Janelle Saffin (Page, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak about two international matters that concern the community in Australia. The first one is to do with Burma. On Sunday I attended an event in Sydney organised to mark 15 cumulative years out of the past 20 years of incarceration of Aung San Suu Kyi. The event was well attended. It was a very rainy day and over 120 people attended, including a large number of people from the Australian-Burmese community. It was organised by the Burma Australia Campaign—and well done to them.

The Burma Australia Campaign visited the parliament yesterday and met with a whole range of people including the Parliamentary Friends Group, which is jointly convened by the member for Werriwa, me and Senators Payne and Ludlam. We listened to Dr Sean Turnell, who is an economist expert particularly on Burma, talk about issues impacting on Burma and the economy. He also spoke about their recent visits to the United States where they met with people who were also concerned about Burma. They raised the matter of the commission of inquiry that people want the UN to undertake in Burma, they raised the issue of sanctions and they also raised the question of elections.

The elections will take place on 7 November in Burma. A lot of people call for them to be free and fair, and I understand why they do that. These elections can never be free nor fair—they cannot be and will not be. For a range of reasons Burma is a country that is under the rule of a military dictatorship which is commanding control and does not allow free and fair elections. It is a state that has been delegalised in a whole range of ways. There is no rule of law and it is being premised with a constitution that is fatally flawed in process and design and is referred to as a sham constitution. Therefore the elections cannot be free and fair in any way.

The second matter I want to raise was my attendance last night at the parliamentary Friends of Palestine group along with a large number of colleagues from all sides of the political spectrum. We listened to a very compelling speaker, Anna Baltzer. She is a Columbia graduate, a former Fulbright scholar, a Jewish-American woman and, as she said, the granddaughter of Holocaust refugees. Anna showed a DVD called ‘Witness in Palestine’ and spoke about visiting Palestine as a young Jewish-American. She went to the West Bank to discover the realities of daily life for Palestinians under the occupation. She said that what she found changed her outlook on the conflict forever. The full title of her presentation was ‘Life in occupied Palestine: eye witness stories and photos’. It provided a down-to-earth way of looking at the occupation in Palestine and at the non-violent movement for freedom and equality in the Holy Land.

She gave accounts of personal stories, of human rights abuses and spoke about what Palestinians faced in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. She spoke about the endless waiting at checkpoints, the devastation of home demolitions to make way for what she said were the settlements. She also spoke about the separation wall and about how it was not a wall in the sense that we know but was something quite draconian. She spoke about the impact on the environment and the struggle to maintain dignity in the face of relentless oppression.

It was very interesting to hear her speak and I want to thank the convenors of the Friends of Palestine group, particularly the member for Calwell and the member for Farrer, who both spoke and hosted the event. It gave a lot of people an opportunity to hear from someone who is not a political person, as such, but is someone deeply concerned about human rights.