Melissa Parke (Fremantle, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the House:

(1)

notes that the 24 October is United Nations Day, celebrating the entry into force of the United Nations Charter (UNC) on 24 October 1945;

(2)

celebrates Australia’s key role in the formation of the United Nations and the drafting of the UNC;

(3)

recognises that Australia has been a consistent and long term contributor to United Nations’ efforts to safeguard international peace and security and to promote human rights, for example, by being the thirteenth largest contributor to the United Nations’ budget; by contributing to many United Nations’ peacekeeping operations; and by firmly committing to increasing Australia’s development assistance and seeking real progress towards the Millennium Development Goals;

(4)

notes further the Australian Government’s commitment to the multilateral system as one of the three fundamental pillars of Australia’s foreign policy; that Australia is determined to work through the United Nations to enhance security and economic well-being worldwide; and to uphold the purposes and principles of the UNC;

(5)

notes that as the only truly global organisation, the United Nations plays a critical role in addressing the global challenges that no country can resolve on its own and that Australia is determined to play its part within the United Nations to help address serious global challenges, including conflict prevention, international development, climate change, terrorism and the threat posed by weapons of mass destruction;

(6)

notes also Australia’s commitment to, and support for, reform of the United Nations’ system in order to ensure that the organisation reflects today’s world and is able to function efficiently and effectively; and

(7)

reaffirms the faith of the Australian people in the purposes and principles of the UNC.

Last Saturday, 24 October 2009, was United Nations Day, which is an annual celebration of the entry into force of the United Nations Charter on 24 October 1945 and of the role of the UN and its constituent member states in safeguarding international peace and security, eliminating poverty and promoting human rights. Tonight I come directly from the annual UNICEF Parliamentary Association function, which was well attended by members and senators from all parties. The guest speaker was the head of UNICEF’s global HIV-AIDS division, Jimmy Kolker.

Last month we also celebrated the inaugural dinner of the new UN parliamentary group with guest speaker the Hon. Robert Hill, former Australian Ambassador to the UN, who was recently elected as the new president of the United Nations Association of Australia. I take this opportunity to congratulate Mr Hill on his election and to pay tribute to outgoing UNAA President Professor John Langmore, a tireless advocate for the United Nations. At last month’s dinner we also heard from Richard Towle, the regional head of UNHCR, and Chris Woodthorpe, the new director of the UN Information Centre here in Canberra.

I note that two of the objectives of the United Nations as set out in the preamble to the UN Charter are as follows:

• to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, and
• to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained …

Unfortunately, despite our key role in the articulation and adoption by the UN of the body of international human rights law, Australia has never fully incorporated our own international obligations into domestic law, and we remain the only advanced nation in the world with no charter or bill of rights.

To those who say Australia does not need a charter of rights, the report of the National Human Rights Consultation points to numerous unfortunate cases in this country’s recent history, including Al-Kateb, Cornelia Rau and Dr Haneef. There are also many less-well-known cases involving Australia’s elderly, persons with disabilities and people living in rural and remote areas who have not been treated with dignity by institutions and agencies of the state or those acting on its behalf.

Last Monday, I received from the Deaths in Custody Watch Committee of WA a petition regarding the death on 27 January 2008 of a much loved and respected Aboriginal elder from the Warburton community in WA, Mr Ward. Mr Ward died of multiple organ failure caused by heatstroke after being transported 360 kilometres, from Laverton to Kalgoorlie, for three hours and 45 minutes in the back of a prison van with no air conditioning or ventilation on a day with outside temperatures over 40 degrees. The state coroner noted deep burns on Mr Ward’s abdomen from contact with the boiling metal of the van’s floor and found that Mr Ward had ‘suffered a terrible death while in custody which was wholly unnecessary and avoidable’. The van was operated by government contractor GSL Custodial Services, now G4S, a company that continues to carry out prisoner transport services for the WA Department of Corrective Services.

This appalling event took place a mere 18 days before the national apology to Australia’s Indigenous peoples and 107 years after Labor member for Coolgardie Hugh Mahon moved a motion in the first year of the federal parliament calling for a royal commission into the conditions for Aborigines in northern Western Australia and into the administration of justice in the lower courts of Western Australia as it affected Aboriginal people.

There is a striking similarity between Mr Mahon’s motion of 1901 and the petition by the Deaths in Custody Watch Committee of WA presented to the parliament last week which called for, inter alia, a review of the standards within the criminal justice system and an inquiry into the extreme overrepresentation of Indigenous Australians in that system. That we could be here 108 years after Mr Mahon’s motion still speaking of the same issues is shocking and shaming.

There could be no greater repudiation of the treatment of Mr Ward and others who have suffered terrible injustice, and no greater celebration of shared UN and Australian principles—concerning the dignity and worth of the human person—than Australia’s adoption of a human rights act.

Far from being a law for the elites, as it is often characterised, a human rights act would be a law for the ordinary person, for the weak and the powerless vis a vis the state and those acting—sometimes in a criminally negligent fashion, as we have seen—on the state’s behalf. A human rights act would be the very embodiment of the ‘fair go’ principle that is embedded in our national character and, I suggest, in the UN Charter. This is an opportunity that Australia cannot allow to pass by. Carpe diem.

Ms Anna Burke (Chisholm, Deputy-Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Is the motion seconded?

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

I am very happy to second the motion and reserve my right to speak.

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

Australia has a long and proud history with the United Nations, having been a founding member in 1945. I can say confidently that this nation has always had a strong regard for the United Nations. We have been well represented as a member of the Security Council on four occasions—1946-47, 1956-57, 1973-74 and 1985-86—along with being a founding member and an active participant on many UN agencies. Australia has been a full participant in the United Nations.

I would like to mention the underlying principles and purposes of the United Nations. Firstly, it is to maintain international peace and security, to develop friendly relations and to achieve global cooperation. Collectively as a nation, or individually, Australians have made a great contribution to the United Nations. For example, Dr Evatt in 1948 was elected third President of the General Assembly and was the first chair of the UN Atomic Energy Commission; and Mr Makin in 1946 was the first President of the Security Council. There are quite a number of Australians that have made a contribution to the United Nations. We only need to look back very recently to East Timor and the proud contributions that Australia has made to INTERFET, UNOTIL and UNMIT, and a number of contributions that we have made collectively there in the best interests of the people of East Timor.

I note the member for Fremantle, in making her contribution regarding the United Nations, made mention of a bill of rights and how that is a shortcoming—a limitation—of this country. I think of it differently. I have great confidence in the systems and laws that exist in this country. When you look at places like Western Australia, with which I am obviously most familiar, there is a certain lack of confidence in people in the decisions of some magistrates and judges in Western Australia. Although that might be limited to issues to do with the criminal justice system in Western Australia, I think there will be a great cause for concern for the people to want to surrender a certain amount of interpretive power, in the future, to judges—given that there have been plenty of occasions where justice has not been well served—particularly when people tend to trust the running of the country to those that are directly elected. I think it is an important point to make. We should not be second-guessing and handing over power to unelected officials that can then reinterpret the law away from what the people’s representatives—the elected representatives of this nation—would want.

Australia has had a great history within the United Nations, having been there right from the start. It has been a full participant in the agencies of the United Nations, making contributions—whether financially or in the way of peacekeeping forces—through the history of the United Nations. We have been there. Australia has made an excellent contribution. In the same way that we have a sense of regard for this great and important multilateral organisation, there have also been times when there has been a certain limitation in the ability of the United Nations to act in the right way. We have seen that not every decision by the UN has been a positive one or fairly applied and that it has not delivered justice on every occasion. We need to acknowledge it as a great organisation for the world but there are certain limitations that we must never lose sight of.

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

Opponents have labelled the UN irrelevant—a geriatric 64-year-old overdue for retirement and ready for a pension. Indeed, some letters to the editor—even in my electorate of Braddon—call it a dire threat to civilisation and individual national sovereignties, and indeed a global plot to usurp the nation state. For supporters, on the other hand, it is the continued hope for the future and its best years lie ahead.

I am sure we are all aware in this House that extremes never demonstrate the real truth, for, to write-up the UN too much regarding its success or to write it off too soon after its failures is to do little but exaggerate. If one goes by the letter and spirit of the UN Charter, which came into force on ratification by a majority of signatory nations on 24 October 1945, multilateralism under the United Nations has been—and will remain—the most effective international organisation to lead the international system from anarchy to order based on international law and from dominance by hegemony to international democratic governance. Multilateralism a la carte has been a feature of some major and middle-power nations, particularly paralleling the neo-conservative’s regime of the Bush years—and during the Howard regime in Australia between 1996 and 2007—whereby there was a resort to multilateralism when it suited their interests and they spurned it when it did not.

Other choices have been unilateralism, bilateralism, regionalism or a device like the coalition of the willing. The true nature of the crisis or major challenges facing the UN, I suspect, are not so much the so-called new threats to international security, for example, those posed by genocide, ethnic cleansing, other large-scale violations of human rights, terrorism, transnational crime, climate change, environmental threats, poverty, rogue nuclear arms activity, pandemics and others. Nor, I would argue, is there no international consensus on the nature of threats to security, most notably collective security, or on the methods to meet these threats. Nor is it about the failure of the UN to adjust to the existing global power structure. It should be the global powers that should adjust to the body of international law and commonly shared human values underpinning the UN and embodied in the UN Charter. I believe the real crisis is, according to Muchkund Dubey, the former Foreign Secretary of India, well worth reflecting on and is:

The real crisis is that the more powerful among the Member States now want to go back on this body of international law and on these common values, and are bent upon continuing to turn a blind eye to the obvious inequities and imbalances in rules and regimes which govern international relations. The crisis lies in these countries having put themselves beyond the pale of some of the key instruments and frameworks of multilateral control, surveillance and constraints. The crisis lies in their preference for ‘exceptionalism’ or ‘exemptionism’ or for ‘multilateralism a la carte’. The crisis does not so much lie in occasional paralysis in decision-making, but in the built-in system of unequal decision-making and decision under pressure based on the exploitation of the vulnerability of the weaker Member States.

The Australian government, I suggest, has an obligation to our people, our region and our planet to strengthen the multilateral, rules based system. It does not have the right to tear it down along with others. Nor does it have the right to stand idly by in the name of some brave new unilateral world whose central organising principle is an ill-defined unilateralism with a nondescript moral purpose. The Australian government has instead a duty to help build up the rules based system given it does not argue for any alternative system. This is the mark of true statesmanship rather than the stuff of rank politics. Indeed, those are the words of our current Prime Minister issued on 25 April 2005 to the UN Association of Australia and the Australian Institute of International Affairs. I am glad there is a new regime with its attitude to the UN and I am glad there is one worldwide. Multilateralism is the best of an evolving system, not unilateralism and not multilateralism a la carte.

Robert Oakeshott (Lyne, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am having a good night on the crossbenches. I heard a debate before this one in regard to coastal issues, which is a very local issue in an electorate such as Lyne. It was an excellent report supported by both sides of the chamber through the member for Throsby and the member for Moore. And now I am hearing some good bipartisanship on the significance of the international arm of the work of members of parliament through the bipartisan words of the member for Parkes, the member for Cowan and the member for Braddon. I say thank you to everyone for allowing a parliament to do its good work.

The UN is important and, as I have mentioned, it is an important part of what a local member of parliament does. There is a saying in this place that all politics is local. That is right to some degree but I do believe the work of the United Nations is a part of the role of a local member of parliament. All of us have a role in bringing the international into our local electorates and engaging with our communities on the important work of the United Nations and the many arms of work it is involved in—and vice versa. I think we have a responsibility with many of the local issues such as Indigenous issues and gender based violence, to pick just two examples, to feed up many of those important local issues from our electorates through to the international domain. We are not playing our roles as local members of parliament unless we are engaged in organisations such as the United Nations. It does therefore have an important role and that is why I am more than happy to speak in support of this motion. In my first speech in this place I talked about the local, national and international role of members of parliament. I said that quite purposely to place a marker to say that I am not one who is willing to give rough trade to the work done by the United Nations as mentioned by the previous speaker.

It has always left me somewhat bemused why the United Nations does not have the reputation in Australia that it has in many other parts of the world. I am not sure whether it is because we have a great big moat around the country which at times can mentally disengage us with many of the world issues. I am not sure whether it is because there are only two full-time staff of the United Nations that actually work in Australia. I am not sure whether it is the history of defining ourselves by the superpower of the moment, the UK or the US, rather than defining ourselves by the advantages of multilateralism and working as a global unit rather than whoever is the superpower of the moment. I think the politics in Australia to date has been somewhat of a hard sell. But I would hope all members in this chamber, regardless of political persuasions, do not take the easy path. That is why motions such as this one are important. It is the easy path to run on the simple sentiments about the United Nations rather than doing the heavy lifting and actually selling the good work that the United Nations does.

I would love terms in Australia such as the Millennium Development Goals to be much more widely known. It is the role of many of us in this chamber to sell those terms and engage with communities on the importance of those terms and allow the communities to get angry about why many of those Millennium Development Goals are failing, particularly in the Asia-Pacific region. For that reason, in the Mid North Coast, we have tried to do some of that heavy lifting and last month set up a United Nations Association of Australia branch. It is unchartered waters and it will be difficult but I would hope it is an example for the many members of parliament in this place who do not have a UNAA branch in their local area. From an area which normally does not talk world affairs it was fascinating to sit in on the first meeting of about 20 who turned up. We covered topics from climate change to Indigenous issues to gender based violence and it was great.

Debate interrupted.