Julian Hill (Bruce, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

There is now a karaoke song in China, popular with lower middle-class workers, exhorting people to go to Sihanoukville, Cambodia, where dreams are made and you can do whatever you want. It's like the fantasies of the wild, wild West of old—casinos, booze, guns, riches, women, you name it. But the promised dreams are not the reality. Sihanoukville is the worst place I have ever been. The roads are clogged and destroyed, the air and water is polluted, gangsters rule and the people are miserable. Locals have had their land stolen by the government to give to rich foreigners and then have been unable to find jobs when the foreign businesses arrive.

What is happening in Sihanoukville is now spreading across Cambodia. Hun Sen, who has ruled Cambodia for 30 years, is so desperate to stay in power that he is selling out his country, giving away the Cambodian people's sovereignty to foreign countries and pocketing the cash. Twenty to 30 per cent of Cambodia's coastline has been given to Chinese companies in the form of land concessions, including port facilities in Sihanoukville, which everyone knows are likely to have a military purpose.

On 23 October 1991, 28 years ago, the Paris peace accords were signed by the four combatant factions in the conflict and 19 other countries. Through this historic agreement, Australia and the world made a promise to the Cambodian people to stand up for human rights, peace and democracy, but, 28 years on, the world has failed to keep its promise. Instead, Hun Sen's regime has attacked human rights, killed democracy, given away the Cambodian people's sovereignty, accumulated secret wealth overseas for his family and undermined prosperity in our region.

I travelled at my expense to Cambodia in August this year with my friend Victorian MP Meng Heang Tak to see the situation firsthand. We met with human rights organisations, independent trade unions, victims of the regime and community leaders. I mustn't say who we met with, to protect their safety lest they be harassed or jailed by the regime, but what I saw truly shocked me, both as a friend of the Cambodian people and as an Australian concerned for a peaceful and stable region. The appalling deterioration in the human rights situation in Cambodia is well documented by Human Rights Watch and by the UN special rapporteur on human rights. But I saw it firsthand.

Draconian new laws undermine trade unions and NGOs, restricting freedom of assembly and the ability of ordinary people to get together in any form. There are poor families whose land was stolen by Hun Sen's government. Shamefully, Australia's ANZ Bank financed a syndicate that stole land, and still has not paid compensation. Government critics and democracy activists, such as the inspiring Dr Kem Ley, are murdered. As someone said to me, the government killed the chicken to scare the monkeys. Street protesters are effectively banned and ordinary citizens are harassed by the police just for speaking up on social media. A tuktuk driver in Sihanoukville, when I was there, was called in by the police simply for talking to a journalist and saying things that were critical of the impact of China's Belt and Road Initiative and investments on ordinary Cambodians. Astoundingly, the police made him apologise for bringing the BRI into disrepute. I've always tried to be open-minded on the BRI, but having seen the reality in Sihanoukville I'm forced to rethink my position. Human rights organisations are scared. The workers there are so brave but pleaded with us to keep speaking out publicly, internationally, about what's happening.

The state of democracy in Cambodia was even worse than I thought. The opposition party was dissolved before the last election. Hun Sen won 125 seats out of 125 seats. The opposition leader, Kem Sokha, is still in detention. Political activists are unjustly detained every day. Sam Rainsy's planned return on 9 November is met with threats. It's not so much a one-party state now as a one-family sate, because Hun Sen is trying to become the Robert Mugabe of South-East Asia.

But the big story, the big thing that has shifted in the last 10 to 20 years, is the impact of Chinese influence. I don't mean this as anti-China rhetoric. I've been the chair of the Parliamentary Friends of China and I believe passionately that Australia needs to invest in a strong and productive relationship with the PRC. But I must be honest and say that I don't see what Hun Sen has let China do in Cambodia as positive. I commend the work of Charlie Edel, who has written on the strategic implications of Chinese investment. It may be couched as BRI, but it seems that Hun Sen is allowing the development of naval and air facilities to facilitate Chinese military planning. The same salami-slicing tactics that the world saw in the South China Sea are happening here.

What is happening in Sihanoukville is spreading elsewhere in Cambodia. Indeed, as one person said, 'Don't be fooled: Sihanoukville is the big shiny mess over there to distract people from the broader plan on the fringes.' We heard disturbing accounts, which have not been reported in Australia, of over 170,000 hectares of land in strategic locations given to Chinese interests up and down the Thai and Vietnamese borders. Many people we spoke to talked of 'Chinese only areas' in these concessions off limits for ordinary Cambodians, of men with 'short military style haircuts' though not in uniform, in places like Bavet and Preah Vihea. Should the suggestion of quasi-military facilities in border areas be true, then the strategic implications for Thailand and Vietnam are profound, and ASEAN countries would rightly be concerned. It is not in the interests of a peaceful, stable region to see Cambodia drift away from their historically non-aligned position into authoritarianism. Even factions in Hun Sen's government are upset by these shifts and the imbalance.

We also heard of young CPP leaders been flown to China for training by the Chinese Communist Party; of the lackey employer-run unions being mentored in the Chinese state union system; and of surveillance technology from China being exported—cameras on traffic lights and monitoring of people on the internet. And people talk despairingly of the takeover of independent media outlets, shut down or taken over by government critics.

But the question for Australia and countries that promised in 1991 to support peace and democracy is: what, if anything, can be done now? Well, first we have to be honest with ourselves and admit that the current approach is not working. Australia's current approach is to just keep talking, but this is insufficient. You build diplomatic capital to achieve outcomes, yet Australia can't point to anything much, aside from a disgraceful refugee deal. The Minister for Foreign Affairs and DFAT need to get real. In colloquial terms, Hun Sen is taking the piss.

It's time to press reset and seek a coordinated approach by like-minded nations. And the 1991 Paris Peace Accords are the place to start. The accords are of continuing legal and moral relevance. The UN special rapporteur on human rights in 2011 stated that the agreements will remain relevant until their vision is a reality for all Cambodians. Of course Hun Sen is desperately trying to erase the accords from history, describing them as a ghost. In fact, tomorrow is the last public holiday to commemorate their signing; Hun Sen's abolishing it next year. And in a moment of peak irony he calls the accords 'foreign interference' while he sells Cambodia's coastline and sovereignty to China.

But the accords contain a formal mechanism in article 29 to bring together countries in the event of serious violations of human rights—and it is past time that this clause was triggered. There's no doubt that the threshold test of serious violations has been met. Labor's great foreign minister Gareth Evans led us in 1991, and Australia could do so again by writing to the UN Secretary-General and to signatories to trigger article 29. Formal consultations would see signatories coming together to discuss the status of compliance and to devise pathways to urgently re-engage with their commitments. This is a legitimate first step to increase international pressure on Cambodia's government, and would force countries to declare their hand and be accountable.

Countries who seek to honour their commitments can then devise a coordinated approach, and I'll just sketch out a few of the elements which I think such an approach could include. First, tell the truth. Shine light on the reality now in international fora and to the Cambodian people. Australia, and others, have to get back into the information game using Radio Australia; invest in Radio Free Asia, shortwave radio, social media. Second, more public diplomacy. Australia has a lot of soft power in Cambodia, as do the USA and other partners. Third, invest in more people-to-people diplomacy. It's relatively cheap. Fourth, carrots: invest more in diplomatic and aid efforts. Cambodia will never be the centre of focus for Australia or the US or Japan, but it should be a central concern for Thailand, Vietnam and those immediately around it, in India and so on. Fifth—sticks. Australia should coordinate actions, including considering targeted sanctions against key members of the CPP regime involved directly in human rights abuses and suppression of democracy—as the USA has already done. Hun Sen's cronies do not want their assets and wealthy lifestyles in Australia and other Western countries threatened. And, sixth, we need to push back harder on foreign interference in Australia by the Cambodian People's Party to protect Australian Cambodian people from the CPP's propaganda and threats.

Action is now urgently needed and principled nations, I hope like Australia, must take a stronger stand against this authoritarian takeover. The Morrison government talks a big game, but it's not good enough to just keep saying 'all options are on the table' and yet do nothing. Our ambassador is good, but her instructions appear weak. The Prime Minister has to move past the disgraceful refugee deal with Cambodia and drinking champagne with the dictator. If he fails to act, he has to explain why. People will be entitled to ask, 'What were you doing, Prime Minister, when democracy was dying in Cambodia? Why did you fail to act?'