Bob Brown (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

What a pathetic statement from the government. The minister has the arrogance to say that these are matters that should be dealt with by the government. In other words, the parliament should be disempowered from debating issues of international significance. Of course, that is a failure to understand the democratic system. Let me remind the government that it is the executive but it is not the parliament of this country, and nor does it have ownership of what should be debated or should not be debated—thank goodness—in the Australian parliament. This motion is to welcome the news that the President of the United States, Barack Obama, will be meeting with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of the Tibetan people in exile, in the coming weeks.

The difficulty here, to be blunt about this, is that when His Holiness was in Australia in December, while the Leader of the Opposition, Mr Abbott, met with him and I, as the Leader of the Greens met with him and introduced him to 3,000 or 4,000 people in Hobart, the Prime Minister of Australia declined to meet with the Dalai Lama. The reason for that is not that there is not respect for the Dalai Lama, as the minister says, but that there is a cowardice, a lack of courage, to simply say to the Chinese government, to the regime in Beijing, ‘We will not be coerced into having our relationships with people around the world dictated by you.’ Instead of that, the government, the Prime Minister, acquiesced and failed to meet His Holiness. Barack Obama is doing the right thing and that should be welcomed. That is what this motion is about.

Question put:

That the motion (Senator Bob Brown’s) be agreed to.