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

I move:

That this House:

(1)

notes that 24 October is United Nations Day which celebrates the entry into force of the United Nations Charter on 24 October 1945;

(2)

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

(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:

(a)

being the thirteenth largest contributor to the United Nations budget;

(b)

contributing to many United Nations peacekeeping operations;

(c)

firmly committing to increasing Australia’s development assistance; and

(d)

by continuing to push for 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, namely 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 United Nations Charter;

(5)

notes that as the only genuinely global Organisation, the United Nations plays a critical role in addressing the global challenges that no single 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 and resolution, international development, climate change, terrorism and the threat posed by weapons of mass destruction;

(6)

expresses its condolences for the loss of 100 United Nations staff lives in January 2010 as a result of the earthquake in Haiti, and expresses its appreciation for the ongoing work in difficult conditions of United Nations staff around the world; and

(7)

reaffirms the faith of the Australian people in the purposes, principles, and actions of the United Nations acting under guidance of the United Nations Charter.

This evening I attended and spoke at an event at the ACT Legislative Assembly to celebrate United Nations Day and the 65th anniversary of the founding of the United Nations. I would like to congratulate the UN Association of Australia, the UN Information Centre, UNIFEM, the UN Youth Association of Australia, the Australian Institute of International Affairs and the Deputy Chief Minister of the ACT, Katy Gallagher, for organising and supporting this event. Tonight I would like to recap some of the issues raised at the UN event. I began by remembering the victims of the Pakistan floods and the Haiti earthquake, as well as those of the numerous other disasters that occur but which seem to elude the attention of the media. Of course, Pakistan’s is a tragedy on an enormous scale. Some 21 million people —the entire population of Australia—are homeless and many of them are suffering hunger, malnutrition and disease. The food crisis may well be long term given that the floods have devastated agricultural areas and much land is still under water, preventing the planting of wheat and other crops. Members may recall that the 7.1-magnitude earthquake that struck Christchurch in New Zealand recently caused no fatalities, while the same magnitude earthquake that struck Haiti in January this year killed more than 200,000 people, injured many more and left a million homeless. We are now seeing a serious cholera outbreak. The point is that disaster can strike anywhere but it is always the poor who are disproportionately affected.

The 17th of October was the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty and of course yesterday, 24 October, was UN Day, which we celebrate here. These are good opportunities to reflect on the Millennium Development Goals, the progress that has been made and the considerable distance still to go. As I have heard the former Parliamentary Secretary for International Development Assistance, the Hon. Bob McMullan say, ‘Of course when we reach the goal of halving extreme poverty by 2015 we still need to work on helping the other half of our fellow human beings who are living and dying in extreme poverty.’ I welcome foreign minister Kevin Rudd’s landmark speech to the UN MDG Summit in New York last month during which he commented that the richest among us have a profound responsibility to help the poorest members of the human family out of poverty and he announced that Australia will devote 0.15 per cent of national income to the least developed countries, which will mean a significant increase in aid flowing to the poorest countries, of which 15 are in our own region and 33 are in Africa.

This year, on 2 July, we have also seen the creation by the UN General Assembly of a new UN agency called the UN Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women, known as UN Women. UN Women merges four UN agencies and offices devoted to the interests of women, including UNIFEM, and it is headed by Under-Secretary-General Michelle Bachelet, former Chilean President. The creation of UN Women is very well timed, coinciding as it does with the tenth anniversary of UN Security Council resolution 1325 on women, peace and security, which was adopted unanimously on 31 October 2000 under the presidency of Namibia. Resolution 1325 has been described by UNIFEM as ‘a landmark legal and political framework that acknowledges the importance of the participation of women and the inclusion of gender perspectives in conflict prevention, peace negotiations, humanitarian planning, peacekeeping operations, post-conflict peace-building and governance’. Felicity Hill, of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, said of the UN Security Council resolution:

The Council agreed that … women deserve a place at the peace and security table, but this is not only because they have been tortured, raped and affected by war differently, but because they are simply alive and have the human right to participate in their society.

So the unanimous adoption of the resolution was a wonderful and breakthrough moment, but the problem with resolution 1325 is that, despite being the broadest and most comprehensive statement on the rights and roles of women in peace and security, it is weak in terms of monitoring and enforcement. The implementation of the resolution has been erratic by member states, both in relation to the behaviour of troops they contribute to peacekeeping missions and in relation to providing a more effective participatory, justice and security environment for women within their own countries.

Resolution 1325 has since been supplemented by other Security Council resolutions calling for increased representation of women at all levels in the peace process, condemning conflict related sexual violence and aiming to strengthen coordination, monitoring and reporting including the appointment of a special representative for sexual violence in conflict.

We know that in World War I approximately 41 per cent of the war dead were civilians, while in contemporary conflicts 90 per cent of the victims are civilians, most of whom are women and children. And while, as the US Institute of Peace has noted, ‘wartime rape is probably as old as war itself’, there has been increased international attention in the past two decades due to the rape atrocities committed in the former Yugoslavia, in Rwanda and, more recently, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, among other places. Just a few months ago we heard the horrific reports of mass rape that occurred in the eastern Congo between 30 July and 2 August, whereby more than 300 women and children, including elderly women and baby boys and girls, were raped by members of rebel armed groups. The horror has been amplified by the reports this month that the victims of the rapes now face the same abuse from government troops who have been sent to the region to enforce a government ordered moratorium on mining. Jeffrey Gettleman, the East Africa Bureau Chief of the New York Times, has reported that armed groups are actually committing atrocities to bolster their negotiating strength and that ‘in Congo’s wars, the battleground is often women’s bodies’.

On 14 October, the UN Secretary-General’s Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict, Margot Wallstrom, who had visited the Walikale region where the rapes occurred, reported on the matter to the UN Security Council. She noted the connection between illicit exploration of natural resources by armed groups and sexual violence, saying ‘the mineral wealth that should be the source of their prosperity is instead the source of their greatest suffering’. Ms Wallstrom called upon UN member states to enact laws to require companies to disclose whether their products contain DRC minerals and she called upon the council to give MONUSCO, the UN peacekeeping mission present in the Congo, the financial resources and other assets needed to carry out its mandate, which includes the protection of civilians, while noting that the primary responsibility for controlling the situation rests with the national authorities. Ms Wallstrom stressed that the rapes will continue so long as consequences are negligible and said they:

… will leave a devastating imprint on the Congo for years to come.

                        …                   …                   …

Rape is shattering traditions that anchor community values, disrupting their transmission to future generations. For the women of Walikale, peace is not a treaty, a resolution, or a conference but simply the peace of mind to live and work without fear. For these women justice delayed is more than justice denied—it is terror continued.

It is shocking to be standing here in Canberra, Australia and know that such abhorrent things as extreme sexual violence and preventable child and maternal deaths are happening around the world as we speak. But, despite the pain and cruelty that endures, we can take heart from the enormous strides that have been made in the last decade within the expanding consciousness of the international community as reflected in the progress on the Millennium Development Goals, the emergence of the Responsibility to Protect doctrine and the increasingly specific Security Council resolutions 1325, 1889, 1820 and 1888 on women, peace and security. The fact that there is now a special representative reporting to the Security Council on the events in the Congo and calling for specific remedial action is significant. There is also the new agency, UN Women, which will put in place new strategies for progress on women’s rights and empowerment.

Although I no longer work for the United Nations and the only bombs and bullets I face these days are metaphorical ones, I remain inspired by the purposes of the United Nations as reflected in the UN Charter and the core principles contained in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, both of which, as everyone here knows, Australia played a key role in drafting. I am heartened by the large number of parliamentary colleagues of all political persuasions who clearly feel the same way as evidenced by the substantial membership numbers of both the UN parliamentary group and the UNICEF parliamentary association and by the motions that are lodged and debated each year in recognition of UN Day.

In this debate tonight I would like to recognise the efforts of UN and humanitarian workers who provide life-saving assistance to millions of people around the world, who work in conflict zones and areas of natural hazards and who place their own lives at risk in the line of duty. I pay tribute to the UN staff who have lost their lives in the service of peace. In January the UN suffered its largest ever loss of staff in the devastating Haiti earthquake, where 100 UN civilian and military peacekeepers from 30 different countries were killed. Prior to that the largest loss of UN staff life in a single event had been the bombing of the UN headquarters in Baghdad in August 2003.

In both tragic events I lost a number of good friends and former colleagues with whom I had worked in Kosovo, Gaza and New York and the world lost some of its best and brightest people. As I said in a parliamentary speech earlier this year, these are people who thought only of bringing good to the world and they have now taken their place with Dag Hammarskjold, Sergio Vieira de Mello, and many other fallen UN colleagues whose memory serves to fortify us in carrying on our efforts to help restore dignity to the lives of the world’s most vulnerable.

Bruce Scott (Maranoa, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Is the motion seconded?

Kate Ellis (Adelaide, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Employment Participation and Childcare) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I second the motion and reserve my right to speak.

Paul Neville (Hinkler, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I suppose it is appropriate that tonight we celebrate the United Nations, and I take great pleasure in being able to speak to the motion proposed by the member for Fremantle, who has had a most distinguished career in the United Nations both in New York and in Europe, and who comes to this House with a skill set that no-one else in either chamber can match. We do well to take on board her words tonight especially in regard to the United Nations responsibility to women and children.

It is appropriate that we should take pride in Australia’s part in the formation of the United Nations. We should take pride in the fact that we were part of the crafting of the Declaration of Human Rights. We should take pride in the fact that Dr Evatt was the first president of United Nations. Something that surprised me was that I could find no actual tribute in New York to the man who virtually founded the United Nations. There were lots to the secretaries-general but I could not find anything that honoured him.

As the member for Fremantle said in her resolution tonight, the UN is the only genuinely global organisation that plays a critical role in addressing the global challenges that no single country can resolve on its own, and that is true. That is unquestionably true.

About this time last year I was in the United Nations and I spent the period from mid-September to mid-December as one of this country’s two parliamentary advisers to the UN. My colleague at the time was the former member for Canberra, Annette Ellis. It was truly a marvellous experience to be in New York and to be part of the Australian team.

By embassy standards we do not have a big contingent in New York with only about 30 to 35 diplomats. From mid-September to mid-December the UN General Assembly meets. It is, if you like, the parliament of the UN, the parliament of the world. The concentration of all nations, national leaders and national heads of state are on the UN at that time. It is the time when every nation has to garner what it can in its influence on the direction of world affairs. The work there is not easy. The UN is divided into six committees and I served on three of them—the first committee, which is disarmament; the fourth committee, which is decolonisation; and the sixth committee, which is international and UN law.

As a parliamentary adviser one does not go over there for a junket, or at least Annette Ellis and I did not see it that way. It was full-on work every day—into the Australian Embassy by 8.30 am, down to the UN by 10 am, back to the embassy or to functions in the UN from 2 pm till 3 pm, back to the UN from 3 pm till 6 pm, and sometimes staying on later into the night for functions, lectures and the like. It was full on. Every Monday morning in the embassy everyone had to report on the week that they had just been through and what they had done, and the ambassador dished out the jobs for the coming week. Quite often Annette and I represented the ambassador at functions or events. I asked him once: ‘Why do you send us and not the junior diplomats?’ He said, ‘Some international delegations take it as a greater privilege if we send a member of parliament.’

Australia is quite unique in that it sends two Australian MPs—and you, Mr Deputy Speaker Scott, have been one of them—to bolster the team at the UN during the assembly sittings. Some experts are also brought from government departments here in Canberra, and some of the diplomats from our team in the UN in Geneva also come to New York to build the team up to perhaps about 45 to 50. It is full on the whole time, especially in that fortnight when the world leaders are present.

I was very upset when our current foreign minister, the former Prime Minister, was there. He was scheduled to speak at about half-past seven one night, and we had a rare performance of self-indulgence from the presidents of Iran and Libya, who were expected to speak for 15 or 20 minutes. One went for an hour and I think the other one went for an hour and a quarter. So by the time the Australian Prime Minister got to speak it was 25 to 10 at night and people were going home. I was really insulted as an Australian to see our Prime Minister treated so shabbily. Nevertheless, those are the sorts of things you have got to contend with, and sensitivities are all part of diplomacy.

The quality and calibre of the young diplomats in the Australian mission in New York is quite exemplary. People aged from 25 or 26 through to their late 30s are quite young by international standards, and they take a workload the like of which you have not seen. They are skilled negotiators, even at that age, on the floor of the UN in the committees. I remember one day in particular. I did not even know the significance of the issue, but for many years they had not been able to get the five permanent members of the UN to agree on it. Many countries had tried, but it was the junior Australian diplomats who got all five of the permanent members to agree to the resolution. I can remember one girl coming across, saying, ‘Oh my God, we’ve got China! We’ve got China!’ Then they got Russia and they got someone else. It was considered quite a coup, and I took great pride in seeing them work so effectively.

In those committees of the UN I was very interested in colonisation. I take a great interest in the Pacific Islands and Australia’s external territories and I had been to New Zealand to see what the New Zealand government was doing with regard to its external territories only just before we went to the UN. While we were in New York we went to Washington for four days and got to know what the Americans were doing. It was good to see that Australia measured up very well in that field. But it is interesting to see that Gibraltar is still an issue. The Malvinas, the Falklands, are still an issue, and we have a part to play as Australians in seeing that those things are attended to.

I spoke five times in the UN, once in the General Assembly. I must admit that to stand up at the green marble podium and speak to a plenary session of the General Assembly is quite a daunting exercise. But it was great to know that Australia could tell such a great story, and on that occasion the story was about increasing our aid to Africa by 40 per cent.

Sure, the UN is a good place. It is not beyond criticism. It is excessively bureaucratic. But you really have to ask yourself: if there was not a UN, what would you do about water, sanitation, agriculture, human rights, the protection of women and children? Who would do that?

I will finish on this note. One night I went to a display and there I was confronted with a painting of a woman with one arm hacked off trying to suckle a baby with the other. That left me with a burning impression from the UN, one that will live with me for many years to come.

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

I thank the member for Hinkler for his contribution and interest. I also thank the member for Fremantle for helping to celebrate the 65th anniversary of the formation of the United Nations and to celebrate its work, its agencies and of course, most importantly, those people that work in the UN and dedicate themselves to making the world a better place.

Opponents have labelled the UN irrelevant, a geriatric 65-year-old overdue for retirement and ready for a pension. Indeed, critics have called it a dire threat to civilisation and individual national sovereignties and, indeed, a global plot to usurp the nation-state. We have all read it. We all hear it. At every public meeting you go to someone will bring that up. 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 neoconservative regime of the former Bush years and during the Howard regime in Australia between 1996 and 2007—whereby they would resort to multilateralism when it suited their interests and spurn it when it did not. Other choices have been unilateralism, bilateralism, regionalism or a device such as the coalition of the willing—sound familiar?

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 and other large-scale violations of human rights—we have heard some of these highlighted tonight by the member for Fremantle—as well as terrorism, transnational crime, climate change, environmental threats, poverty, rogue nuclear arms activity, pandemics and others. Nor, I would argue, is there an 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. However, it should be that the global powers adjust to the body of international law and commonly shared human values underpinning the UN and embodied in the UN Charter.

As I have said before in this place, I believe the real crisis is, according to Muchkund Dubey, the former Foreign Secretary of India, who said:

… 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, as was evidenced during the Howard years, 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 non-descript moral purpose. Multilateralism is the best of a more positive evolving system, not unilateralism and not multilateralism a la carte.

Finally, I note that the United Nations has three noble aims worthy of pursuing no matter what the faults and foibles of the organisation. These are to end the scourge of war, to affirm faith in fundamental human rights and to promote social progress and better standards of life. I thank those people who deliver those aims.

John Forrest (Mallee, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am pleased to rise tonight to support the member for Fremantle on her motion concerning the United Nations. It is a very important motion. Whilst I might not be able to bring the same passion that she can to this issue after her long years of experience with the organisation, there are some observations that I would like to make. Last year, during the last parliament, I visited the UN with the Joint Standing Committee on Treaties. We were conducting an inquiry on nuclear proliferation. To stand in the chamber of the General Assembly made me realise that, for all the criticisms that are made against the UN—that is, it is a talkfest and excessively bureaucratic—the reality is that it is there. We must not let happen to it what happened to the League of Nations, which was established after the Great War. The League of Nations collapsed in its effort to prevent another war from happening. Within a generation the world was again at war. All of us need to make the commitment to the United Nations, despite all of its alleged inadequacies, to make it operate effectively.

The motion goes to the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals. I have been somewhat frustrated over my time in this parliament—no matter what government has been in power—in achieving the millennium goals set for us by the United Nations. I got so frustrated that I took matters into my own hands. I wanted to make a personal effort. Last year I was privileged to table in this chamber a report of the struggling stateless Akha people in the Mekong hinterland of South-East Asia. They are completely vulnerable and exposed to child trafficking. They end up being sexually exploited. I was encouraged to go to the village after working with the Rotary Club of Swan Hill. Other motivated members of the Swan Hill community in my own home town established a donation tax deductibility status for an organisation called Children of the Golden Triangle. I was impressed with the commitment that ordinary Australians make. It is somehow not taken so much into account in our contribution to achieving the millennium goals. I believe this parliament owes organisations like that every means by which we can encourage Australians to demonstrate their commitment.

For the last decade or so, people from the Swan Hill community and other communities around Australia have been travelling up to Mae Sai, a small village in northern Thailand that is right next to the Burma border, to help these stateless people. These people are one of 12 individual tribes scattered throughout the Mekong hinterland. We want to arrest the vulnerability of these people and give them skills in agriculture and education so that they will not be exposed and vulnerable to the ruthlessness of people who go there to steal their children in order to take them away into slavery.

I commend the member for Fremantle on her motion. Sixty-five years is a wonderful milestone for the United Nations. I am pleased to be able to stand here to support her motion. I also would like to comment on point (6) of the motion, which expresses condolence for the loss of life from the Haiti earthquake. There are not many Haitians in my constituency but I found a couple in Robinvale. They asked for my assistance in sending a package to their devastated family in Haiti. I was thrilled to be able to make a contribution to assist them. At that stage, they did not know whether their relations were safe.