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

I rise to make some observations about a recent trip to Burma I undertook during the winter break before I travelled to Japan, which is a place I have wanted to visit for a very long period of time. Senators will be aware that each of the Australian Greens works within the foreign affairs portfolio on different issues, and in my instance I have been working with the people from the various parts of Burma, or Myanmar, in Perth, which I think has the largest population of people from that country of any Australian city. Burma really captured my imagination during the Saffron uprising, which occurred during the election campaign, and I became interested in the country, its history and the challenges that faced it at that time during the brutal crackdown on the monks and the other citizens who took the fight for democracy up to the regime.

I wanted to make more of a contribution when I arrived here and I have been very pleased to be able to work with people in the country and people in Australia in the exile community who are advocating for democracy in Burma. I was also very fortunate to visit the border town of Mae Sot in Thailand which borders the Burmese town of Myawaddy in Karen State and was able to visit there for the second time. It is extraordinary the changes that are unfolding in that country and the closer you get the more complex and more fast moving things seem to be.

There is undoubtedly progress. There is no doubt in my mind that pro-democracy campaigners have made enormous gains in the last period of time despite the fact that those who have chosen to go down the parliamentary path labour under an entirely corrupt constitution. Those who work within the parliament, which I had the good fortune to visit in the capital, work under conditions that we simply would not dream of here and they have access to very few resources. Nonetheless, labour organising is now occurring in Burma and there is a much greater degree of press freedom than there was before. Obviously the candidates who were able to stand in the by-election were then elected, and there is a reasonable degree of agreement that the by-election was mostly free and fair and people were able to campaign unencumbered. Of course, candidates from the National League of Democracy, most notably Daw Aung Sun Suu Kyi, were elected to the parliament for the first time.

However, this is still a country that faces enormous challenges and the roots of the military regime that have dominated the political and economic life of the country for decades run very deep. There is still a war in Kachin State to the north which has displaced tens of thousands of people and left the area laced with landmines. There is still ethnic cleansing in Rakhine State. Senators will be aware of horrific events of the last couple of months that have seen people expelled into Bangladesh and the Bangladeshi government trying to force them back over the border into Rakhine State. There are still areas that are heavily mined and there are still large-scale military deployments in the ethnic areas, even the places in which fragile ceasefire agreements are holding—places like Karen state. The country is still enormously fragile. There are somewhere between 700 and 800 political prisoners but the true number is not really known because the number of prisoners who have been incarcerated as a result of their political activities in Rakhine or Kachin are really very hard to identify. So, while progress has been made, there is still a long way to go.

One of the things which I came out with the strongest impressions about is that our aid budget can make an enormous difference. Australia is one of the largest aid donors to the country, which is still the poorest in our region. We have to be very careful of the tenor and the tone of some of the investment stampede that is now underway. This is obviously a country that really needs foreign exchange but they were to do so on their own terms. That is being expressed in various forms by people who are landless and are being moved on, who have traditional title but do not necessarily have a formal paper title to their land and are being pushed aside for various forms of development. One example I will conclude with is the Myitsone Dam. Right to the top, right to the President, they been saying that this country is not necessarily open for unrestrained extractive industries. As Daw Aung Suu Kyi has put it, they are seeking democracy-friendly development or democracy-friendly investment, forms of investment that allow people to stay on their country and give people an economic future rather than simply being shoved aside for extractive investment. However, in this country there will be an increase in mining development and probably an increase in forestry, but I think this is a country that can choose to chart a different path.

Australia has some history of this, not simply to craft our aid budget to benefit Australian investors but to benefit the people as a whole. I think we can be quite proud of some of the changes that our aid budget has made and some of the diplomatic overtures that the Australian government has made in various fora. Senators will be aware that we were very pleased to see the Australian government adopt our proposal that we join a universal arms embargo and that we begin United Nations Security Council prosecution investigations of some senior regime and judiciary figures. Some of those initiatives, I suspect, may now fall by the wayside—and I think that would be a shame. But, in the meantime, there is a role for the kind of positive engagement that is being shown by not just Australia but also around the world.

I want to extend my thanks to our ambassador there, Bronte Moules, and her staff, including Michael Hassel, who runs our AusAID program through Rangoon, and also David Dalton, who is the sole AFP officer stationed there, for the extraordinary work that they have been doing, effectively starting from scratch in a country where the infrastructure is very, very basic, with a barely functioning banking system and extremely fragmentary telecommunications. This is a country that was looted by its regime over a period of decades, with the help of, I must say, some of its neighbours, including the Chinese government.

I was very fortunate, with the help of local campaigners, including some Australians who have been there for a long period of time, to meet a wide range of people and hear a wide range of viewpoints. Everyone in the country holds a different piece of the puzzle and has different views of what is occurring there and just how fragile progress is. In one of the more chilling references, it was observed that three bullets would be all it would take to return the country to the rather dystopian place it inhabited only a very brief time ago—three key senior reformers being taken out, as it were, would plunge the country back to where it was. It is really against the backdrop of those sorts of comments that I would urge the Australian government to do as some of our diplomatic partners have done and suspend sanctions, rather than going the whole hog and lifting sanctions entirely and saying the place is open for business and all is well.

In MaeSot I had the good fortune to meet with one of the electricity ministers, with the Speaker of the Upper House and a number of committee chairs. There is an interest in parliament-to-parliament, and I think it would be a wonderful thing for this parliament to take a delegation, as delegations are being received from Burma, or Myanmar, and to actually take some of the expertise in holding the executive to account. We are not always able to do so. It is not something that we have perfected, but there is a hunger for information as to how the institution of parliament in that country can set itself apart.

In MaeSot, my thanks very much go to Pippa and Dr Cynthia Maung, who continues with her staff to provide an absolutely inspiring example of what can be done. They make a little go a very long way at that clinic there on the border that looks after tens of thousands of refugees. They are looking to a transition. They are not ready to get back into Karen State—which, as I have said, is still extremely fragile. The Australian aid budget does support the extraordinary primary healthcare work that they do but it does not extend to the backpacker health workers who have effectively built on-foot a primary healthcare system in Karen State. This is something that will need to be revisited, so that our aid budget can be used more flexibly by those partners and those at the Thai-Burma Border Consortium and by some of the people that we work with there. It is entirely appropriate.

The cautionary tale, as I said, is with the Mytsone dam. Burma, Myanmar, is not open for asset stripping, as the Chinese government found out to their cost. A gigantic complex of dams proposed in Kachin State with the transmission wires from the hydro plants going straight across the border into China was cancelled on the veto of the President after a strong community campaign. Australia can be very supportive of this country if we listen to the voices of the Burmese people themselves.