Peter Slipper (Fisher, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to participate in the debate on the motion moved by the honourable member for Fremantle in relation to the International Day of Democracy and on the motion that was carried through the United Nations General Assembly, which essentially supports the principle of the International Day of Democracy and also urges that democracy be celebrated right around the world.

The motion moved by the honourable member notes that the United Nations General Assembly affirms that:

“ … democracy is a universal value based on the freely expressed will of people to determine their own political, economic, social and cultural systems, and their full participation in all aspects of life;” and that “While democracies share common features, there is no single model of democracy and that democracy does not belong to any country or region.”

The problem with the United Nations is that, although it is a very useful international forum and has done much good work, it has often been accused, with some justification, of essentially being a talkfest. People express lofty sentiments and various delegates at the United Nations talk on and on. Motions are carried but, regrettably, there is often not a lot of positive impact flowing from the debate in the United Nations General Assembly. Having said that, I am not one to run the United Nations down, as it is certainly a force for world good. However, in some respects, I think it is regrettable that we do not see more actions of substance from the United Nations and more positive outcomes for the world community as a result of discussions at the United Nations General Assembly.

Often one finds countries which are completely undemocratic but are rather hypocritically mouthing pious platitudes about the importance of democratic principles. There is a whole series of nations that have totalitarian regimes, nations where the population has no authority or right to determine its government. One finds many of those countries are at the assembly putting forward sentiments of support for the notion of democracy while denying it to their own citizens. All honourable members would obviously not approve of such hypocrisy.

In Australia, we are singularly fortunate because we are one of the oldest democracies in the world, even though we are a relatively young country. Someone told me once that Australia was the sixth oldest democracy in the world. Initially, one’s reaction is to say that that simply could not be true, but then one looks at the fact that during the entire period of this country’s life, certainly since we gained representative government, we have always had democratic governments and we have always been governed by the rule of law. We have freedom, stability and a way of life that people in other places throughout the world do not enjoy. We have heard of the appalling examples in South America where people who oppose regimes there sometimes just disappear. But here in Australia if one is, shall we say, questioned by the law or charged under the law then one has an entitlement to one’s day in court. We have a system of which we are justly proud.

Personally, I believe that our constitutional monarchy has played a very important role in being one of the foundations of our society. It has been a guarantee of our freedom, stability and a way of life that many other nations simply envy. All members of the House support the system of democracy. I just think that, while we have a general election and we might not like the outcome, we ought not to question the process. I go round to the schools in my electorate, as no doubt you do, Mr Deputy Speaker Schultz, and talk to students about democracy.

Is it not wonderful that, when a government is defeated, the Prime Minister remains Prime Minister for the time being and then, under the conventions of how we are governed, as the head of government goes and formally advises the head of state, the Governor-General, of the result of the election—although obviously the Governor-General looks at the internet or watches the TV like everyone else—and advises that he as Prime Minister would no longer have the confidence of the House and recommends to the Governor-General that the Leader of the Opposition be commissioned to form a government? The Governor-General then issues a new commission and a new government is formed. There is an orderly transition. New ministers take over, the parliament is recalled and the system of democracy goes on. Then in three years time, when the next election occurs, the government has the opportunity of being judged by what it has achieved and the community of Australia will once again determine whether or not that government should be returned or whether another government should replace it. If the result were that that government was defeated, there would similarly be another orderly transition.

One can go right back to when Federation occurred to see that this has been the way that we have operated as a nation. While I certainly support the principles enunciated in the United Nations General Assembly about the importance of democracy, highlighting democracy, emphasising democracy and encouraging democracy, we as Australians—along with a number of other countries—lead by example. I said earlier that I was advised that we were the sixth oldest democracy in the world. The reason for that is that we have been continuously democratic, whereas many of the now democratic countries of western, central and even now eastern Europe for very long periods, particularly in the 20th century, were under the yoke of communism or other forms of totalitarianism. We as Australians have been fortunate because we have a system whereby the electorate makes a decision at the ballot box, the decision is respected, the people who win the election are allowed to take their place to implement their policies and there is never any question by anyone in our political system that that system should not continue and should not be encouraged.

We do find that there are a series of countries that play lip-service to democracy. While I do not want to highlight large numbers of these countries in the time available to me, Zimbabwe has been a case in point. President Mugabe’s government was defeated and it took an extraordinarily long period of negotiations before some sort of settlement was reached, one which still saw President Mugabe—who stole the election, who intimidated his citizens, who threw people who owned farms off their property—in a power-sharing agreement. Why on earth should there be a power-sharing agreement when there has been an election and the Movement for Democratic Change won and the party of the President, ZANU-PF, was defeated? Unfortunately, there had to be this long and fairly tortuous series of discussions before some semblance of democracy was restored. It is probably a question of watching this space to see just how effective that settlement is going to be. I certainly hope it is and I certainly hope it is only a transitional arrangement and that Zimbabwe can achieve a situation like Australia has in that, when we have an election, everyone respects the results.

There was a recent election in Fiji. I was privileged, along with the now Parliamentary Secretary for Pacific Island Affairs, to represent Australia as part of the Pacific Island Forum election observer group. We collectively judged the election in Fiji to be fair and free, and Mr Qarase’s government was returned. Then, a few months afterwards, there were people who did not respect the result of the election and there was a coup. Commodore Bainimarama is now the dictator of Fiji, the so-called interim Prime Minister, but he does not have the support of the people and he seems to be, regrettably, quite reluctant to allow the people of Fiji to determine who their government is in fact going to be. Having said that, I do applaud the sentiments in the motion carried by the United Nations General Assembly. It is important to encourage member governments, non-government organisations and individuals to commemorate the International Day of Democracy. It is important to raise awareness of the value of democracy, but even more important than raising awareness of the value of democracy is the implementation of democracy so that people in other parts of the world are able to enjoy the freedoms that we have as Australians.

It could be that in some parts of the world they say that democracy is not the best way to go and that somehow you can have dictatorship of the majority through the implementation of the results of an election. I am not convinced by that argument at all. I think the best guarantee of democracy is by having a government put in office as a result of the freely expressed will of the people and then, of course, that government has the opportunity to govern. If that government does not meet the expectations of its people after quite a period of time in government, then that government will be removed from office and replaced by another government.

It is important that democratic government is a government of the people, by the people. The democratic ideal and the concept of democracy as expressed in the resolution of the UN General Assembly ought to be applauded. I do support the international celebration of the International Day of Democracy but, more importantly than celebration, we need action. Actions speak louder than words. What we need to do as a world community is to act on that sentiment in favour of democracy and make sure that the oppressed people around the globe are given the same free political rights that we have as Australians. I commend the motion to the Committee.

Michael Danby (Melbourne Ports, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am pleased to speak on this motion to mark the International Day of Democracy, 15 September, a day instituted by the UN General Assembly in a resolution in November 2007. It is appropriate that my colleague the honourable member for Fremantle has moved this motion. Before she came to parliament, her work in the United Nations took her to Kosovo, Lebanon and Cyprus, all places that have seen ethnic and political conflict and all places that are building stable democracies despite their problems. She follows in the footsteps of the previous member for Fremantle, Dr Carmen Lawrence, a tireless campaigner for democratic rights in Australia and overseas.

The instigation of the International Day of Democracy by the UN General Assembly is itself a significant development. For many years throughout the 1970s and 1980s the UN General Assembly was dominated by a bloc of undemocratic regimes—communist regimes from the Soviet bloc, military juntas in Latin America, dictatorships and absolute monarchies in the Middle East, and more dictatorships in East Asia and South-East Asia. It is hard to imagine the UN General Assembly as it was then—when in 1973 it welcomed a gun-toting Yasser Arafat to the podium—agreeing to a resolution on the International Day of Democracy. Such a resolution would have been denounced as an imperialist, neocolonialist ploy by the Soviet bloc and leaders of the so-called non-aligned movement, mainly a mixture of Asian, Latin American and Middle Eastern dictatorships, as I have said, most of them falsely claiming to be people’s democracies of one kind or another.

Over the past 20 years, we have seen the world transformed at the political level. The Soviet bloc has collapsed, allowing democracy to emerge in eastern and central Europe, in the Baltic states and in the Caucasus, although sadly not in all of the former Soviet republics. Every state in Latin America except Cuba is now a democracy, although some of them are a bit rocky, withdrawing civil rights, as in Venezuela at the moment. In Africa, apartheid has ended and in southern Africa many new democracies have emerged. Last week we saw free elections in Angola, a country long wracked by civil war and emerging from 25 years of authoritarian rule.

In our own region, democracy has emerged in South Korea, Mongolia, Taiwan and, most encouragingly and importantly, in Indonesia, where the courageous leadership of Abdurrahman Wahid and Megawati Soekarnoputri in leading the ‘Reformasi’ movement culminated in the fall of the Soeharto regime. We have also seen East Timor become an independent and democratic state, thanks in part to the timely intervention of Australia under the auspices of the UN.

These developments owe much to the courage and sacrifice of many people. Let me mention such heroic figures as Natan Sharansky; Lech Walesa, in Poland; Vaclav Havel, in Czechoslovakia; Nelson Mandela, in South Africa; and Corazon Aquino, in the Philippines. These are famous names, people who win Nobel prizes—and deservedly so. But we should also honour the thousands of unknown and anonymous heroes in the struggle for democracy, many of whom spent years in prison or paid for it with their lives. We recall the students who rioted in Soweto; those who stood against the tanks in Tiananmen Square; those who have dared to rebel against the junta in Burma; those who took part in the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon, the Orange Revolution in the Ukraine or the Rose Revolution in Georgia; the Catholic and Buddhist leaders who were imprisoned in China and Vietnam; and all those who risked beatings or death to vote against Mugabe.

It would be nice to say that the tide of democratic reform—the ‘end of history’ about which Francis Fukuyama theorised—which has swept the world over the last 20 years, sweeping aside despotic and unelected rulers, was a permanent thing. Unfortunately, it appears this is not the case. In our own region, communist and perhaps postcommunist authoritarian regimes still hold power in China, Vietnam and Laos, while North Korea continues to suffer under the world’s last remaining genuine Stalinist autocracy. Burma still languishes under a corrupt, incompetent and obscure military regime. We should honour the people who struggle for democracy in these countries and who have not been successful, at least not yet. The most notable of these of course is Aung San Suu Kyi, who won overwhelmingly Burma’s only free election in 1990 but was then denied the fruits of her victory by the military junta and has spent most of the last 19 years under house arrest. I think also of my friends in the Chinese democracy movement, such as Wei Jingsheng and labour leader Han Dongfang. Wei Jingsheng spent many years in the lao gai, including years in solitary confinement. Their day will come.

One such leader whose time is coming very soon is Morgan Tsvangirai, a man of enormous bravery who stood firm against the despotic Mugabe and his thugs in the face of violence, intimidation, legal harassment and threats to his life. I was involved in the previous election in Zimbabwe in 2004, when a disgraceful SBS episode of Dateline tried to paint Mr Tsvangirai as organising the assassination of Robert Mugabe. I am very pleased to see on Google still the article that I wrote exposing the two Zimbabwean government agents behind that called ‘Of liars and lives’. That is very highly rated on Google and continues to perform a role in exposing those who have tried to discredit that great democrat Morgan Tsvangirai.

It is a sad fact that the main exception to the worldwide spread of democracy has been the Arab-Islamic world. In that region the only stable democracy is Israel, which this year has marked its 60th anniversary as an independent democratic state. There has been great progress made in Lebanon following the Cedar Revolution, but that country unfortunately remains riven by ethnic and religious conflicts, with the minority Syrian Hezbollah interest group assassinating government MPs so that they can literally shoot down the majority. The US-led intervention in Iraq has allowed the creation of a constitutional state and the holding of elections, but I think Iraq has a long way to go before becoming a genuine democracy. Other Arab countries remain either absolute monarchies, such as Saudi Arabia, or dictatorships, such as Egypt, Syria and Libya.

As we have seen in Indonesia over the past decade, as we have seen in Lebanon, Pakistan and Afghanistan and as we are seeing in Malaysia at the moment, there is nothing inherent in Islamic societies that makes them immune to the attractions of democracy and freedom. Oppressed millions in the Arab world, in Egypt and Syria in particular, want the same kind of freedom, democracy and prosperity that people in Australia, Europe and the US have. The worldwide advance of democracy over recent times has not been without its setbacks. Even in our region we have seen military coups in Thailand and Fiji. Thailand has now restored democratic government, although it has not achieved stability. Fiji is still languishing under military rule. I would like to see Australia and our Pacific neighbours doing more to help the people of Fiji recover their freedom.

Recently we have had the emergence of a bloc of antidemocratic states led by China and Russia, allied with Iran and the post-Soviet dictatorships of Central Asia. This Eurasian bloc, imagined by George Orwell and Aldous Huxley, is organised into an organisation called the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, which has great economic power in the current circumstances because its members have large reserves of oil and gas. It uses that power to oppose the spread of democracy; to subsidise and prop up oppressive and undemocratic regimes such as those in Burma, Sudan and Zimbabwe; and to give those regimes diplomatic cover at the UN, where of course the Russians and the Chinese have Security Council vetoes. This is a worrying development.

As we recently saw in Georgia, Russia under Vladimir Putin has become once again an expansionist power, seeking to re-establish its hegemony in the Caucasus at the expense of the new democratic states there. Moscow is also seeking to bully the Ukraine back into the Russian sphere of influence. The stranglehold that Russia has over western Europe’s gas supplies has made the European powers reluctant to face up to the facts of Russian expansionism, let alone to take firm steps to stop it. Those who remember the history of 20th century Europe can see a familiar pattern repeating itself. If the democratic powers fail to stand up to dictatorships and fail to defend small democracies, those dictatorships will grow bolder and their appetites will increase. It may be that one should not overextend the boundaries of NATO, but I hope the democracies will find a way to prevent that historical parallel coming to pass.

China, by contrast, has shown no evident desire to expand at the expense of its neighbours. I would argue that it is against China’s interests to be seen in the company of regimes such as those in Burma, Sudan and Zimbabwe. The Chinese leaders are surely wise enough to see that their future does not lie in joining a Eurasian bloc of anti-Western, antidemocratic powers led by Putin’s Russia and Ahmadinejad’s Iran. Rather, it should lie in partnership and alliance with the newly emerging, dynamic and increasingly prosperous Asian democratic powers of India, Indonesia, Thailand and South Korea.

Despite these worrying developments, I remain optimistic about the future of democracy in our region and in the world. Antidemocratic forces may be mobilising, but so are the forces of democracy and freedom. One of the leading forces for democracy in the world is the World Movement for Democracy, an international organisation in which I am proud to be an active participant. Some honourable members may only know the acronym WMD as standing for ‘weapons of mass destruction’, but I am pleased to say that it now has a new and more positive meaning. The WMD is a global network of democrats from almost every country in the world, including academics, policymakers and parliamentarians.

Using the technology of the internet for information, the World Movement for Democracy is arousing world opinion to press for democratic change in countries like Malaysia, Iran, Burma, Cuba, Zimbabwe and Egypt. It is part of a growing global movement which includes bodies such as Amnesty International, Medecins Sans Frontieres, Reporters Without Borders, Human Rights Watch, Freedom House and the US National Endowment for Democracy. Many other bodies are also part of this movement. Unfortunately, the WMD is hamstrung at the UN by Russian and Chinese vetoes. Over the past few years, I attended WMD congresses in Istanbul and Kiev and was inspired by the optimism and enthusiasm of the hundreds of democracy activists I met there. These included the great Egyptian political scientist and freedom activist Saad Eddin Ibrahim and opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim of Malaysia, who is on the cusp of democratic victory in his country.

As the honourable member for Fremantle said, democracy means more than just freedom and regular elections—although I am sure the people of Burma, for example, would be happy to have even those freedoms. It means social and economic emancipation, particularly for women and children. It means the struggle against poverty, against illiteracy, against epidemic diseases such as HIV-AIDS and malaria, against organised crime, corruption and people-trafficking, against racial, religious and political persecution and against international terrorism. All these causes are linked. They are major challenges for the world, particularly when we are facing economic upheaval and the challenges of climate change.

I have always been inspired by the example of the brave democracy activists I have met, activists from many countries, through the World Movement for Democracy, the Federation for a Democratic China, the National Endowment for Democracy and other international organisations with which I am involved. The institution of International Day of Democracy is a symbolic but nevertheless important recognition of their struggles and their sacrifices. I urge all honourable members who share my enthusiasm for democratic change to lend their support to those who work for these worthy organisations.

It is an inspiration to know people like Saad Ibrahim of Egypt, who led the democratic opposition to the Mubarak regime. It was an inspiration in Istanbul to meet Anwar Ibrahim of Malaysia. I hope Anwar will one day come to Australia as Prime Minister of Malaysia and be welcomed by this parliament. I know my friends in the democratic opposition in Malaysia, hopefully soon to become the democratic majority, are struggling at this very moment against all kinds of smears, arrests and the improper use of Malaysian laws to achieve a parliamentary majority there.

Having visited Malaysia recently, I can say that it is a country that is very successful and prosperous, and you can just feel the winds of democratic change coming. People in Malaysia argue that a more democratic system which will enable people to have transparency and openness and to oppose corruption will actually help the economic prosperity of that society. And isn’t that one of the messages of democratic reform throughout the world? One of the messages that we can take from this UN General Assembly resolution is that democracy, as practiced in Australia and other countries, helps with the openness and transparency of the economic system as well, and that prevents the kind of corruption endemic to so many of these previously undemocratic countries like Malaysia. Let us hope, for the sake of Saad Ibrahim and Anwar Ibrahim, that democracy will prevail soon in Egypt and, imminently, in Malaysia.

Luke Simpkins (Cowan, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

15 September 2008 was the first International Day of Democracy after the United Nations General Assembly decided to observe that day last year. Let me say at the outset that there are many countries in the world that should model their government’s processes and democratic institutions on Australia. These democratic processes and the way that Australians exercise those freedoms can be held up as examples to other countries.

I am proud of this country. It is a great country which has always stood up for the weak, the defenceless and the besieged. The strength of our country is in our traditions, our institutions and our values. The will of our country to act when the hard decisions need to be made comes from the collective faith of the great Australian culture—a majority culture forever grounded in the belief of the supremacy of the democratic tradition; a majority culture that will forever be guided by the one and only set of secular laws; a majority culture that supports those who aspire to improve themselves, while also being there to support those who need it and cannot provide for themselves. This is a majority culture that has a strong belief in the principle of personal responsibility. It has a strong belief that all citizens and residents have rights, but never without responsibilities. This country has a majority culture of Judeo-Christian values, and there is nothing wrong with that and nothing to be apologised for.

In making my comments today, I intend to speak about several countries that could greatly improve their political systems, and I do this to highlight the stark difference between those countries and Australia. But, before I do that, in general terms I would like to start with Africa. In Africa, internal conflicts continue to rage in several states—and I draw a lot of the material I have from Amnesty International’s 2008 report. In certain states in Africa there have been gross human rights abuses. Killings, torture and rape are common. Rights have been suppressed; freedoms have been trammelled. Excesses and human rights abuses by police and other law enforcement officers in many countries are not being dealt with. There is no accountability. Furthermore, millions of people in Africa continue to live without their basic needs being met.

A particularly abhorrent example of poor governments hiding behind cultural excuses is the case of Sierra Leone, which, in 2007, passed a children’s rights bill—but only after the provisions criminalising female genital mutilation were dropped. I say that female circumcision is an uncivilised practice, and I am not afraid to say that any religion that prescribes it is a very strange and barbaric religion indeed.

I now want to go back to the manner in which some of these governments act, and I will make this point before I go any further: the fact is that there are certain governments in Africa and elsewhere in the world which do not exercise authority for the people; they exercise power for elites, and normally they do so for the ruling junta, elite class, or a governing party. It is corruption, whichever way you want to cut it. Governments exist because the people set aside some personal freedoms in exchange for the protection and services provided by the state. Yet, wherever countries rule for the few, as opposed to the many, you find other forms of government apart from real democracy. I will just mention a few countries where there is a long way to go.

How can you talk about countries ruling for narrow interests without covering Zimbabwe? I believe that everyone who has spoken before me has covered Zimbabwe. In Zimbabwe, throughout the year, police instituted severe restrictions on the right to freedom of association. What we are talking about here is the suppression of democracy. Let us not beat around the bush: ZANU-PF and its leader Robert Mugabe orchestrated torture, maiming and murder to undermine the democratic process.

Few commentators would disagree that the Movement for Democratic Change, or MDC, were victorious in the election earlier this year, yet the results were fixed and it has only recently been resolved with power-sharing arrangements. It should never have come to this. It was my view that the African Union should have acted decisively months ago and forced compliance with the democratic decision of the people, yet that did not occur, and I wonder what price vacillation will have in the end. Sadly, the continuing presence of Robert Mugabe, his ZANU-PF party and the military strongmen behind Mugabe do not augur well for the future of democracy, although we hope that recent events are a step forward. I would say that when the news vision of the power-sharing agreement was aired, it said it all about the limitations on the Zimbabwean democracy: the backdrop was uniformed generals. Such a link between government and the military is undesirable and should ring all the warning bells.

Of course, in any discussion on democracy it is also hard to go past Venezuela as an example of a democracy teetering on the brink. Socialist President Hugo Chavez was, I understand, re-elected in January 2007. The congress granted him powers to pass certain legislation by decree for 18 months, and that is not a good thing. But, on a more positive note, Venezuelans rejected significant changes to the constitution put forward by the President that included one amendment that would have seen President Chavez installed as President for life—clearly, that is not democracy. It has also been suggested that other amendments would have removed important human rights. I pray for the people in the democracy of Venezuela and hope that the people do not lose control and that President Chavez does not seize absolute power in that country.

Closer to Australia, I also want to address the matter of democracy or the tragic lack of democracy in the Union of Myanmar, or Burma, as most people would know it; this is clearly a military junta. After 1962 Burma was run by a military dictator, General Ne Win, who seized power when he took advantage of instability in the democratic government. From late 1985, student protests gathered intensity and culminated in 10 demands for a return to democracy. The result was the fall of General Ne Win’s government on 8 August 1988 in what is called the 8888 Uprising or ‘Four Eights’ Uprising, yet what then happened was the declaration of martial law and General Saw Maung seized control of the country. General Maung formed the State Law and Order Restoration Council, which then suspended all elements of the 1974 constitution. He was replaced with Senior General Than Shwe in 1992, and in 1997 SLORC was renamed the State Peace and Development Council. It made no difference to the way the regime operates, as it is still defined by its excesses in murder, torture, rape, forced relocations, forced labour, recruitment of child soldiers and imprisonment of political opponents.

I would also speak, as others have done, about the leader of the National League for Democracy, Aung San Suu Kyi, and her detention. In 1990 an election was held and 392 of the 492 seats were won by the NLD yet, soon after the election, SLORC reimposed its own control and did not let the NLD assume government. Aung San Suu Kyi is the 1991 Nobel Peace Laureate, and she has been in detention or house arrest for 13 of the last 19 years. She is the icon of liberty and democracy in Burma, and arguably in the world, and her courage and the resolute way she conducts herself ensures that the SPDC will always be seen as an illegitimate government standing in the way of democracy in Burma.

I would now like to turn my attention to Vietnam. I have thousands of Vietnamese constituents in my electorate and I remain concerned for the people of Vietnam, many of whose friends or family are my constituents. It is known that in Vietnam freedom of expression and freedom of association remain tightly controlled, and arrests and detentions do occur. By example, on 30 March 2007 Father Nguyen Van Ly was sentenced to eight years imprisonment for conducting propaganda against the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. I recently received a letter from a Vietnamese friend in Perth who told me:

Recently there have been religious and human rights violations against Catholics by the Vietnamese government. The archbishop of Hanoi’s residence … and the convent of Sisters of Adorers of the Holy Cross are under siege by the Vietnamese police, militia and security personnel.

He tells me that before sunrise last Friday morning hundreds of police assembled in front of the archbishop’s residence, blocking access to the residence, the cathedral and all roads leading to the nearby nunciature, which is an embassy of the Holy See. Bulldozers were brought into the area and began digging out the lawn. Later, at 6 am, after police and demolition workers were in place, the state-controlled television and radio stations made the announcement that the government had decided to abolish the embassy to convert the land into a public playground. An American reporter, Ben Stocking, who I understand is the Hanoi bureau chief for Associated Press, was an eyewitness at the site. He was attacked by security force personnel as he tried to take photos. He was later released, but his camera was confiscated and he needed medical attention.

The suppression of the Catholic religion in Hanoi is very concerning. From reports I have had in the past, it seems that freedom of religion is getting worse in Vietnam and that freedom of the press is also near to impossible. It is my understanding that the extreme action of the Vietnamese government was a reaction to peaceful and lawful protests by Catholics in Hanoi seeking the return of a building seized in 1959. That property was the former embassy for the Holy See. I have been informed that these protests took the form of prayer vigils. The Vietnam Conference of Catholic Bishops had by that time repeatedly sent petitions to the authorities for the return of the building, yet their petitions had gone unanswered. The protests—or the vigils—only came to a halt after the government had agreed to restore the building to them in February this year. However, repeated delays saw no action. Then, all of a sudden, the Vietnamese government announced that the embassy would be demolished for a playground and immediately carried this out with the support of security forces. This action seems to be a reversal of the policy of dialogue that the government had been having with the Catholic Church. It is greatly concerning because the action of the government disregards existing policy and existing laws, and clearly demonstrates religious repression.

The seizure of property of the Catholic Church also took place at the Thai Ha parish in the Hanoi archdiocese, with 15 acres of land that had been owned by the church since 1928 slowly being taken away since the Communist Party assumed power in 1954, leaving the church with only half an acre. As I understand it, the Redemptorist congregation purchased the disputed property in 1928, but following the Communist takeover in 1954 most of the parishioners had been jailed or deported, leaving Father Joseph Vu Ngoc Bich alone in charge of the 15 acres of land and the parish church. Despite Father Vu’s protests, the authorities slowly took the property piece by piece, leaving only that half-acre. Since 1966, Father Vu and other parishioners have been repeatedly requesting the restoration of the property, claiming that it was seized illegally—all to no avail. Daily protests broke out after Thai Ha parishioners discovered that local government officials had sold the land to individuals. The Redemptorists and their followers, in their desperation, were left with no choice other than holding peaceful and lawful protests to call for justice from the authorities. They began occurring from 5 January.

The government has not listened to them and has repeatedly attempted to silence protestors by using security forces. The Hanoi authorities also claimed that Father Vu had donated the land to the government, but their claim has never been proven and in fact has been repeatedly discredited or contradicted by their own documents. I understand that according to church rules only the bishop of the diocese can dispose of church property. Father Joseph Vu was only a local priest who neither was owner of the land nor had any authority to make such a decision. It is noteworthy that so many properties that once belonged to the church were transferred to state administration under coercive conditions on the grounds that they were needed for social purposes. Even when these purposes are no longer required, the properties are seldom returned to their owners. Recently it has been reported that they have been used as financial resources for government officials. Some of them have been turned into movie theatres, restaurants, nightclubs or government offices. Some were simply destroyed. Others were sold or provided to selected government officials for personal use.

I am informed that the Vietnamese government has been cracking down on protests for eight months and has launched a campaign against Hanoi Catholics, accusing them of using their influence to incite all Catholics to confront the government as well as, amongst other things, assembling and praying illegally in public areas, therefore disturbing public order. The campaign has apparently intensified since 28 August, with more arrests. I have other examples from Vietnam as they relate to both the Catholic and Buddhist faiths, but I will not deal with each of them as these events were reported in the Australian on 24 September. From these events it would appear that the government of Vietnam struggles to maintain political control, yet at the same time it wishes to portray an image of religious tolerance, and this is not working.

Furthermore, I was this morning informed that there had been a recent crackdown against dissidents in Vietnam, and in particular a crackdown on legitimate protests of political dissidents and human rights defenders trying to exercise their right. My view, and I believe the view of Vietnamese in the electorate of Cowan, is that we all look forward to a future when religious and political freedoms can be achieved. It is my view that democracy is the best form of government and here in Australia we have a very good example of it. The International Day of Democracy was 15 September. I strongly support the day and this motion.

Gary Gray (Brand, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary for Regional Development and Northern Australia) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak in favour of the motion on the International Day of Democracy. It is a UN day created to put a focus on and create interest internationally in the matter of democracy, how governments are formed and how they behave. In making the announcement in 2007, the UN statement read: ‘Stressing the continuing need to promote democratization development and respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, the General Assembly today agreed to observe 15 September each year as the International Day of Democracy.’

Over the course of the last 35 years, I have worked on over 50 election campaigns at state and federal level, 13 of them being federal election campaigns. For a goodly portion of those, I was either the campaign director or a senior official in those campaigns. In Australia, we are fond of thinking of democracy as being purely the event that we celebrate every three years to elect a national government or, in most states and territories, every four years to elect governments in states, the ACT and the Northern Territory.

But there is more to democracy than simply marking a ballot paper. Democracy is about how the judiciary works. Democracy is about how media reporting agencies report and about how people have the right to vent their views. Democracy is about how people with views that differ are treated. Democracy is about how minorities are able to express their opinions. And democracy is about how majorities are able to have their way. Fundamentally, in our form of democracy, it is important that the majority is able to govern.

In the course of the last decade, I have been fortunate enough to observe, participate in or work in election campaigns in numerous different countries—in the US, in the UK, in New Zealand, in Sweden, in Greece, in East Timor and in Mauritania in Africa. It is fascinating to watch how democracy plays out in wealthy First World countries such as the US, Sweden, New Zealand and Australia and how in poorer countries and poorer economies nations struggle to implement and deal with the rigours of an election day, let alone the protocols, procedures and respects that are granted through a democratically elected parliament.

It is with some amusement that in Timor Leste I observed an election system that looked as if it had been designed by a wealthy European nation. That electoral system, with all of its caveats on respect for electing minorities, respect for electing genders equally and respect for electing configurations of candidates, would have done the Danish, the British or the French parliamentary systems proud. In Timor, perhaps there was a little bit too much engineering put into the perfection of their election system rather than thought being put into how the actual democracy would work in a country that was distressed from both years of occupation and learning how to work with this new idea of democracy.

In Mauritania I watched as people had their hands inked with indelible ink and voted using coloured pieces of paper as the most obvious way of demonstrating support for one political party or the other. Clearly, there were imperfections in the Mauritania model, but clearly it was more culturally acceptable and obtained a result that was more representative of the people of Mauritania. The only problem was that that election came at the end of a coup and was put in place by the people who had engineered that coup. Subsequently, just a few weeks ago, the democratically elected government was thrown out in another coup. That takes one to the African Union and the role which the African Union plays in democracy in Africa.

My view of the African Union is that it is a splendid organisation. It is a wonderful idea and it has some great people in it. The work that is done by the African Union to underpin both respect and regard for democratically elected governments is significant. In my personal experience, from a very limited resource base with very limited capabilities the African Union worked very hard to try to make sure that there is respect for democracy in Africa. It took a very strong position in those two coups that I have referred to in Mauritania on behalf of properly and appropriately elected democratic governments.

In Australia, we perhaps become complacent about how our electoral system operates. It is a complacency that is born both of our wealth and of our certainty that our election system is one of the best election systems in the world, and you will often hear people in this place making that statement. In Australia, we have numerous election systems, and I noted down a few of them as I was waiting to speak this morning. We have a state-wide election system for members of the upper house that takes place nationally for the Senate. Victoria and Western Australia have regional multimember systems, New South Wales and South Australia have a state-wide system and Tasmania in its upper house has single member electorates. Nationally we have single-member full preferential election systems at work in our own federal parliament here and in the Northern Territory, Victoria, South Australia and WA. In New South Wales and Queensland we have single-member optional preferential voting systems. In the ACT and Tasmania we have Hare-Clark with Robson rotation.

In Australia we have over half-a-dozen completely different voting systems. We have completely different voting systems in one nation, with electoral terms that run for different lengths of time. Running elections in Australia is a complicated business. We have got quite good at it from time to time; mostly we are not that good at it. Two recent elections have raised some commentary in the media: local government elections in New South Wales, because of how the Electoral Commission in New South Wales managed it; but I am most familiar with the state government election in Western Australia just a few weeks ago.

The Western Australian Electoral Commission would normally be regarded as an organisation capable of ensuring that the 1.3 million people of Western Australia all get the right to vote and that all those ballots get counted. On the day before the election, on the Friday, I was driving through my electorate doing work to support the excellent candidates who had put themselves up for election when a news broadcast came on the radio. It took my attention for more than one reason. The news broadcast went as follows:

Residents of Eucla will not be able to vote at this weekend’s State election. The Electoral Commission says it does not have the resources to set up a polling booth in the town and it forgot to tell local people about postal voting.

It remembered to write a press release and get that out on the radio, but it did not have the resources to set up a polling booth in the town and it forgot to let people know that they might be able to postal vote. The deputy electoral commissioner said that the commission would send formal apologies to the town’s 20 electors. She said they will not be fined for not voting. She is reported as saying:

I only became aware of this issue on Tuesday. Had I known Tuesday a week ago we could have organised for the residents to be able to have cast a postal vote. Despite our best efforts this week unfortunately the mail couldn’t get to them in time to have them complete their ballot papers and have them returned in time.

So they did not get to vote. How incredibly pathetic. How bizarre. It baffles me how we can stand in this place and have regard for our election systems while we are being so let down by electoral commissions. It appals me, and I know that this view is shared by all sides of politics and of our parliament.

I was fascinated by the idea that the Electoral Commission realised on the Tuesday that it would not be able to get ballot papers for the Saturday to a community where it would have been possible to have (a) driven, (b) flown, (c) caught a bus—even a carrier pigeon would have done. But no, we did not do that. To the 20 electors, say the Electoral Commission, ‘We apologise and you will not have to pay a fine’. It appears that, in some bizarre twist of what the function of an electoral commission is, the Western Australia Electoral Commission views its function as fining people or not fining people for voting or not voting rather than assisting them in being able to vote.

I looked at that number, 20 voters, and thought that I had driven through Eucla many times and that I would be driving through Eucla again on Sunday. I looked at the electoral roll and I was pleased that Western Australian Senator Sterle was able to give me a print of the electoral roll of 20 voters in Eucla. But there are 24 voters in Eucla. The Electoral Commission in Western Australia did not even know how many people it had willingly chosen to disenfranchise. Equally, it probably does not know how many people it might have to send letters to, inviting them to give reasons as to why they could not vote. The confusion went on from there.

We learned, in the middle of counting, that the Electoral Commission in Western Australia had lost 1,100 votes. There were 1.35 million votes cast that Saturday, and one might say that losing 1,000 was careless. There were 1,100 votes lost from one electorate where 19,000 people voted. They had lost five per cent of the ballot box for the ballot in Geraldton. Fortunately, these votes appear to have been found, but what one cannot deny is the great concern that any reasonable person would have about the capability of the Electoral Commission in Western Australia.

I noted last week the editorial in the West Australian which said this, under the headline ‘WA deserves better from the Electoral Commission’:

The WA Electoral Commission has not exactly covered itself in glory with the State election, coming under fire from all sides for the slow count and bungles such as losing 1100 ballot papers in the seat of Geraldton and disenfranchising the township of Eucla.

Granted, the commission had to cope with the redrawn boundaries on the new one vote, one value electoral map and was obviously caught on the hop by a snap poll. But by any measure its performance was poor, creating the impression that it was not up to the job, difficult as that job may have been. Steps need to be taken to ensure that next time, it gets it right.

I believe that editorial from the West Australian massively understates the reality of the task of getting our state electoral commissions to work effectively, operate in a functional manner and ensure that Australians who are registered to vote, who want to vote, who turn up to vote—not to avoid a $50 fine but because they have something to say about how they are governed and how they wish to be represented—are able to do so.

I would like to put on the record a set of data that was provided by the AEC to me and to the federal Parliamentary Library. In 2007 the Australian Electoral Commission was able to establish a ballot place at the Eucla community hall. It was open from 8 am to 6 pm on 24 November. In addition to that, interstate voting was available because Eucla is on a major interstate highway for people travelling into or out of Western Australia.

Again, in 2004, the Australian Electoral Commission was able to arrange voting activity in this region. It covered townships and communities from Eucla and around Eucla way. It covered Cocklebiddy, Madura and Mundrabilla—communities of not many voters. But even a community as small as Madura, with three enrolled voters, has a right to vote, and electoral commissions have a responsibility to ensure those three people have a capacity to vote in the same way as the rest of the 1.3 million in the state of Western Australia had a right to vote. I am not saying that that vote has to be cast at a static polling place. But to have a press release issued when the electoral commission was in knowledge of its shortcomings four days before the polling day in Western Australia is incompetent and a shame.

Mike Kelly (Eden-Monaro, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary for Defence Support) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is great to be able to speak on this motion on the International Day of Democracy and I applaud the member for Fremantle for bringing forward the motion. Democracy is something that Australians often take for granted, I feel. But, like the member for Fremantle, I have seen a lot of the alternatives and know that they are very ugly. I note also the presence in the chamber this morning of the member for Fadden, and I know that a lot of what I have to say he will no doubt have reflected upon from his time in Bougainville.

It is the question of the promotion and the challenges of democracy referred to in the motion that I would like to talk to this morning. It certainly is inspiring and sobering to see the way that the people of Timor-Leste and Iraq responded to the opportunity to vote for the first time in their lives, at great risk to their lives. That is often the case in these postconflict environments. It often also requires the exertion of great physical effort and patience—standing for long hours in queues, for example. And if you are in Iraq, of course, that brings with it the risk of being subject to suicide bombers and the like—something that we cannot really imagine as we participate in our electoral events here in Australia.

One thing that I have learned in the course of those experiences, in those environments where they are struggling through to achieve the level of democracy that we have here, is that elections do not equate to democracy. Often what we have seen in the past is that we conduct these elections and, as far as the international community is concerned, that is a tick in the box and a job well done—mission accomplished. But bitter experience I think has taught us that establishing sustainable and meaningful democracy is much harder than that. I think we have learned that close to home in Timor-Leste. Once those elections were conducted, the hard work began from that point—the hard work of both effectively growing the institutions and the agencies of democracy and the culture of democracy. Quite often we do not recognise that critical factor—the need to build a culture of democracy. So it is not just about frameworks and institutions at the end of the day. I have quite often seen attempts to impose Western solutions, elaborate solutions, on these environments which just do not take locally. In many ways it is akin to having an organ transplant. That organ will be rejected unless it is appropriately introduced and grafted on effectively in a way that will gel with the local culture. And that is really the test here: to evolve those institutions in that culture.

The situations in Afghanistan and Iraq also demonstrate that there are various levels at which democracy must occur. Certainly my own experience in Somalia emphasised this as well, that you need to build democracy at various levels. Provincial governance is quite often as important as—or, in some cases, more important than—a national-level democracy. The reason that is important is that often, in postconflict environments, we need to come to something akin to federalised solutions because often the issue in these internal conflict situations is that we need to do more to ensure people are comfortable about the protection of their cultural identities and minorities are respected. Quite often in those environments there can be a tyranny in majority because the rights of minorities and even their physical safety are not respected by the majority. So often the best way to move through this and to achieve an effective result is a federalist approach.

There are many elements in growing a culture of democracy, as I have discovered. It is not just about building institutions at the federal and local level but also about establishing public security so that responsible leadership has the confidence to move forward. All of the aspects of the rule of law need to be in place as well, such as the justice system and prisons. Transitional justice issues to do with truth and reconciliation processes or retributive justice are just as important to achieving a level of calm within society for democracy to flourish. Human rights bodies and independent watchdogs can also be part of that process, as well as good governance measures, which are quite often necessary to prevent corruption and distortion of the political process. We have seen that to be a major threat in places like Papua New Guinea. We need to be able to follow through, on the delivery of an election, to grow agencies and mentor them through to maturity. Quite often, that means putting in place inspector-general type mechanisms and other types of good governance and auditing approaches.

One thing that I thought was an effective concept in Iraq—but not particularly well implemented, because of the rush to do so—was the idea of graduating the various ministries. Instead of a straight handover of sovereignty to Iraqi governance, each department had to meet certain criteria to hand over and achieve autonomy. I think that is a good conceptual way of flagging that we need to sustain efforts in the transition to democracy by identifying points of weakness in the governance that exists and ensuring that we support and mentor those involved through to an effective outcome. What we now see in Iraq illustrates many such cases.

I was delighted to see overnight the announcement that the Iraqi parliament has moved through the provisions that are required to be in place for the conduct of the provincial elections. This was a key piece of the puzzle for the ongoing improvement of the situation there. We are now hoping to see provincial elections occur in Iraq towards the end of January, at the earliest, next year. This has been long delayed, and there have been a lot of issues that have caused that delay. They relate to the fact that we have seen quite a demographic shift in Iraq. Some have claimed that it is ethnic cleansing, but certainly what we have seen is shifts in population gravitating towards a more communal identity. One of the benefits of having provincial and federal approaches and solutions is that you can accommodate minority and cultural identity issues.

The last time there was an attempt to move forward with the provincial elections, it was defeated by the veto of the President, Jalal Talabani, but we are very confident that it will move completely through that parliamentary process, as the Kurdish legislators are in support of this new provision and have accepted the compromise that was brokered by the United Nations. I would like to salute the role that the United Nations has played all along in Iraq in helping with the political transition process and conducting elections in that country. Certainly, I was distressed to see how much time and opportunity were lost in the early days in Iraq by a failure to take the best advantage of what the UN has to offer and to capitalise on its strengths.

The interesting thing with regard to the provincial legislation that is going forward and the resolution of continuing issues is that a committee will be formed to look at property disputes and power-sharing concerns so that the remaining three provinces, which are quarantined from the process that will occur at the end of January, will be able to move forward as well. That relates to the issues of the Kurdish autonomous regions and the status of Kirkuk. Another aspect of that is the equitable management and distribution of resources, and of course the oil factor is the big one there. Quite often, in creating an effective democracy in postconflict environments, part of the issue is the equitable division of access to resources and the way funding from resources gets distributed in a community.

Interestingly, a new law bans political parties from using religious authorities, mosques and government institutions in their campaigns. That certainly is to be welcomed, along with the introduction of a 25 per cent quota of women on councils as part of the election process, which is a reflection of the constitutional provision for the national parliament. That continuation in the promotion of the status of women in Iraq is certainly to be welcomed. I salute the progress that has been made there and hope that it will move that country forward.

When we talk about different levels of government and democracy, it brings me back to our situation here in Australia. The Parliamentary Secretary for Regional Development and Northern Australia highlighted some of the challenges in local governance issues, even in this country. I note there have been comments about the decline in the ability of local governments to deliver for communities. Some people have even claimed that the status has reached a failed state level. I think that is probably taking it too far but, on the current trajectory, governance in rural and regional Australia is not sustainable without the sorts of measures announced by the Prime Minister in building a new federal relationship with our local government. I think that is critically essential. It was welcomed very rapturously by all my local councils during the campaigns last year, and it is good to see we are delivering on that.

I also highlight in relation to the building blocks of democracy that the Rudd Labor government is now stepping forward to see if it can deliver a more effective approach to that in those postconflict environments by the establishment of the new Asia-Pacific Civil Military Centre of Excellence. This centre will aim to harness all the elements of national power to target those buildings blocks of democracy at the same time as delivering effective public security to enable those building blocks to flourish and grow. We see this centre as harmonising our approach in agencies and helping them target fault lines in our regional neighbours that can be addressed before they develop to the stage where some intervention is necessary. An aim of this centre is to facilitate harmonisation of our cooperation programs and our planning in situations where agencies have to intervene. A lot of research will be harnessed and promoted through the development of this centre. We will be bringing private industry and NGOs into that process, as well as members of various government agencies. We will be networking with many of the think tanks that help us to facilitate that strategic thinking. We also intend to network with other institutions internationally that are pursuing the same objectives, such as the Post Conflict Reconstruction Unit in the UK—which was recently renamed as the Stabilisation Unit—the Stabilisation and Reconstruction Task Force in Canada, the Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilisation in the United States, and also with Europe and what has been going on with their Civilian Headline Goal Program, to create deployable civilian capabilities to address these deficiencies and issues.

The centre will also help develop our integrated doctrine, training and exercise opportunities for our agency and external actors to enable cooperation to be more effective on the ground in these situations. It will also help us to have dialogue within the region to build an understanding of the need for this sort of approach and to enable us to work closely with our regional neighbours when that is required such as we have, for example, in East Timor and in the Solomon Islands.

We have discovered that there is a need for the deployable civilian expertise which the Europeans are looking at, and we are examining ways to be able to deliver that. I have commissioned a study within our Reserve capacity in the ADF to map the actual civilian skills that exist there so that we can draw on those skills. There are many people who have the economic, organisational, electoral, legal and economic skills that can help us tackle those issues in the short term as we move towards transition to Indigenous capabilities.

I hope that, with the contribution of the centre, all of our agencies will become known for two particular qualities: flexibility and imagination. This is what the contemporary security environment really requires of us. The challenge for us is the ability to be flexible in the capability that we bring to the table, in our strategic analysis and in our ability to think outside the square. It is the responsibility of those of us who have the opportunity to promote the cause of democracy through every possible means, as it is by no means free from threat or guaranteed, even to us in this country, without eternal vigilance. I commend the motion to the House.

Dick Adams (Lyons, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! The question is that the motion be agreed to. I call the Hon. Parliamentary Secretary for Pacific Island Affairs—and, some say, ‘fun’!

Duncan Kerr (Denison, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary for Pacific Island Affairs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr Acting Deputy President, I appreciate your designation as one with which I would be delighted if it were always the truth. I can say that our relations with the Pacific have been much improved over the last eight months as some of the tensions that were inherent in our dealings with our nearest neighbours have been dealt with effectively. Through both multilateral and bilateral engagements led by our Prime Minister, the Minister for Foreign Affairs, my colleague Bob McMullan and I have really done a lot of work to strengthen the effectiveness of Australia’s engagement with our own region, a region which we are both of and in. We are a country of the Pacific, we are in the Pacific, and the engagements that we are involved in through the partnerships for development, through bilateral arrangements with each of the countries and through multilateral negotiations with the Pacific Island Forum and other regional institutions have seen a very great improvement in our nation-to-nation and nation-to-region relationships.

On this particular motion, generally, the Pacific is a region where democracy has been established and is being consolidated, and that is all to the good. It is not always an easy thing to build national institutions in the Pacific, because for many of the countries the idea of nationhood is a relatively recent invention and one which would probably have been unimaginable to most of the populations of those countries only one or two generations previously. My own experience in Papua New Guinea, for example, reminds me that there were many people who had no knowledge of an external world beyond their valley. They had their own language—there are 700 languages in PNG—and so the creation of a vibrant democracy out of communities that saw their world as encompassing their tribe, their family and little more has been quite an enormous achievement.

Sometimes we are faced by critics who are very dismissive of the difficulties facing Pacific Island countries as they transition from countries which were essentially based around different forms of quite basic technologies to their involvement in a 21st century global environment, with the kinds of challenges and demands that that places upon them. Those critics give those countries far too little credit for the distance that they have achieved. We are working very hard to stabilise and make effective democratic institutions in the Pacific and, of course, there are specific bipartisan initiatives that have been established. The CDI—Centre for Democratic Institutions—is active in the Pacific but, very importantly, on a timescale that looks beyond the immediate next couple of years. We can be quite proud of the fact that we are engaged not only in strengthening the effectiveness of state building in those countries through institution strengthening but also in addressing some of the key critical issues that affect the citizens of those countries to enable them to participate effectively as members of a democracy that is addressing the Millennium Development Goals—extending opportunities for early education and post secondary education, making certain that people have relief from poverty, making certain that health services and education are addressed, designing our interventions in ways that will improve the lives of people and also improving the communications systems and the infrastructure that enable communication through those quite remote and sometimes complex societies so that people can actively take part in vibrant democratic institutions and see the benefit of that participation.

All of the countries of the Pacific are democracies, albeit at the moment Fiji, which is under a military interim government. Members of this House would know that there is bipartisan agreement within the Australian political system that we would wish that circumstance to come to an end as quickly as possible and for a restoration of genuine democracy in Fiji, because the people of Fiji are suffering at the moment. The GDP of that island has been reducing. It always has after coups, and the sooner we can find the political basis of an effective settlement that enables a return to democracy in Fiji the better. The Australian government has indicated on many occasions that it stands ready to assist in that process as best we can.

There were challenges to democracy in the Solomon Islands, a conflict that nearly brought the government of the Solomon Islands to a point of collapse. It was under considerable distress. The initiative that Australia was participating in, and to some extent was the driver of, the Regional Assistance Mission to the Solomon Islands, has been very successful. We look forward to a period where the Solomon Islands is restored to the robustness both democratically and economically to which its people are fully entitled.

We are working with all of the islands of the Pacific and Papua New Guinea to make certain that we give reality and flesh to commitments that we have entered into through our commitment first articulated by the Prime Minister in the Port Moresby declaration and then manifested in the rollout of the partnerships for development and through continuing bilateral discussions with those countries. We wish to make certain that we not only support the structural elements of democratic governance in those countries but assist to make it effective in the interests of the people. We encourage through negotiations, for example, on PACER Plus, the integration of the Pacific into a wider free trade environment where people are able to maximise their participation and their chances of economic development as well as their entitlement as citizens to vote and to participate within those democratic governments. Thank you very much. I welcome the initiative of those who have put this measure onto the Notice Paper and commend its consideration to the chamber.

Sid Sidebottom (Braddon, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Colleagues, I am very proud to be able to participate in this motion put forward by the member for Fremantle. She follows the former member for Fremantle, who was a great advocate of democracy in every sense of the word—one of the few people I have heard in this place actually speak about genuine reform to the parliamentary practices and traditions of this place and throughout Australia. I am a beneficiary of a democratic community, like everybody here. I also work in, and am a participant in, an institution of our democratic system, our parliamentary system. Like all of you in this place I have stood for election not just for federal parliament but for state parliament and local government as well. That means that I have been part and parcel of a democratic community and I have been able to participate in it and be genuinely free to do that. Thus, I want to be able to participate in this debate and to celebrate democracy.

In the interim between losing my seat in 2004 and regaining it in the last election—

John Murphy (Lowe, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Trade) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

That was tragic.

Sid Sidebottom (Braddon, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

What, that I got re-elected?

John Murphy (Lowe, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Trade) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It was tragic that you lost your seat.

Sid Sidebottom (Braddon, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Thank you. What I did in the meantime, once I got over the little bit of personal hurt, was postgraduate studies in international relations. One thing amongst many that I got out of those studies is that you can take democracy for granted, because you greatly appreciate the different forms of democracy throughout the world but even more appreciate the urge of many other peoples who seek just the basics of a democratic society and to be able to live in one. So I recognise the United Nations General Assembly resolution 62/7 that we have an International Day of Democracy celebrated on 15 September. I also note that democracy ‘is a universal value based on the freely expressed will of people to determine their own political, economic, social and cultural systems and their full participation in all aspects of life’. The resolution goes on to say:

While democracies share common features, there is no single model of democracy and … democracy does not belong to any country or region.

Indeed it does not. There is both a truth and a warning. The best democratic systems have evolved. To try and impose them on others for whatever political ideology will not work. Democracies evolve. They are dreamed of, they are fought for and people have died for them.

They are also taken for granted. Indeed, apathy is often a consequence of a long period of democratic experience, particularly the system of liberal democracy that we live under. That is one of the consequences and one of the great ironies of liberal democratic systems, that you can take it for granted. Some people think that voting on election day is basically your democratic responsibility and duty and that is all. But that is not all; that is just the beginning. Democracy, as many speakers have alluded to before me, is much more than the electoral process for parliamentary elections. We have many institutions that make up a democracy which are absolutely vital for that democracy to function properly. If we do not take notice of what is happening to those institutions, we do it at our peril. I know that the member at the table, my colleague the member for Lowe, has constantly been on in this place about the media ownership laws in this country and the effects of those laws—that is, the concentration of ownership—on our democratic institutions. If we do not have a diversity of opinion, a diversity of information then our community suffers for it.

We are being reminded of that daily, remembering that most people get their news and information from the traditional forms to this day, from newspapers, radio and television. They are concentrated in few hands. We do have greater access to the new technologies through the internet, through our iPods, our MP3 players and our mobile phones and so forth. But most people’s information does not come from those. So, although we have democratic institutions such as a free, fair, open media, we have to guard to make sure that that that in actual fact is the reality. So I suppose the one thing I want to emphasise today is that we should not take what we have for granted. It is sometimes under threat, often from without in many countries but at times from within, and sometimes by design. Sometimes it is just by apathy and neglect. So we need to be vigilant.

There are those in this country who believe that there are constant threats to democracy in Australia. They are often ridiculed as mad Lefties. But one of their major arguments is that one of the sure signs of our democracy being eroded is the growing disengagement of Australians from the democratic system. We are all aware of that. We in this place are an aberration; we are an exception rather than the rule. For a start, we belong to political parties. Most Australians will not have a bar of political parties. Why is that? We are passionate, we are dedicated, we are informed and we are educated. So are many other Australians, but why won’t they belong to our political parties? What is it about them? We are engaged. We believe that our political system is engaging, but many will not have a bar of it, and it is not just apathy. Sir William Deane, the former Governor-General said:

So let us rejoice and be grateful for all the achievements of our past …

I would add, ‘Our democratic past.’ He went on:

At the same time, let us be honest and courageous about the failures and flaws which mar those achievements …

That reminds me that people will engage with politics because it gives meaning to action. They disengage when politics lacks purpose. Essentially, for me that means that the political system that we are more thoroughly engaged in appears to be less relevant to their lives and it certainly is in their minds. That is an issue that we have to deal with.

One of the suggestions is that what has happened in the political arena of our democracy is that the executive rules, not the parliament. While we do have a parliamentary system, the parliament either lacks the will or the ability to scrutinise the executive. We in this chamber all know what I am talking about. That can be sheeted home to things like how we use the committee system within the parliament, whether it be in the House of Representatives or in the Senate. Are those committees properly resourced? Are those committees free to take up their review briefs? A review of the committee system could tackle the public view that the parliament is disengaged from those things that matter most to people. That is something that we can debate more in the future.

Others are concerned that the party system is still bound by either ideologies or by personalities through factional arrangements, whether it be on our side of the House or among others. We may say that that is an unfair view, but the fact that the view exists is a worry for us.

How do we engage with and communicate with generation Y? These are the people who are most disengaged from us? How do we go about that? It is absolutely crucial that we do that. I thought that I would share with you a little bit of research done on generation Y in the book No, Prime Minister: reclaiming politics from leaders by James Walter and Paul Strangio, published in 2007. I quote:

Research by the Australian sociologist Anita Harris shows that young people accept that future achievement is dependent on ‘individual choice and responsible self-making’ but resist the diminution of public space and surveillance of the private by establishing community, neighbourhood and friendship networks. In her investigations of the political attitudes and behaviour of Generation Y (those born in the early 1980s), researcher Rebecca Huntley confirmed that members of Gen Y are ‘turned off, annoyed by and distrustful of political parties, politicians and increasingly the [mainstream] media, but also found that they are ‘looking for alternative ways to get involved and so they focus on issues that affect them directly, at the local and the community level, or international issues, something facilitated by information technologies without borders.

So the last thing they need—and I will finish with this because I have other colleagues who want to speak—are electoral laws that disenfranchise them, a media that is controlled and dominated by a few, often on ideological grounds, and a parliamentary system that seems to churn on under 19th century conditions, yet in their name and in that of generation now. I will leave you with this thought—HL Mencken said of democracy in 1920:

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.

I think we can all have a discussion about what ‘good and hard’ means. The important thing is that they get it, and many do not believe that they do. But, compared to many others throughout the world, what we do have should be cherished, we should be vigilant with it and we should be very proud of it.

John Murphy (Lowe, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Trade) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I congratulate the member for Braddon for his invaluable and lasting contribution to this important debate. It is an honour to join the parliament in recognising the first International Day of Democracy, which was held on Monday, 15 September 2008. There can be no greater place to acknowledge this important occasion than in our parliament, an institution which demonstrates better than any other the commitment of the Australian people to democracy and democratic institutions.

I note that the United Nations General Assembly recorded in a press release dated 8 November 2007:

… that democracy is a universal value based on the freely-expressed will of people to determine their own political, economic, social and cultural systems …

Furthermore, article 21(1) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted in 1948 by the United Nations General Assembly, to which I am a proud signatory, states:

Everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives.

Article 21(3) of the declaration states:

The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government; this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures.

Can there be a better place to focus attention on the promotion and consolidation of democracy than in an institution which is the ultimate expression of the will of the people?

While we conduct our day-to-day lives in this place, we can never underestimate the importance of our role in the democratic process. We should never underestimate the legitimacy and mandate of an elected government, a legitimacy that arises because of the will of the people. As parliamentarians, we all know that the will of the people is sacrosanct. We understand our duties to interact directly with our constituents and respect their right to decide policies and programs through free and fair elections. That is one of the impenetrable strengths of any true democracy and those in power will always remain accountable to the people—that it is the people who ultimately rule. It comes as no great surprise that the Inter-Parliamentary Union notes that the word ‘democracy’ is derived from two Greek words meaning ‘people’ and ‘rule’. It also comes as no surprise that the Inter-Parliamentary Union, the world organisation of parliaments, has fought for decades to promote democracy by strengthening the very institution of parliament.

On this historic day, we ought to pay tribute to this organisation, which has developed governance principles for free and fair elections, established parliamentary systems where they would not otherwise exist and assisted more than 40,000 parliamentarians to represent their constituents without the fear of retribution. While the strength of any democracy is its capacity to limit the power of government according to the wishes of the people, there is no place for complacency. Democracies have not always been fortified against failure; we need only refer to the atrocities committed against indigenous populations by rising democracies in the United States and Australia.

The member for Fremantle, Melissa Parke, has already made reference to Duncan Green’s book entitled From Poverty to Power. In that book, Green rightly notes that numerous institutions, be they the legislature, judiciary, executive or media, exert checks and balances on each other which will ultimately determine the degree to which democratic regimes respect the rights of their citizens. Nowhere is this clearer than in Australia. Australia’s democratic institutions are undoubtedly underpinned by the rule of law, which is upheld by a truly independent and incorruptible judiciary.

While notions like the rule of law can be utilised as powerful rhetorical weapons, we ought to be concerned about any action or inaction that makes a mockery of what those words actually stand for. It would be the antithesis of democracy if citizens were forbidden to participate in democratic processes on the basis of their race, gender, personal beliefs or lifestyles. It would be the antithesis of democracy and would go against one eminent principle of the rule of law if free men and women were deprived of their life, liberty or property except by due process of the law.

It is a truism that no nation can seriously be considered democratic if it only pays lip-service to protecting opposing voices, the rights of minorities and individual freedoms such as freedom of speech, association and religion. The outgoing President of the United Nations General Assembly, Srgjan Kerim, has lived under democratic and non-democratic systems and would be well equipped to attest to that fact. He has been quoted recently as saying:

I have experienced the difference between being able to realize one’s individual initiative, and in circumstances that limit rights and opportunities.

Similarly, the UN Secretary-General, Mr Ban Ki-moon, has stated that while his home country, the Republic of Korea, had previously been exposed to emergency laws, censorship and political imprisonments:

With our transition to a pluralist state came greater transparency and accountability, a more effective government machinery, and a thriving business sector able to compete with the rest of the world.

In non-democratic nations or fledgling democracies, one can often find criticism that democracies are flawed, have failed people and are only promoted by meddling foreign powers. In this light, I applaud the United Nations General Assembly for deciding to commemorate the International Day of Democracy and for inviting all member states to participate in a way that raises public awareness. I also applaud the General Assembly statement that:

… while democracies share common features, there is no single model of democracy.

It would be wrong to feed any misconception that democracies are a product of interfering foreign nations. It would be wrong to assume that democracies can be exported from one country to another without the will of the people. While Australia is one of the oldest uninterrupted democracies and is recognised worldwide for its political stability, it would be naive to assume that our parliamentary democracy, with its Westminster traditions, is one that can be transported elsewhere. No democracy will succeed if people are not given a genuine say in their own governance.

Australia is best served by sharing its experiences, both good and bad, and its knowledge of governance principles for free and fair elections. Our mission should be to support fledgling democracies, not dictate to them. In this context, we should also pay tribute to the United Nations, which, arguably more than any other organisation, has supported the growth of democratic institutions and practices worldwide. The United Nations has matched the talk in numerous General Assembly resolutions with action on the ground—most visibly through countless peacekeeping missions. The role that multilateralism has to play in the spread of democracy should never be downplayed. It is a far greater challenge for nations to promote and consolidate democracies around the world unilaterally, or even bilaterally. In this global village, we are integrating with our neighbours to a far greater degree than we have ever done before.

There is no room for unilateralism. International cooperation and understanding are as necessary for peace and democracy as they are for trade and investment. Just as the epic struggles of the 20th century were fought hand in hand with those that shared our values and experience of democracy, so too we will work together against the modern threat to democracies and human rights around the world. We well remember 11 September 2001 and the callous and cowardly attack on the values of freedom, and on the democracy of not only the United States and Australia but of all free democracies around the world.

Only this week, terrorists tried, yet again, to assault democratic traditions and institutions in Pakistan with the cowardly suicide bomb attack on the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad. While terrorist attacks have taken place in areas such as New York, Bali and Islamabad, their targets were very clearly each and every free nation—those defending freedom over oppression and democracy over dictatorship. Democratic traditions and institutions have been resilient against far greater challenges in the past and we must remain vigilant. We must support all people who stand up against violence and overwhelmingly commit themselves to democratic causes and values. We must ensure that we continue promoting freedom and democracy as a positive force for change, particularly given the sheer forcefulness of the rhetoric used by terrorists. We must also remain attuned to the needs of our fellow human beings who turn sympathetically to such rhetoric out of desperation or ignorance. It cannot be denied that poverty, combined with the absence of education, has fuelled the capacity of terrorist organisations to recruit people to their cause.

It is legitimate to ask whether many fledgling democracies can survive if we do not take real action to eliminate poverty. Australia’s fate, and the fate of many democracies, is inexorably linked with the fate of the majority of the world’s people that are struggling with poverty. It would be naive of us to assume we can promote and consolidate democracies around the world while leaving the door open for extremists to recruit from the poor and marginalised. That is why I am proud to be playing my role in the Rudd government’s active re-engagement with Africa. I am also proud of the Rudd government’s commitment to the millennium goals and our long-term ambition to increase Australia’s overseas development assistance from 0.3 per cent of gross national income to 0.5 per cent by 2015-16.

Before concluding, I wish to speak about the free and sceptical press in Australia that has no doubt given our democracy the strength and vitality that makes it one of the most revered around the world. Notwithstanding my own reservations about policies which I believe were inconsistent with his statement, former Prime Minister Howard was spot-on when he said:

… the strength and vitality of Australian democracy rests on three great institutional pillars: our parliament with its tradition of robust debate; the rule of law upheld by an independent and admirably incorruptible judiciary; and a free and sceptical press.

I have already spoken about the role of parliament, the rule of law and the judiciary. The role of journalists, and their ability to dissect and report on the serious issues of the day, is no less important. Their role extends beyond keeping government accountable. The media is central to the free flow of information in a participatory democracy. Diversity in news, current affairs and journalistic commentary is essential to ensure people are made fully aware of all views and opinions. Without a free media, citizens are unlikely to be able to participate in the political, democratic, process. How can citizens who are disengaged and uninformed be expected to legitimately take part in the democratic process? That the juntas and dictators of the world will stop at nothing to tear down a free and sceptical press is proof enough of the importance of the press to any democracy.

We must all remain vigilant and obstruct any moves that would weaken the pillars of our democracy. The International Day of Democracy has an important role to play in sustaining this vigilance. I commend the member for Fremantle for moving this very important motion.

Debate (on motion by Ms Grierson) adjourned.