Marise Payne (NSW, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for COAG) Share this | Hansard source

I want to begin by acknowledging all those who have taken part in this debate in both places. It is a very important undertaking by the parliament and one which I think is timely, particularly with regard to recent discussions both in Australia and elsewhere.

It is history which shows Australian support for the initial foray into Afghanistan and against the Taliban regime—at the time, a move with bipartisan support. In the wake of the September 11 attacks and the Taliban regime’s harbouring of the al-Qaeda masterminds of those egregious crimes, the view held here and elsewhere was that the continued existence of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan posed a threat to both international and, in Australia’s view, national security. We had an ANZUS alliance partner who had been attacked on their home soil. Australia’s obligation to support the United States in taking swift action against al-Qaeda and the Taliban regime that harboured them was a very important obligation.

This was an engagement directed at the ruling Taliban regime, an unelected regime that not only harboured the perpetrators of the 9-11 attacks and other terrorist acts but whose hardline rule exacted an appalling toll on the history and the culture and the people of Afghanistan. I have spoken before—long before being in this chamber, ironically—of the devastating impact of the Taliban on the lives of women and girls in Afghanistan in particular. I spoke in this chamber, some years ago now, of the completely without merit, completely obscene destruction of the historic Buddhist statues at Bamiyan by the Taliban for no other reason, really, than that they could.

It is important to remember aspects of those debates, I think, and the debates which many of us have taken part in in other places, as we sit here, nine years later, debating Australia’s continued involvement in Afghanistan. I am not sure who, or how many of us for that matter, would have envisaged the duration of our commitment and whether it would still be ongoing in 2010. I think, to that end, it is understandable that public attitudes and support for Australia’s continued involvement in Afghanistan have experienced changes over that time. As I said at the beginning, I think it is important that we are having this debate here and now about staying the course. It is an important debate, which is healthy in a great democracy like ours, a democracy that so many others do not have the privilege to enjoy.

I know that several members of the parliament have taken the opportunity to express their very strong reservations about ongoing Australian involvement in Afghanistan. Their views are genuinely held and passionately argued. However, they are not views that I can share. I could not support the abandonment of the people of Afghanistan and, in Australia’s case, of the Oruzgan province specifically to the fate of a resurgent, pre-eminent Taliban. We have that insight already. It is not an attractive picture. It is about violence. It is about lawlessness. It is about extremism. It is about hate. It is about anarchy. It would certainly come back, should Australia and other nations that are supporting efforts in Afghanistan elect to withdraw, in my view.

I think it is extremely important to reiterate at almost every opportunity when issues of this nature are under discussion that the deployment of Australian troops is never a decision made lightly. It is not made lightly in terms of the conscience of those members of government who make it. It is not made lightly by the leadership of the Defence Force who advise on it. Participation in those deployments is not taken lightly by those men and women of the ADF who are fully engaged in the task. It is also not a decision made lightly in terms of the very real costs of fine and proud Australian soldiers. They are costs which are immeasurable. They do not appear on a balance sheet anywhere, except perhaps a balance sheet in the hearts and minds of their families and friends. For those who have given their lives in this cause, for their families and their friends, for their mates who still remain and do the job, we must, I think, note and record that these are not decisions made lightly.

I have spent many years in this place working on defence issues. That work has in fact taken me to Afghanistan during the period of Australian deployment to see for myself some of the work being done there.

I have seen the good, the bad and the singularly unattractive of the Australian defence forces, but, through all of that, I have great respect for those who serve, for their leadership, who grapple every single day with these issues, and for the decisions that they make in that process.

I would say, though, that the costs that you can add up, the costs that you can put on a balance sheet, are in many ways very concerning. If you look at the United States budget for the Department of Defense, for example, you see something like in excess of $335 billion to date has been spent on the direct costs of the war, with a further $120 billion requested for the 2011 financial year. In comparison, the Australian government, whilst spending billions of our own dollars, has made a similarly important financial contribution for us. But let us put it in perspective, with consideration of the amount of money that the US State Department has spent to fund reconstruction and aid across conflicts like Afghanistan and, in this case, also Iraq: $59 billion. To put that into perspective, more than twice as much money has been spent funding military engagement in Afghanistan in the last 12 months than has been spent by the State Department on aid and reconstruction efforts during the entire nine-year period of conflict.

So, while I absolutely support our engagement in Afghanistan, I do think that it is important that we consider that balance or, some would say, imbalance. I think there is an issue to be addressed by those of us engaged in the decision-making process politically, in this country and elsewhere, when the size of the commitment of prosecuting the war is so large and the size of the commitment of prosecuting the peace is so small. I will talk further about prosecuting the peace, so to speak, in a moment.

I believe that we should finish what we set out to do, that we should assist and support the people in Afghanistan in achieving what they are currently not able to achieve, which is a government with some stability, a government with some solid and transparently operating institutions and rules, and a society which comes as close to free and fair as they can get. There may be some who see those ambitions as perhaps unreal or overly ambitious, who think that that is not possible and question whether our efforts thus far are worth while.

While some are lost in the sea of pessimism which surrounds our engagement in Afghanistan, there are some very worthy organisations which contain very committed individuals on the ground who are doing very valuable work for the people in Afghanistan. That is over and above own government agencies like AusAID and the Australian Federal Police, for example. There are Australian NGOs currently engaged in Afghanistan. And I note that, in terms of engagement in this debate, the Australian Council for International Development wrote to members and senators recently in regard to these Afghan and Australian civilian and military aid issues. I do not agree with everything they have written, not by a long shot, and I do not agree with all of the premises on which they operate, but I do think that their raising of our awareness and hopefully our interest in some of this work in Afghanistan is a very important contribution to the discussion. Having said I do not agree with them, I expect to hear from ACFID again quite soon! We will see how that goes.

Organisations that do that sort of work do not always receive the sort of recognition they deserve. They are carrying out vital grassroots work, though, with the people of Afghanistan. As I said, they are building the peace, if you like. Whether it is World Vision, Oxfam, Habitat for Humanity, the Fred Hollows Foundation or CARE, the sort of support they are providing—backed up by our military presence—would not be provided, in my view, if we were not there. Realistically, it would be difficult for them to continue in the face of a completely resurgent and in-control Taliban, for example.

Afghanistan at the moment has one of the most poorly resourced education systems in the world—and in fact, as most of us are aware, the formal education of girls was effectively nonexistent under the Taliban—with an adult literacy rate at less than 30 per cent. CARE Australia is one of the organisations who are determined to assist in turning that around. They are running a community-organised primary education program which is currently endeavouring to meet the primary education needs of over 3,000 students—most importantly, 70 per cent of whom are girls—with ambitions to reach many thousands more. They are also operating an innovative program which targets the social and economic reintegration of the many thousands of displaced women in Afghanistan. Their support services cover a very wide array of roles. They include things like vocational training, microfinance—I know many members of this chamber have a longstanding interest in the effective use of microfinance—and community outreach activities. I think that they make a contribution, at the same time that I think our military engagement makes a contribution, to the development of sound institutions and to the observation of the rule of law, which in fact will not develop unassisted, and I believe that we should do as much as we can to help this process both developmentally and, in terms of security issues, militarily.

In Australia and, most particularly, in our very robust parliaments, I think we often take for granted the opportunity to speak our minds. Freedom of speech might not be something which is explicitly enshrined in the Australian Constitution, but I think it is a pretty cherished and fiercely protected right in this country. We do have the freedom to speak our minds, to argue the case, to argue against authority, to champion a cause or basically just to tell people our view, usually without fear of persecution—unless it is a ‘very important’ debate about football or something like that! But it takes courage to speak out on issues we feel strongly about, especially when we know powerful forces disagree with us. Having the courage to speak up for what we believe in in the face of intransigent power is, I think, admirable. Doing so in the knowledge that it can mean death is probably beyond my capacity to describe, but let us start with ‘truly courageous’.

I want to speak very briefly in my concluding remarks today about one Afghan woman and to use the phrase ‘truly courageous’ to describe her. Her name is Dr Sima Samar. Many of you here may have met Sima Samar over the years on the couple of occasions that she has had the opportunity to visit this region and our country. She is the head of the Independent Afghanistan Human Rights Commission. She has made a lifetime of risking her life for her beliefs. As a medical doctor, she was forced to flee first Kabul and then Afghanistan entirely when her husband was arrested by the regime of the time. She fled to Pakistan where she established the Shuhada Organization, a body dedicated to the provision of health care for Afghan women and girls who, like her, had been forced to flee their homes due to violence and persecution.

Her full story is complex and distressing. I have heard her tell it personally and it is a deeply moving story and a deeply distressing story. Ultimately in 2002 she returned to Afghanistan to take up a role as Minister for Women’s Affairs in the Afghan Transitional Administration before being forced to resign her post. Her crime, her offence, at the time was public questioning of certain laws in an interview with a foreign newspaper. In fact, not only was she forced to resign but she faced death threats and she faced ongoing harassment. A group of religious extremists went so far as to take out an advertisement in a local paper labelling her the Salman Rushdie of Afghanistan.

When I met her at a conference of representatives of national human rights institutions in Fiji—it was a very obscure place and time to meet a woman of her calibre—I was struck by her courage and her tenacity in standing up for those without a voice in Afghanistan, for championing unpopular causes like women’s rights and reform of sharia law in the face of what seems from the outside to be almost insurmountable odds.

For me, the war in Afghanistan and our military engagement in Afghanistan are not just about the many men and women I know personally who have served on behalf of Australia and continue to do so. It is not just about endeavouring as best as we are able to remove the Taliban from their engagement in this area. It is about security, it is about human rights and it is about peace. It is about supporting the Sima Samars of this world who do so selflessly risk their own lives to better the lives of those around them. I do not believe that our work in Afghanistan is complete until people like her no longer have to risk their lives to make their voices heard, and I do not believe that is a forlorn hope.