Michael Ronaldson (Victoria, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Veterans' Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

I am happy to show it to you, Mr Acting Deputy President, and I seek leave to table it.

Leave granted.

Thank you, Mr Acting Deputy President. The caption on Time reads: ‘What happens if we leave Afghanistan: Aisha, 18, had her nose and ears cut off last year on orders from the Taliban because she fled abusive in-laws.’ If that is not bad enough, the Taliban has been attacking girls schools throughout the country with poison gas. That photograph, in my view, epitomises the barbarity that we will force upon those women and young girls in Afghanistan if we take the move that Senator Brown wants us to adopt. It is absolutely intolerable, in my view, that we could put anyone at risk of a repetition of what is on the front page of the Time magazine. What Senator Brown and his Greens party colleagues are effectively advocating is open slather for jihadi barbarity. That, in my view, is just completely unacceptable. They are effectively declaring open season on Afghan women and anyone else who believes in modernity over medievalism. Currently, the Afghan government is far from perfect, and of course more must be done to protect Afghan women from domestic abuse. But, while Hamid Karzai builds schools for girls, the Taliban destroys them. It is as simple as that.

In closing, Senator Brown may want to run, but this is a threat from which we simply cannot hide. Events such as 9/11, Bali, the London subway and the Madrid rail attacks all show that if we do not take the fight to them they will bring it to us. In Afghanistan we are fighting enemies whose determination to drag the globe into medieval darkness is only matched by their ruthlessness in achieving that goal. They represent a veiled form of fascism that must be opposed and not appeased. In that regard, we would do well to remember Winston Churchill’s quote that ‘an appeaser is someone who feeds the crocodile in the hope of being eaten last’. Charles Lindbergh was on a fool’s errand on that September night back in 1941, and I believe that the Greens are on a similar flight of folly in this debate. I speak to express my determined support for Australia’s war effort in Afghanistan. I thank the chamber.