It does not have enough capacity for us to carry bullets, the water that we need to carry and our weapons themselves, and we are at serious risk when we are wearing this webbing. We do not want to have this webbing. We actually believe it’s dangerous and we’ve gone out and bought our own at $300 a pop.’

I then asked them if they had lodged complaints on the RODUM system, which is a system that Defence Force personnel have to complain about their equipment, and frankly they just laughed. They said: ‘RODUM is a joke. We have lodged complaints on it, but the complaints go nowhere. The department doesn’t treat them seriously, and it is just not a system that allows us to have any confidence at all that, here on the ground, on deployment, when we say something is not correct, that we need another piece of equipment, we can get a fast response and get those issues fixed.’

The lack of mental health services provided to troops on deployment and the webbing are just two issues that were raised directly with us over a 10-day period in the Middle East area of operations. I have no doubt that on both of those issues I am going to hear some pretty terrific departmental spin about why those issues are really not a problem. In fact, I have already heard some. When we arrived back in Australia after the deployment, we hit Darwin and we were all a bit jet-lagged. The department had already provided us with some dot points as to why the webbing really was not an issue at all. One of the more offensive things I heard was one of the media people telling us: ‘It’s really like choosing to have a Gucci handbag or not a Gucci handbag. That’s why our troops are deciding to go and buy their own webbing.’

It is a very serious issue and I think with this deployment of our troops to Afghanistan we need to look very seriously at the issues that are raised directly by troops on deployment and not listen to the media spin. To this end, I ask the minister to look seriously into both of the issues that I raised, but I also put him on notice that there are a number of us on this side of the House who are extremely concerned about what is happening to our troops on deployment and post deployment and that we will be keeping a very close eye on this issue.

As I said at the start, for the men and women of the ADF deployed to Afghanistan, this is a very dangerous deployment. There is a high likelihood of Australian casualties before the end of the year. In the current deployment of troops in Afghanistan there have already been several wounded, with very little information available publicly as to the nature of their injuries and the circumstances in which they have occurred. Labor know how dangerous this deployment is. We also know how important the task is that our troops are being sent in to do. Afghanistan is at the centre of the terrorist operations and it is in our national security interests that we participate with other nations and do all we can. I wish our troops and their families well at what is a difficult time. The Labor Party have taken the decision to support the deployment in full consideration of the nature of your task. We know what we are asking you and your families to do and we wish you a safe deployment and we pray for your return.

Kim Wilkie (Swan, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to echo the comments of my colleagues, led by the Leader of the Opposition last Wednesday in the House. Before turning to the specific issue of Afghanistan, I think it is pertinent to the matter at hand to reflect on this week’s commemoration of the Battle of Long Tan 40 years ago. Last Friday, members of the RSL Manning sub-branch in my electorate met for lunch, a chat and to remember past mates ahead of this week’s commemoration. As Manning sub-branch President Alistair MacPherson said, the Long Tan anniversary is particularly important to remember because of the way that Australian soldiers returning from Vietnam were treated. ‘When the soldiers came back to Australia,’ Mr MacPherson said, ‘they were spat on and disgraced. It’s taken a long time for the Vietnam chaps to get over that. They were only young boys—hardly hardened soldiers.’ I again commend the efforts of RSL branches in my electorate. On their behalf I urge all of my constituents to spend a moment tomorrow to reflect on the Battle of Long Tan, to reflect on all those who served in the Vietnam War and, especially, those who never returned home.

I now turn to Afghanistan. I would like to begin by adding my concerns to those raised by others about the injuries sustained by some of our troops over the last few days. I join them in offering my wishes for a speedy recovery. The fact that these injuries were sustained highlights the fact that the soldiers we already have deployed in Afghanistan are operating in very dangerous circumstances and that the additional troops we are sending will be exposed to great danger. The reason they are in danger is the failed policy of the Australian government and the fact that it cut and ran in Afghanistan before the job was finished. Make no mistake: this government is responsible for putting the lives of these newly deployed soldiers at greater risk because of its past actions. I will expand on this shortly.

Let us turn to the current situation. As other members have explained, we currently have 240 Australian soldiers in Afghanistan made up of SAS members, commandos, an incident response regiment and logistics personnel. They are supported by two Chinook helicopters from the 5th Aviation Regiment. While the opposition have grave misgivings about the war in Iraq, we fully support this new deployment of our troops to Afghanistan—as Labor did in the past. As the Leader of the Opposition has said before, Afghanistan is terror central—the central office of al-Qaeda working with the Taliban. That is why it is vital that we get rid of terrorism root and branch and our presence in Afghanistan is part of achieving that objective.

The Howard government’s yo-yo commitment to Afghanistan is indicative of its confused approach to the war on terror. It is a confused approach because, rather than concentrating the resources and capabilities of the ADF on the destruction of al-Qaeda and its acolytes in Afghanistan, the Howard government chose to commit Australian resources to the invasion of Iraq. As we know, the links between Saddam Hussein’s regime and al-Qaeda were tenuous. Since the invasion, the world is none the safer.

Let us look at what happened in Afghanistan to put it into perspective. When the coalition forces invaded the country, we took over the capital city and some of the major Taliban strongholds in the region. We did not take over the whole country. So all that happened was that the Taliban knew that they were being attacked in certain provinces and they moved their resources and their people out of the areas that were being taken over by the coalition forces and into other areas where they previously had not been dominant. They then continued to establish new networks and new terrorist cells in those areas. That is because we did not do the job properly in the first place. So now, as Osama bin Laden and the forces of the Taliban and al-Qaeda regroup and embark on their plan to reactivate their terror networks, this government has been forced to admit its failure. For all the rhetoric about not cutting and running and needing to stay the course in Iraq, the Howard government has a lot of explaining to do for its lack of commitment to Afghanistan.

Members will recall that, in 2002, the Australian government, as I said, withdrew our troops from Afghanistan. At one stage, we had one soldier on the ground in Afghanistan. We knew the task had not been completed but that was our only force in that country. That is outrageous! Labor supported this move at the time in good faith, as a result of the information supplied to us by the government. But as we now know, as I have stated previously, the government has been less than honest about the security situation in Afghanistan. It has now transpired that the troop withdrawal in 2002 was undertaken in the face of private diplomatic protests from the Afghani government. In a letter dated November 2002 the Afghans pleaded with the Australian government to continue their military support because, as it said, ‘terrorism is alive and well’. Unfortunately, this plea was ignored.

The government has now reversed that decision, and Labor fully support the deployment, but we know there are grave dangers. I know that members on both sides of the House feel great pride in our men and women who are serving overseas and are acutely aware of the dangers they face. Unfortunately, as was said previously, the difficult situation in Afghanistan has been exacerbated by the actions of the Australian government in withdrawing our troops back in 2002. While the political situation in the north of the country is stabilising, the southern precincts are becoming increasingly fragile. I recently met with officials from the International Crisis Group in Brussels, who have been closely monitoring the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan. The ICG made the following comments:

In a state of effective war for most of the last quarter century, Afghanistan was a Cold War battleground before a fratricidal civil war was allowed to fester for much of the 1990s. With the extremist Taliban in power it played host to al-Qaeda. However, having refused to give up al-Qaeda leaders, the regime was quickly removed in late 2001 by U.S.-led Coalition forces. Following the political roadmap laid out in Bonn, the country has since seen the ratification of a new moderate Islamic Constitution and the election of a president and National Assembly. However, the ultimate goal of a stable, sustainable state remains delicately poised. The south and eastern regions bordering Pakistan see an ongoing insurgency while a policy of cooption has seen warlords and the powerbrokers of past eras entrenched. Opium production has exploded; the country is now responsible for 87 per cent of the world’s supply. While a fledgling Afghan National Army is gaining confidence, police and judicial reform remain neglected and district authorities (are) often a source, rather than succour from, fear for the local population. Exacerbated by security problems developmental progress has been painfully slow, with Afghanistan having some of the lowest social indicators in the world.

These concerns appear to be evident to everyone except the Australian government.

In January, ICG chief and former Australian foreign minister—the best foreign minister I think we have ever had—Gareth Evans, wrote in an article in the Financial Review:

Beyond basic security, the crucial issues are good governance and the rule of law, which must be at the core of the new compact. The current state of affairs is unacceptable for the local population and wastes donors’ time and money. Why promote alternative livelihood programmes for opium farmers when their provincial governor is a known drugs trafficker? How can you promote a justice system today when those responsible for yesterday’s massacres remain in positions of power? Governors with records of human rights abuses and involvement in drugs are on a merry-go-round of presidential appointments: when locals in one area object to an official, he is simply moved to the next province. In many regions police commanders with no professional training run what are, in effect, private militias. That such positions of power have been awarded to the very people who fed the civil war has been a major source of public disillusionment with the transition process.

We need to deal with those sorts of issues. It is vital that we do not lose sight of the need to look after the Afghani people. Their plight must not be ignored.

As the member for Barton made clear in his contribution to this debate, the Afghani people are being terrorised by bandits who are using extreme violence to try to intimidate and scare villagers. Our troops have already made a contribution to protecting the Afghani people. And I know that they will continue to do so under this new deployment. Australia is one of 25 countries providing assistance in Afghanistan in terms of fighting terror and reconstruction. Last week, the editorial in the Australian made the correct point: ‘Australia has a duty and interest in setting things right in Afghanistan.’ The Labor Party will continue to support our troops and their endeavours in that country. We will pray for their safety and that their cause is successful.

Debate (on motion by Mr Cameron Thompson) adjourned.