Scott Ludlam (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

by leave—I move:

That the Senate take note of the statement on Current developments in Burma.

I rise to make some very brief remarks on the ministerial statement that was tabled by the Minister for Foreign Affairs on 8 February relating to current developments in Burma. A little bit of time has elapsed since then.

Firstly, I would like to congratulate the government on quite substantially increasing our foreign aid budget to Burma. According to the minister’s speech, it will rise over the next three years to about $50 million annually, which is an increase of approximately 67 per cent. As the minister gives due recognition in his speech, foreign aid from Australia—and also from other countries who traditionally stand with Australia in foreign aid in the region—to Burma is actually less than a 10th of that received by Cambodia and a 16th of that received by Laos. This aid is for a country with some of the most horrific maternal mortality and child health statistics in the world—if there is a country with worse statistics, in our region at least, I certainly have not heard of it—so it is entirely appropriate for this increase in our aid budget to occur.

I made some comments the last time I spoke on these issues around making sure that Australia’s aid budget goes to credible non-government organisations. We already know that our aid to Burma is going to such organisations, and they work incredibly hard under difficult circumstances. Credit should go to our people with AusAID but also to the aid agencies that we fund, who work under very difficult circumstances.

My main plea of the government the last time I spoke on this was that the government make sure that a much larger proportion of funding makes its way up into the border areas, where, effectively, a war is going on. This war has forced hundreds of thousands of people across the border, and people are in extremely tenuous circumstances on both sides of the border. It would really be a credit to Australia, and to the credible non-government organisations, including the Thailand Burma Border Consortium, if we made sure that some of our aid budget—or certainly a much larger proportion—made its way to those groups.

I want to pick up on some of the other comments that the minister made in his statement. In October 2007, following the most recent bout of extreme violence against pro-democracy campaigners in Burma, Australia tightened up its sanctions slightly. The minister lists them as travel, defence and financial sanctions, saying they ‘have the common purpose of exerting pressure on Burma’s military regime’. Last year, when one of the world’s most famous political prisoners, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, was granted an audience with our consular representatives in Rangoon, they had to explain to her why Australia’s sanctions regime was so much looser than that of the United States or the United Kingdom.

From questions in estimates last year, I know that the government was at that time considering whether or not to tighten our sanctions regime. They appear to have decided at this stage not to bother. That is enormously problematic, particularly in the case of the investment that occurs. Senators will no doubt be aware that there is roughly $50 million in two-way trade between Australia and Burma. While that does not sound like much, and it is not much in terms of Australia’s accounts, it is quite a significant flow of funding in and out of Burma given the extreme financial sanctions which have been applied by other countries and given the fact that this regime is extremely cash-strapped—so much so, people have told us, that the regime occasionally has to abandon military campaigns in the border areas because it simply does not have the resources to keep troops in the field. So financial sanctions do have an impact, and they are something that we should take a much closer look at.

It is a source of shame to me, coming from Perth, to have to acknowledge that there is a company, Twinza Oil, which is based in Perth and has investments in west Perth, that paid around $11 million or $12 million for a licence to take out oil and gas concessions and that they had to do this in partnership with the Burmese regime because it is not possible to do business in that country otherwise. One of the reasons that it is long past time for a rethink of our sanctions regime is that companies based in Australia can go into partnership with this vicious regime to sign up to oil and gas deals to further strengthen and legitimise the regime. This is not just political or diplomatic legitimacy; it also means hard currency, because the $11 million or $12 million that that agreement represents is really a down payment on what has been estimated on the basis of today’s market at US$5.36 billion worth of crude oil, should the resource in the ground be proved up to that value.

It is not possible to calculate at this stage how much that would be worth to the regime, but, to put those figures in context, the fact is that this company, which I will speak of in a moment and which needs to be put on Australia’s financial sanctions list, earns about $1 billion annually from oil and gas projects, and that represents 40 per cent of the country’s annual budget. An Australian outfit’s proposing to sign up to a deal which could be worth $5.3 billion in total represents a very substantial potential flow of resources to the Burmese government when Australia should really be moving in precisely the opposite direction.

It would be very simple measure for the Australian government to simply tighten our sanctions regime and do it now, well in advance of any proposed elections that the regime may or may not hold in Burma. I certainly have not heard a satisfactory explanation from the government—and this is what we are after—as to why the Myanmar Oil and Gas Enterprise, MOGE, is not on Australia’s financial sanctions list. Many other companies are, and with good reason. But, without signing up to a deal with this particular company, you cannot get into the Burmese oil and gas business, and we now have the embarrassment of this company in Perth doing exactly that—signing up in partnership with MOGE and setting us up in future for enormous flows of international revenues to the Burmese regime.

It is time for the government to rethink this. We are spending taxpayers’ money on foreign aid, and that is absolutely deserved and very important, but we have to make sure that we are doing everything we can to cut off the flow of financial resources to this regime, and I think most Australians would have supported the Minister for Foreign Affairs if he had stood up and said, ‘We have been having a rethink of our targeted financial sanctions regime and decided that Australian investment will be frozen from this day forward.’ I am still looking forward to that announcement. I think it is entirely indefensible that we are continually trading with this nation, which is effectively an outlaw nation and an outlaw regime. We should be doing everything that we can within our power to support people in that country. Aung San Suu Kyi has said on many occasions, ‘Please use your freedom to promote ours.’ I think this chamber and this parliament has the opportunity to do that at a time of its choosing.

Question agreed to.