Kelvin Thomson (Wills, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the House for the chance to move this private member's motion. I move:

That this House:

(1) stresses the superiority of collective security through the United Nations over unilateral action or 'coalition of the willing' type adventurism, and strongly supports the 'responsibility to protect' principle as a vehicle to protect civilians; and

(2) urges the Government to:

(a) encourage the United Nations to establish peacekeeping forces in the world's trouble spots to protect civilians and to extinguish conflicts before they escalate in ways which potentially draw in Australia; and

(b) implement the recommendations of the Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade regarding the establishment of a mediation unit within the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade to assist in resolving intrastate and interstate disputes before they develop into open conflict (similar to the Norwegian model).

I believe it is deeply appropriate that we should be having this debate on a day when the Prime Minister has made an announcement concerning Australia's national security. The Prime Minister's statement is caused by and acknowledges the threat posed by Islamic State, not just in the Middle East but right around the world, including here in Australia.

The Prime Minister's statements on national security so far have, in my view, been incomplete; what they are lacking is an apology. There has never been an apology from the Liberal Party or any sign of recognition or awareness that the response of former US President George W Bush—enthusiastically supported and unconditionally embraced by Liberal Prime Minister John Howard—to the attacks by al-Qaeda on 11 September 2001 was disastrous. The invasion of Iraq was an act of folly and self-indulgence which was a key driver of the threats to our national security that we are discussing today. Until the Liberal Party shows some sign of acknowledging and apologising for what was a monumental blunder, it cannot be regarded as a safe pair of hands when it comes to national security.

The link between the invasion of Iraq and the rise of Islamic State has been made by numerous experts. Sir Christopher Meyer, British ambassador to the US from 1997 to 2003, has said of the reasons for the success of Islamic State in Iraq:

Perhaps the most significant is the decision taken more than ten years ago by President George W Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair to unseat Saddam Hussein without thinking through the consequences for Iraq of the dictator’s removal.

He said Islamic State is now fighting alongside former members of Saddam Hussein's army, which was disbanded in May 2003, 'throwing 400,000 angry men on to the streets with their weapons', and:

The order directly fuelled the eight-year insurgency against American and allied troops.

… former Iraqi soldiers were recruited by the Iraqi branch of Al Qaeda, have been fighting in Syria and have now returned to Iraq with ISIS.

Former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan has identified the 2003 Iraq war as one of the causes of the current situation in the Middle East. He says:

I spoke against it at the time, and I am afraid my concerns have proved well-founded.

…   …   …

The country has been in the throes of insurgency ever since and the ensuing chaos has proved an ideal breeding ground for the Sunni radical groups—

that now call themselves Islamic State. The commentator Tom Engelhardt, from Middle East Eye, identifies the US intervention in Iraq as a significant factor in the current situation. He says:

… just about everything done in the war on terror has facilitated their rise. After all, we dismantled the Iraqi army and rebuilt one that would flee at the first signs of ISIS's fighters, abandoning vast stores of Washington's weaponry to them. We essentially destroyed the Iraqi state, while fostering a Shia leader who would oppress enough Sunnis in enough ways to create a situation in which ISIS would be welcomed or tolerated throughout significant areas of the country.

As the motion makes clear, I do believe in collective international action to solve problems, and of course we have the United Nations, established precisely to solve international problems and to seek to improve on the abysmal record of the First and Second World Wars. I know it does a lot of good, but the increasing level of global violence suggests that it needs to be doing much more. Why doesn't it do more? That would be because the big powers, members of the UN Security Council with a veto power over UN action, are prepared to turn a blind eye to cover up the sins and misdeeds of their allies and supporters. No-one has clean hands here. Getting the big powers to do better globally is no easy matter. We must all be willing to put pressure on the big countries and demand action from them. It is not good enough to let them blame this or that rogue state, rogue general or rogue religious leader. We should tell the big powers that we know they can fix the problem if they genuinely want to or, if they cannot, that the world is willing to help out. Being part of the US alliance as we are does not mean that we are obliged to turn a blind eye to misconduct.

We must breathe new life into the 'responsibility to protect' civilians. This doctrine does have the potential to save civilian lives, and we should demand that the UN Security Council uses it when outbreaks of violence occur. This is far superior to coalition-of-the-willing type unilateral action and far superior to fatalism and meekly allowing this violence to continue.

Ewen Jones (Herbert, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Is the motion seconded?

Melissa Parke (Fremantle, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Health) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I second the motion and reserve my right to speak.

Jane Prentice (Ryan, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I have spoken about war and conflict before in this place, about the enormous responsibility of government in making that decision to commit our troops to war, knowing full well that our decision will almost inevitably end with the loss of life of fine young Australians. There are no easy decisions in this space. This motion is framed in pejorative terms, perhaps more concerned about making a political point, but it is an important motion in that it brings the issue of peacekeeping before this parliament.

The United Nations plays an important role in international security and there is generally a benefit for nations confronting conflict in doing so under the cloak of a UN resolution. However, it is important that Australia never relinquishes our right and obligation to make decisions in our national interest. There may well be times where we must act with our allies to protect our interests and our nation and that may include circumstances where there is not a UN resolution in place. Australian governments must not abdicate our responsibility to place Australia's interests first.

I am a great believer in the benefits of effective peacekeeping. It is important to note that Australia has a long history of involvement in peacekeeping operations. As a founding member of the United Nations, we participated in our first peacekeeping mission in Indonesia in 1947. Since then we have provided more than 65,000 personnel to some 50 United Nations peacekeeping missions and are the 12th largest donor to UN regular and peacekeeping budgets. In our region we have effectively provided peacekeeping services in Bougainville, Solomon Islands and East Timor. In Bougainville, the scene of a long and bloody insurrection, the Howard government committed Australian troops to act as part of the Truce Monitoring Group and then the Peace Monitoring Group while they negotiated a peace agreement to bring an end to the conflict.

The challenge of that decision was the fact that Australian troops would be on the ground, unarmed, before the combatants had disarmed. It was a courageous call but, armed with Australian humour and friendliness and supported by our New Zealand and Fijian colleagues, the Bougainville process was remarkably successful. As the time for a referendum on independence approaches, it is well worth acknowledging Australia's contribution and that of our Defence Force personnel and indeed David Irvine and Nick Warner, our high commissioners to Papua New Guinea at that time. Their input was critical to that success.

Similarly, Australia's intervention in Solomon Islands during the times of the so called ethnic tension was critical to bringing an end to a conflict that had the potential to expand beyond the confines of Solomon Islands and into Bougainville, potentially igniting a broad regional conflict. East Timor likewise provided a fine example of Australian involvement in peacekeeping operations in accordance with a UN resolution establishing INTERFET.

It is fair to say that Australia is a strong participant in the United Nation's peacekeeping team. From the standpoint of the United Nations, the responsibility to protect means that if a sovereign nation does not or will not protect its citizens then the international community has the responsibility to do so. This was the basis for the UN involvement in Rwanda and the Balkans. And Australia supports the United Nations in its desire to stamp out crimes like genocide and ethnic cleansing through participation in and support of many 'responsibility to protect' groups.

This motion calls for a further expansion of the responsibility to protect by calling on the United Nations to identify potential trouble spots and establish a peacekeeping force there before the conflict can escalate. This is what we might call a useful pre-emptive strike. This is why I personally support the proposal by the Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade to create a mediation unit within DFAT to look at resolving conflicts before they escalate into war, particularly in our region. This model has been used successfully by Norway in helping to resolve or de-escalate a number of conflicts. Given the generally widely held respect for Australia in the international community, I see no reason Australia should not adopt a similar approach. The other potential role for this mediation unit could be to not only deter the escalation of conflict but also resolve the cause of the conflict, thereby minimising future disputes. I thank the member for Wills for his motion today.

Melissa Parke (Fremantle, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Health) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am grateful to my friend and colleague the member for Wills for bringing this important motion forward for debate. In 2015, there continue to be many serious and dangerous conflicts around the world. Australia is directly involved in some and affected by others. The truth is that we have an interest in supporting peace and reducing conflict wherever it occurs.

The member for Wills is absolutely right to say that there is no security without collective security. History shows, and all our recent experience has confirmed, that without a shared approach and a shared commitment to building a lasting peace conflicts simply tend to morph from one set of antipathies to another. Yesterday's ally by proxy often becomes tomorrow's enemy,; and all those so-called solutions that have involved arming one group to balance the violence of another inevitably prolong the violence and inevitably see the weapons turned against those who supplied them in the first place.

On a number of occasions I have talked about the kinds of structural and procedural changes that can and should be made in Australia to improve our approach to regional and global security and to securing our own national security. These include a greater commitment to active and constructive participation in multilateral fora and associations, especially the United Nations, and in regional multilateral organisations with the UN's oversight, including using the responsibility to protect principle as a vehicle to protect civilians. Necessary change must also involve a preparedness to improve our own decision-making processes, for instance, through the introduction of a war powers act to ensure proper parliamentary consideration of any assignment of Australian forces overseas.

As I noted on 22 September last year in this place, it was profoundly disappointing that Australia, which at the time held a seat on the UN Security Council, did not raise the matter of the global response to ISIS and Middle East security within the council before committing special forces and equipment to the US-led coalition mission, which remains open-ended with no coherent objective or exit strategy.

Just this weekend, Australians have read in the Australian newspaper that in late November last year the Prime Minister raised the idea of unilaterally sending 3,500 Australian ground troops into Iraq. The Prime Minister has denied this report as false and fanciful. Nevertheless, it only reinforces the need for parliamentary involvement in decisions to send Australian troops to war. In my view, it is preposterous in the 21st century that such a significant decision should reside in the hands of a small group within the executive, made up only of the Prime Minister and those he chooses to consult with, under outdated, leftover royal prerogative powers, rather than require a decision taken by the elected representatives of the Australian people as a collective.

The final point in the motion goes to the very worthy recommendation by the Joint Standing Committee for Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade, of which I was a member at the time, in its report Inquiry into Australia’s overseas representation—punching below our weight? of establishing a mediation unit within the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. The committee's recommendation grew out of evidence to the inquiry presented by Professor John Langmore regarding the Norwegian model of peaceful conflict resolution. This is a model whereby a mediation unit within the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs provides good offices and mediation to other states to help prevent conflict, thereby reducing the potential need for peacekeeping forces, reconstruction and emergency aid, and development efforts that inevitably follow an outbreak of conflict. The committee considered that Australia could play an effective role as a regional leader in mediation and conflict prevention in South-East Asia and Pacific regions where mediation is poorly resourced.

While conflict between nations is still too common, it is conflict within nations that represents some of the worst and most protracted harm. We only have to consider recent events in Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq to understand how intrastate or subnational conflict causes great damage. Of course, that damage is not confined to the borders of the countries that suffer civil unrest.

In my former role as Minister for International Development, I was pleased to have the opportunity to be briefed by a research team from the Asia Foundation on their report titled The contested corners of Asia: subnational conflict and international development assistance. The report begins with the sobering observation that:

Subnational conflict is the most widespread, deadly and enduring form of conflict in Asia. Over the past 20 years, there have been 26 subnational conflicts in South and Southeast Asia, affecting half of the countries in this region.

Of course, Australia has played a constructive and effective role in helping to address subnational conflict, as was the case in the Solomon Islands, where our leadership of the coordinated international effort involving 15 contributing nations through the RAMSI mission, with the support of the Pacific Island Forum, helped create peace and stability out of chaos, violence and danger. It was a privilege, as minister, to be present in Honiara in 2013 to mark the 10th anniversary of the RAMSI mission.

As this motion makes clear, it is only through cooperation and shared commitment to peace within and between countries that we in Australia, as part of the global community, can hope to experience and contribute to greater peace in our region and the world over.

Peter Hendy (Eden-Monaro, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the House for the opportunity to speak on this motion moved by the member for Wills on the protection of civilians. I am always very happy to contribute to discussions on international relations, global governance and Australia's role in the world. There are few issues more serious than these, and as a former chief of staff of a former minister for defence and a former principal adviser on foreign affairs to the now Minister for Foreign Affairs, I take them very seriously indeed. Sadly, there are those in this place who either underestimate the gravity of these issues or simply fail to grasp their complexity. I am unsure which category the member for Wills falls into, but the subject is a good deal more sophisticated than this motion would indicate.

Let me outline three key elements pertinent to any discussion of global politics in this place—that is, the UN, the US and us, Australia. Firstly, the United Nations: of course the coalition supports effective action through the United Nations. Australia was a founding member of the United Nations and we have been a strong supporter for nearly seven decades since. Australians played a leading role in one of the United Nations' first peacekeeping operations at Indonesia's birth as an independent nation. Indeed, Australia had the privilege of providing the inaugural presidency of the UN Security Council in 1946. We filled that position again recently, and few would argue with the magnificent job performed by the foreign minister, the member for Curtin, and our Permanent Representative, Gary Quinlan. The unanimous adoption of Security Council resolution 2166, the Australian drafted resolution dealing with the downing of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17, constituted the high-water mark of this period of Australia's diplomacy.

Since its inception, the United Nations has worked for peace, prosperity and the preservation of human rights. But there is another institution that has upheld these three values, which brings me to the second key element: our great and powerful friend the United States of America. This relationship can cause those opposite some discomfort. We in the coalition experience no such discomfort. We understand the unique role the United States has taken on since the Second World War, we understand the unparalleled burden placed on them and we understand the tremendous sacrifice and terrible cost. The role that the United States has played in establishing and maintaining the postwar world order has been uniquely powerful and pervasive. It is a role that we should never take for granted; for, if not the United States, then who? No other country has the capacity, the geostrategic circumstances, the inclination or the habit of upholding world order. Absent that engagement and absent that leadership, the world would look very different than it does today.

That brings me to the third key element: Australia's role. Lowy Institute Executive Director, Dr Michael Fullilove, caused quite a stir last year when he called for a larger Australia. Dr Fullilove's argument is that far from punching above our weight, as is often claimed, Australia punches at, and sometimes, below our weight. He reminded us that Australia is the 12th largest economy in the world, that we are the fifth richest people and that we are not a super heavyweight but we are certainly not a flyweight—and that is true.

Before we decide what weight division we are in, we need to define the reason we want to be in the ring in the first place. For me, the answer is a simple but extremely powerful one: as Australians, we are the beneficiaries of centuries of hard-won liberal democratic thinking, institutions, traditions and structures. The world order that has emerged from the horror of the Second World War has delivered unprecedented peace, prosperity and freedom. In recent times, our role as a defender of those institutions, through our support of both the United Nations and the United States, has increased. But the false dichotomy of unilateralism and multilateralism is a straw man. It has never been a reality. It has certainly never been a zero sum choice. The nuance-challenged binary presented by those opposite does not reflect the complexity and multiplicity of international action and international governance. Australia can, has and will continue to be a steadfast supporter of, and participant in, collective security through the United Nations. Australia can, has and will continue to act in coalitions of like-minded countries to defend our common interests and common values. It is what we have always done. I thank the chamber for the opportunity to speak.

Tim Watts (Gellibrand, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak in support of this motion on the protection of civilians, and I congratulate the member for Wills for raising this important topic. At a time when Australia's international aid budget continues to be the plaything of the current government, the member for Willis' reminder of the importance of international cooperation for peace and stability is refreshing. Our world is changing, and so too must our responses to the challenges we face. Our world is more interconnected, borders are more porous, international travel is cheaper and the threats we face transcend any single nation's control.

Our engagement with the United Nations is indicative of a world view that favours multilateral action and consensus building for collective security. It is clear that the pressures we face are international in nature. The spectre of climate change remains ever present. The danger posed by international extremist groups is ever growing. Interstate and intrastate conflicts threaten to undermine the stability of entire regions, including aspects of our own. These problems cannot be solved by any one nation acting unilaterally; they require collective solutions. The United Nations provides us with the platform for collective action that these complex issues require. This is particularly the case for international interventions and peacekeeping missions, which this motion speaks to.

The United Nations has deployed peacekeeping missions in hotspots throughout the world for many, many years, and areas such as Syria and Kosovo have benefited significantly. Through the involvement of the UN, many conflicts have been resolved and humanitarian crises averted, saving many lives in the process. Conflicts within countries and civil unrest within nations have also been mediated through engagement with the UN. In this respect, the Responsibility to Protect—an evolving and emerging norm of international law—states that a nation's sovereignty is predicated on its ability to protect its citizens from atrocities and genocide. The Responsibility to Protect principle, shaped and championed by former Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs Gareth Evans, was designed to promote collective action to prevent or punish genocide.

Australia has used its two-year term as one of the non-permanent members of the United Nations Security Council to promote this principle to the great benefit of both the international community and Australia's international interests. Despite this, the now Prime Minister, while in opposition, criticised Labor's campaign to win the seat on the Security Council. In 2012, the current Prime Minister attacked the then Prime Minister Julia Gillard for her efforts, saying:

Our prime minister should not be swanning around in New York talking to Africans …

He even referred to a non-permanent seat that Australia was vying for as the 'bronze medal' of the United Nations. Yet Australia has been able to use its standing in the UN to create a better and safer world. One of the ways that we have used our position on the Security Council is by using the Responsibility to Protect, championed, as I said, by former Foreign Minister Gareth Evans, as the principle to guide international action in Syria. Australia helped lead the way in getting the Security Council to intervene there and so enable humanitarian assistance to be delivered, even when nation states did not want their borders crossed. Australia led the charge in putting pressure on Russia in the aftermath of the downing of Malaysian flight MH17, which other members have also alluded to in this debate. Australia has also put North Korean's humanitarian crisis firmly on the agenda as a permanent part of future Security Council discussions. These are real achievements that are built upon a sense of collective security and collective action. This is what it means to pursue change in the 21st century in the international fora.

In a similar respect, Australia's defence policy should not simply be about unilateral defence; it should also be about engagement with our international partners. This motion calls for the implementation of the recommendations of the Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade regarding the establishment of a mediation unit within the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. Australia can assist by providing resources and knowledge, as well as by engaging in conflicts as both a mediator and a legitimate third party. We have shown this before in our own region with the work of former Foreign Minister Gareth Evans. He worked to establish a durable solution to the conflict within the state of Cambodia. It is a very good example of the role that Australia can play in this respect. Australia could be of particular importance in the Southeast Asia and Pacific regions by playing an international mediation and peacekeeping role. Unfortunately, mediation has been poorly resourced in this region in the past and, as this motion alludes to, we could do much more in this space.

One of the necessary preconditions to effective development is peaceful resolution of conflict. We talk a lot about the objectives of our international aid program; but, without collective security and stability within these nations, economic development—something that we can all agree on is a worthy end in itself—is a long way off. In that respect, I commend the motion moved by the member for Wills to the House and recommend it to the government.

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

I appreciate the opportunity to speak on the motion moved by the member for Wills on the protection of civilians. I had prepared a speech, but I thought that I would set that aside and speak a little bit more about my in-depth feelings on this motion. There is no doubt about the member for Wills's history with regard to his view on what happened in Iraq, and obviously this is the key driver behind this motion as well. I would say that when you look back upon history, it is always so much clearer with the hindsight and clarity of years past.

I would remind everyone that, when we think about what it was like back at the time of the invasion of Iraq in the Second Gulf War, when Saddam Hussein was running Iraq, there was a resistance and an obfuscation of attempts to identify what these weapons of mass destruction were. There was a lot of thought that they were there, but the question was whether there should be more time or whether there should be immediate action. There were very few people saying that these weapons just did not exist anymore. Ask the Kurds, ask even his own people, about whether chemical weapons were used. The reality was that Saddam Hussein had a history and a track record of using weapons of mass destruction and chemical weapons. So there were lots of reasons to suspect—and, as is well documented, as even the then foreign affairs spokesperson, Mr Kevin Rudd, also said—there were weapons of mass destruction. So it was not as though they just did not exist at all.

When I see motions that talk about adventurism and that denigrate what happened as some form of recklessness or some form of shooting from the hip—a fun moment, 'Let's go and have a little bit of a party in Iraq'—I just do not get that at all. I do not think that there has been a government in this country's history, and I cannot perceive that there will be a government in the future of this country, who would take our soldiers to war, take our forces to war and support a war without being gravely concerned and giving grave consideration. I think that it is a cheap shot, and I think that it is a shooting-from-the-hip sort of allegation. Obviously there were debates as to whether it was the right thing to do. In hindsight, there were no weapons of mass destruction found, but there was certainly evidence leading up to that point that they could well exist. On that basis, action was taken.

When we look around at what the UN has achieved over time, there have been plenty of good things done by the UN, and there is no doubt about that. It is, however, a very big bureaucracy. I think that some of the troubles with the UN are the processes that they have. As the member for Wills has already clearly identified—and we have common ground here—when the permanent five members of the Security Council have the ability to veto action by the UN, whether it is a peacekeeping mission or whatever, then we start seeing the national interests of those five key players, the historical players from the victory at the end of the Second World War, and those sorts of influences starting to come into the decision making.

We have something like 130,000 peacekeepers currently deployed around the world on 16 peacekeeping missions. There is no doubt the world is a more dangerous place these days. When you look at some of the things that have occurred and some of the people out there—when I look at what is happening with IS or Daesh—I do not blame their existence on the decision to go to Iraq for the Second Gulf War. I do not blame it on that. I blame that on an Islamist history where this sort of violent destruction of opponents and disbelievers is what they have done for 1,000 years. When we really look at what has happened more recently, the decision to abandon Iraq, leave it and allow the sectarianism that took place is one of the problems that Iraq has had, and that is the legacy we are leaving. The problem was a decision to pull out too early without leaving guidance to that country.

Alan Griffin (Bruce, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I commend the member for Wills for bringing this motion forward. It raises some significant issues about the nature of the operation of the United Nations and the whole question about how nations can work together to try to create peace, often in parts of the world where peace is about the last thing on their minds. History, cultures and clashes which are very varied and very complex in their nature create circumstances which cause real problems for the international community in how to respond.

Some of the things that have been mentioned already, and my figures may be slightly at odds with some that have been mentioned, highlight the size of the problem. According to information from September of last year with regard to the United Nations, there were 16 current peacekeeping operations, 13 political missions, over 104,000 uniformed personnel from 128 member states—including just under 90,000 troops, 12½ thousand police and in excess of 1,700 military observers—and just under 19,000 civilian personnel.

The total number of personnel across those 16 peacekeeping missions was at that stage just short of 123,000 and climbing. If you go back over the last few years, in 2009 there were 121,700, in 2012 there were 120,900, in 2011 there were 121,600 and in 2012 there were 114,800. There was a decrease around that time that related to some improvements in circumstances in Haiti, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Lebanon and Timor. Resources per annum are about US$8 billion, as I understand it.

What this highlights, I think, is that the size and the volume of the problems being faced is huge. There is a need for complex relationships and partnerships across a range of different organisations, whether it be the World Health Organization, the UNHCR, UNICEF and member state groups that relate to particular regions. It is a complex operation.

The other thing is that, when we talk about peacekeeping, what do we really mean? It is actually pretty simplistic to look at it in just those terms. There is the issue of conflict prevention, peacemaking and then, on from that, peace enforcement and peacekeeping, which overlap. Add to that the whole issue of post-conflict peace building. What this says is that you really have to have a multipurpose approach across a range of disciplines to ensure that you give some of these communities a chance to get beyond the violence and into the situation where they can get peace, which gives the community the opportunity to grow into the future.

UN peacekeeping is now bigger than ever before and growing. It is more diverse and it is more active. It requires, as I said, engagement with many more actors, and the fact is peacekeeping operations alone are not sufficient to deal with the issues we are talking about. There are a range of challenges which go into the future as well. Firstly, there is a question about the potential for operational overstretch and the risk of mission failure and capability mismatch. That goes to making sure you are meeting the needs of the conflict you are facing.

Others have spoken a bit about the UN and the circumstances they face. The UN in my view is an organisation that tries to do a range of tasks and does some of them well, most of them badly—but, frankly, no-one else does them. That is the point that people who criticise the UN have to remember: no-one else does some of the things that the UN does in the places the UN does it. We expect them to be the answer, often in a situation where we do not even know what the question is.

When we look back over the history of some of the engagements that have occurred—and I will use Afghanistan and Iraq as an example—I think there is no doubt that there was at times a complete misunderstanding of the nature of what needed to be achieved, of what the circumstances were. That led to circumstances such as going in in a manner which, in my view, probably on certain occasions was not the best way to go and leaving conflict zones at times when in fact there was a need to stay. I think that can be pointed out particularly in the first departure from Afghanistan and, arguably, around the question of Iraq.

They are complex problems, and that is why it is important to look at the recommendations from the Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade on establishing a unit which would, from our perspective, allow the development of a more complex understanding of the issues faced. It is about coordinating our aid, about coordinating our responses and about providing the best opportunities to ensure our aid and our activity actually gets a result.

Ewen Jones (Herbert, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The time allotted for this debate has expired. The debate is adjourned and the resumption of the debate will be made an order of the day for the next sitting.

Sitting suspended from 13 : 30 to 16 : 00