Janet Rice (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

[by video link] A tragedy, an appalling tragedy, is the only way to describe what is going on in Afghanistan, which we focus on today. People around the world, including Australians, are shocked, upset and heartbroken and want to know how it has come to this—that, after 20 years of war, the Taliban are back in control and their brutal regime, which the world had hoped was defeated 20 years ago, is back. We need to reflect on the lives that have been lost—the tens of thousands of Afghan people and the 41 Australian Defence Force personnel—and the suffering. So much suffering, so much sacrifice, and it's come to this.

Make no mistake: the Taliban is back, but the newer, softer Taliban—the Taliban who do media conferences—is a lie. We have already heard enough credible reports to know that: the credible reports of them going house to house, executing Hazara people on the spot; of them telling us that the rights of women will be subject to sharia law; and of 10- and 12-year-old girls being married off to soldiers. We have seen footage of the brutality of the Taliban fighters patrolling outside the airport, bashing people with rifle butts. I myself heard a direct account of the people in that maelstrom, that crowd at the airport over the weekend. One person who I was engaged with was bashed by a rifle butt, pushed by Taliban fighters into razor wire and thrown to the ground and had his glasses broken. We know of people who have been evicted from their houses, people living in fear and terror for their lives. We know of Hazara people and others knowing that they are at extreme risk of death just because of who they are.

My office, along with other offices, has been inundated with people—Australians and people from around the world—who are so fearful for the safety of their loved ones, families, friends and colleagues in Afghanistan. My office has been inundated by the emails and phone messages from thousands of Australians who want our government to be doing more. My staff, the staff of our Greens offices, the staff in other MPs' offices, so many of us as members of parliament and so many public servants have worked incredibly long hours over the last week and the weekend, supporting people and helping them work out what to do. We've been advocating to the Department of Home Affairs, advocating to DFAT and advocating through ministerial offices to have visas and applications expedited and for people to be evacuated. Many of the people on the lists that our Greens offices have put together are partners of Australian permanent residents or immediate family members of Australians. Some have had visa applications in to come to Australia for up to two years. They're people who should have been able to come to Australia long before now. Others are human rights campaigners, women's rights campaigners, democracy campaigners, journalists and targeted people, especially Hazara people and other ethnic and religious minorities. They are people who have worked with our government and with NGOs. They've worked in the field with our defence forces, as interpreters, support workers and aid workers.

Over the last weekend, over 20 of the people who our Greens offices had been directly engaged with and were supporting—it was such a relief—managed to get through the gauntlet of the massive crowds outside Hamid Karzai airport. They managed to survive the Taliban attacks on people outside the airport. They managed to get on the list for people to be evacuated. They were approved for travel to Australia and are now on their way to start new lives here.

I personally spent the weekend following the progress of a group of 11 of these folk. They had been brought to my attention by an Australian friend who had been working on an aid project in Mazar-i-Sharif, in the north of Afghanistan, since the beginning of the year. She managed to get out of Afghanistan herself, fleeing in a very dangerous journey, just over a month ago. These were people that she had worked with, who she knew were at extreme risk. She had worked over the last week to put in applications for humanitarian visas to Australia for them. This group of 11 people was typical of the people at risk in Afghanistan and typical of the people in that crowd of tens of thousands outside the airport. They were Hazara people and other targeted ethnic minorities, people who would be at extreme risk of execution by the Taliban. They were human rights and democracy activists and people who have worked with foreign governments and NGOs. They included a family with a four-year-old and a four-month-old. They included a 23-year-old woman who had the audacity to be training to be a pilot. She was one of only 40 women out of 1,000 pilots in the Afghan defence forces and did not want to have her future determined by the brutal repression of women that the Taliban will be imposing—that is, if she even survived. This group had direct experience of the brutality of the Taliban. Some had personal experience from 20 years ago of the massacres by the Taliban, the public executions by stoning, the whippings, the dismembered hands hanging from a tree in the centre of a roundabout, the harassment and the abuse of women.

This group that I was focused on over the weekend were just a drop in the ocean of the people seeking to flee. In my mind, I spent all weekend in Kabul with them. In my mind, I was there with the tens of thousands of people in this maelstrom of humanity outside the airport. Every one of them was there because they are in fear of their lives under the Taliban. This group that I was following spent all of Saturday and Sunday in the awful crowd outside the airport gate. It was 40 degrees. There was no shade. There was no room to even sit down. I could not bear to think of a four-year-old and a four-month-old in those conditions, but they had no option. If they stayed behind, the threat of death was just so real.

I want to thank Ministers Payne and Hawke and their offices for their engagement over the weekend on all the cases that our offices brought to their attention through this last week. In particular, I want to thank them for what is a very wonderful outcome for this group of 11 people. At 2 am last night—eight o'clock their time—I got word that this group of 11 that I'd been following had been permitted to enter the airport and were now waiting for emergency visas to be issued so that they could be evacuated to Australia to begin new lives. I am still crying tears of joy and amazement that they are now safe. I think of four-year-old Daniel and four-month-old Diana beginning their journey to Australia, beginning their quintessential multicultural Australian journey, growing up as Australians in that tradition that our nation has been built on.

Every one of the 450 people Australia has evacuated so far has a powerful story to tell, but so do thousands and thousands more. We need to be doing more. We need to be accepting more than the 3,000 people that our government has committed to—3,000 people who are only being accepted as part of our existing refugee quota. Since we have settled only 8,500 people from Afghanistan since 2013, it is not a number that I would be proud of. And our government should be hanging their heads in shame at their record of locking people up indefinitely—people like these people that we are now evacuating to Australia. People have been locked up indefinitely just for pursuing their right under international law to flee persecution.

Australia should be committed to resettling at least 20,000 people, following the lead of Canada and the UK. The 4,500 people on temporary visas here in Australia must be given permanent protection so that they can fully settle down and establish their roots and know that Australia really values them and wants them to stay. We need to continue the work on fast-tracking visas for the people who are so desperate to leave, and we need to increase aid support, particularly through civil society organisations, to help the people who are suffering so much already and are going to continue to suffer with the Taliban in control. It's the least we can do. The foreseeable future in Afghanistan looks bleak. Our 20 years of war has not created an ongoing peace. Part (b) of this motion says that we have been 'fighting terrorism, promoting freedom and seeking to support the people of Afghanistan'. We might have thought that we were doing that during this longest war, but it hasn't turned out that well, has it?

We must ask ourselves what has gone wrong. Why has it come to this, with the Taliban back in control? Was there anything else that we could have done instead of imposing a colonial war upon the people of Afghanistan, supporting warlords and turning a blind eye to corruption? In this longest war, 41 Australians have died, sacrificing their lives, tens of thousands of Afghans have died, and hundreds of thousands or millions more people have been impacted by trauma and loss. I send our ongoing sympathies to all those people affected and those who have been affected by those who have lost their lives, and I hope that those lives have not been lost in vain. The least we can do in the circumstances is to provide a safe haven for people now. We should have been getting many more people out well before now, so taking 20,000 people to be resettled in Australia is very reasonable in the circumstances.

We should learn from the war of the last 20 years, change the way that we act in the world, and develop and implement policies so that human rights are at the centre of our foreign and defence policies. We need policies and actions in the world that have equal participation of women—we must insist on that. We must have diverse peoples across all hierarchies in all institutions, from ministries to embassies and implementing partners. We need to be supporting political processes to ensure equal influence of the politically marginalised and to actively support civil-society actors promoting gender equality and the rights of political minorities. Yes, there has been progress made in Afghanistan over the last 20 years, but there is so much more that we could have been doing and should have been doing to make sure that those achievements were lasting. We need to acknowledge the continuing colonial legacies within Foreign Affairs and actively work to overcome them. We should be championing cooperation, partnerships and inclusion over domination and exclusion, and emphasising the shared communalities of human beings across the globe.

As we reflect today on the tragedy in Afghanistan we have to realise that we can and we must do better. For the sake of the people who have suffered over the last 20 years, the people who have sacrificed their lives, the people who are suffering at the moment in Afghanistan, and the people who are going to have a very difficult time in the ongoing months and years—who knows how long—we have to do better. We can do better and we must.