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

My question is to the Minister for Foreign Affairs. Will the minister inform the House as to why the Australia-Indonesia education partnership is in the national interest? How is Australia supporting counterterrorism efforts and are there any threats to these efforts?

Kevin Rudd (Griffith, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Foreign Affairs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Australia’s foreign aid program is designed to support Australia’s core national interests: our national economic interest, our national security interest and our international humanitarian interest—and that is precisely what this program in Indonesia does. So what are the contents of what happened under the previous government on this program and what we are proposing to do? Just to refresh honourable members of yesterday’s discussion of this, we had 2,075 schools built under the Howard government; we are going to add another 2,000. That is a good news story. Under the Howard government we had assistance to 500-plus Islamic schools; now we are going to add to that with assistance to a further 1,500 Islamic schools. Under the Howard government, 330,000 extra places were created for kids and we are going to add a further 300,000 places for kids. These are good contributions all round. It makes for a good policy.

If we wish to look at the human face of what this produces, I draw people’s attention to an article by Tom Allard today in the Herald which tells us about little Parhin. This is her photograph—a little girl in East Lombok. Her story is terrific. She has been directly helped by the Howard government program. She has been directly helped because she has had the opportunity to go to secondary school. She has the dream of becoming a doctor. Furthermore, on top of that, in her class, her graduating class, 42 of the 44 kids are going on to high school. Two years ago, about four out of 50 went on to high school. That is what this program is doing on the ground.

I have been asked about international and national reactions to this. We see in today’s Australian reaction from the Indonesian vice-minister for education. He has called in Australian embassy officials to clarify whether this program will continue. Furthermore, we have officials from the Indonesian education ministry making very clear-cut statements about the value of this program to the future of education in his country. As he says:

... we try to educate them—

that is, kids in these villages—

into a more pluralistic society. Australia is really helping us with education.

As for domestic reaction, we have had Alexander Downer come out and bag the decision by the Leader of the Opposition. We have Alex II, the member for Mayo—he has also bagged the decision by the Leader of the Opposition. I am told also that the member for Cook has been out there bagging the Leader of the Opposition’s decision. But there is more on today’s front-page of the Australian, and that is from the Deputy Leader of the Opposition. The Deputy Leader of the Opposition apparently has had something of a disagreement with the Leader of the Opposition on this matter. To quote from the Australian, she is devastated by Mr Abbott’s insistence that the program be sacrificed, and, furthermore, she believed that she had already won the heated debate on foreign aid in the shadow cabinet and is understood to have become embroiled in an ‘intense late-night argument with Mr Abbott in which he insisted on deferring the Indonesian schools program’. The problem for the Leader of the Opposition is that the Deputy Leader of the Opposition is right on this—absolutely right.

The supreme irony is this: here we have the Leader of the Opposition and today we are debating his policy, which is absolutely opposed to sound counterterrorism policy in Indonesia. What is the Indonesian government doing today? It is putting on trial Abu Bakar Bashir in Indonesia for charges concerning terrorism. The Indonesian government is doing the right thing on counterterrorism. The Leader of the Opposition is doing precisely the wrong thing on counterterrorism.