Kelvin Thomson (Wills, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Public Accountability and Human Services) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

On the night of 23 July, two Lebanese Red Cross ambulances came under Israeli air attack near the village of Qana. The attack reportedly caused one man travelling in one of the ambulances to lose his leg, and his 12-year-old son was scarred by shrapnel wounds to the head. An attack on Red Cross ambulances is cause for dismay, even disgust, no matter how war-weary our world has become, and the attack was widely reported by the international media.

In a world where violence is a way of life and the innocent are victims every day, the caravan moved on—except here in Australia, where the Minister for Foreign Affairs gave a speech on the Gold Coast in the last week of August deciding to criticise journalists for poor reporting of the war in Lebanon and deciding to use this case as an example. He said:

After closer study of the images of the damage to the ambulance, it is beyond serious dispute that this episode has all the makings of a hoax.

The problem for the foreign affairs minister is not merely his pompous, self-righteous, fake indignation in telling journalists how they ought to report a war but that he was wrong—quite wrong. Both the Lebanese Red Cross and the International Committee of the Red Cross have confirmed the attack. In no other official discourse around the world has the attack been doubted.

Now, you would think this minister might have learned from his blunders of the past and would be careful to check his facts and engage his brain before putting his mouth into gear. This is the same minister, after all, who said after we invaded Iraq that we would be there for months, not years. He is in the same gullible category as US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, who told American parents that their soldier sons and daughters would be welcomed by ‘liberated’ Iraqis with candy and flowers; instead, tragically, thousands have come home in coffins.

This is the same minister who in October 2004 sent our ambassador off to the US Senate to look US senators in the eye and tell them the Australian Wheat Board had not been paying kickbacks to Saddam Hussein. You would think he would have learned by now to check his facts before telling the media they should check theirs.

So where did Minister Downer get his information? Well the ‘evidence’ he produced on the Gold Coast to the Pacific Area Newspaper Publishers Association was based on images and opinion drawn from a website called zombietime.com. The person who operates this website is anonymous. He or she claims they live in San Francisco. He or she does a line in right-wing propaganda and ‘shocking images’. But our foreign minister prefers to believe this internet identity, rather than have his own department check matters out with the International Committee of the Red Cross. This is the minister who told the Cole commission into the AWB scandal that he does not have time to read diplomatic cables. But it turns out he has time to log on to anonymous right-wing US websites.

I went onto the internet and looked up the Compact Oxford English Dictionary definition of ‘zombie’. Its first meaning is ‘a corpse supposedly revived by witchcraft, especially in certain African and Caribbean religions’. Zombie’s other meaning is ‘a lifeless, apathetic, or completely unresponsive person’. That is Minister Downer all right: apathetic about the catastrophe that is Iraq, apathetic about the scandal that is AWB and unresponsive to the basic standards expected of a minister.

The Irish band the Cranberries did a brilliant anti-war song about the war in Ireland: like the Israel-Palestinian conflict, another senseless, decades-long, religious based conflict. They called it ‘Zombie’, and it goes:

With their tanks and their bombs,

And their bombs and their guns.

In your head, in your head, they are crying ...

…            …            …

What’s in your head,

In your head,

Zombie, zombie, zombie?

Minister Downer would be better served listening to the Cranberries than getting his kicks searching the net for websites run by anonymous right-wing crackpots. Floating across his portfolio in a zombie-like trance, he is a minister who hears only what he wants to hear, sees only what he wants to see and believes only what he wants to believe. Australia’s national security deserves better.