Danby Parl Speech 10 March 2005

Mr DANBY (Melbourne Ports) (12.24 p.m.)—I am pleased to have this opportunity to speak on the Appropriation (Tsunami Financial Assistance and Australia-Indonesia Partnership) Bill 2004-2005 and related legislation. As the previous speaker indicated, this bill has bipartisan support. The opposition was clear in its support for major assistance to Indonesia before, during and after discussion first arose about the issue in the area of foreign aid generally but the tsunami in particular. This bill embodies that bipartisan consensus— and, indeed, the consensus across the country—about Australia’s response to the earthquake and tsunami disaster that affected the countries of our region, particularly Indonesia, on 26 December and its aftermath during the following months.

According to the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, 21 Australians have now been confirmed lost in the tsunami disaster, while another six are missing, apparently lost. Although these figures are much lower than we originally feared, each one is a tragedy for an Australian family. I offer my sincere condolences to all of those affected. We can be thankful that Australia escaped with so few losses, when we reconsider that the overall death toll has now reached some 310,000.

I was contacted on the first day. I went back in to my office to see of what assistance I could be for citizens of Melbourne Ports who had family lost in various parts of Thailand and later Sri Lanka. I was immediately in contact with the Parliamentary Secretary for Foreign Affairs and Trade, Bruce Billson, on his mobile.

We got the details to him of some missing Australians in Thailand, faxed from the mother of one of the missing young women. I must say that I was very pleased that the government acted so quickly and that the member for Dunkley, the Parliamentary Secretary for Foreign Affairs and Trade, was so accessible and so quick in acting at the request of parliamentarians on behalf of their constituents.

As previous speakers have done, I want to pay tribute to all of those Australians who rallied so magnificently to bring aid and comfort to the millions of people affected by the tsunami. These include, first and foremost, the men and women of the Australian Defence Force, who acted with their usual promptness, efficiency and compassion to bring aid to the affected areas, most particularly to the Aceh province in Indonesia. I think the sight of the Australians with their water bottles, giving out fresh water to people in that devastated region, will be an image that sticks in all of our minds. That praise extends to federal and state government departments, including the Australian Federal Police; the aid organisations which sent volunteers and funds; and the many Australians who stayed in the affected areas to work as volunteers.

In my own electorate, as I said, many generous people gave to various appeals. I attended a tsunami benefit at the Amici Bakery Cafe in Chapel Street, Prahran, with my colleague the state member for Prahran, Mr Tony Lupton. The cafe donated all of the fees from the benefit that night—$6,500—to the tsunami relief effort. There were many similar efforts by businesses, community groups and individuals. All the Fitzroy Street and Acland Street traders took up money on behalf of the Red Cross.

The tsunami victims affected in my electorate include Robbie Burke, formerly the saxophonist of the Black Sorrows, who lives in Caulfield, his wife, Atia Cader, and their two daughters, who had a narrow escape in Sri Lanka; and, on Phi Phi Island, Leonard Hamersfeld and Tanya Bensimon of East St Kilda, who huddled behind a wall and then scrambled onto a roof to escape the waters.

Australians have donated $280 million to charities assisting the tsunami affected countries, which I think is the highest per capita voluntary donation for tsunami relief of any country in the world and is certainly an extraordinary outpouring of generosity from a country of 20 million people. It follows from this that Australians expect their government to be equally generous.

The total aid commitments of the Australian government to the tsunami relief total nearly $1.4 billion, and those commitments have the full support of the opposition. We expect those commitments to be fully honoured, and a future Labor government would of course honour those commitments, which will run for many years into the future.

I want to talk today about the link between Australia’s tsunami relief efforts and our relationship with Indonesia. The tsunami, coming as it did soon after the inauguration of Indonesia's first directly elected president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, provides an opportunity for relations between Australia and our largest and most important regional neighbour to make a fresh start after the various stresses and strains of the past decade. As Indonesia is the world’s largest Muslim country, our relationship with Indonesia is an extraordinarily important one, particularly in the current international climate. We have a great stake in Indonesia remaining a united, stable, democratic and increasingly prosperous country. If it does not—if it breaks up into warring provinces, if it relapses into dictatorship or succumbs to Islamist extremism or if its economic progress goes into reverse—the consequences for Australia could be immediate and severe.

In the past, many people in the foreign policy establishment in this country, including members from both sides of politics, took the view that what was needed above all else in Indonesia was stability, and that Australia’s interests lay in propping up the Indonesian authoritarian governments and all that that entailed including, unfortunately, the Indonesian occupation of East Timor. I do not seek to make a partisan point about this, as this was the policy of successive Australian governments and was the wisdom of the time.

However, Australia’s support for the incorporation of East Timor not only had a morally problematic aspect to it but was also short-sighted and not in the long-term interests of either Australia or Indonesia. All authoritarian regimes eventually fall and, when they do, the people who suffered under them remember who their friends were. This lesson applies as much to Burma today as it did to Indonesia yesterday.

Today we can see that Australia’s interests lie in supporting and promoting Indonesian democracy as the best way of securing a stable and prosperous Indonesia into the future. We must pay tribute here to the former presidents Abdurrahman Wahid and Megawati Sukarnoputri, who both courageously opposed dictatorship and worked to create a democratic Indonesia. For various reasons neither of them proved to be effective presidents, but they paved the way for the country’s first direct presidential election and the election of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono last year.

There is no great controversy in supporting democracy but I also believe that it is in Australia’s interests to support a united Indonesia. That may be a more controversial proposition. This issue has been brought into sharper focus by the fact that the tsunami struck hardest in the Aceh province of Indonesia, where there has been a long-running secessionist insurgency. The behaviour of both the Indonesian military and the insurgent group, GAM, has been brought into focus by the unprecedented media attention given to events in Aceh since the tsunami struck.

It may seem paradoxical that I should speak in support of Indonesian national unity so soon after expressing support for the independence of East Timor, and that is the position of a lot of members of both sides of this House. However, East Timor was a Portuguese colony, not part of the old Dutch East Indies, and its people never agreed to become part of Indonesia. The evidence was overwhelming that the people of East Timor always retained a sense of separate nationality and wanted to be independent. By contrast, it seems to me that Aceh, West Papua and the Moluccas were part of the Dutch East Indies, and the evidence is at least ambivalent that the majority of the peoples in those areas, as opposed to some minorities, desire separation from Indonesia. After all, Indonesia has recently held free legislative and presidential elections, and voters in these regions showed no sign of support for secession.

It is of course true that the incorporation of the former Dutch New Guinea into Indonesia was done without the consent of the people of that territory. But that was more than 40 years ago and, since then, the territory has been integrated into Indonesia and its population mix changed by large-scale settlement from other parts of Indonesia. Now that Indonesia is a democracy, and now that all the provinces of Indonesia have their own elected regional assemblies with considerable devolved powers, I do not think we in this parliament do the people of West Papua any service by encouraging secessionism. However, we in this parliament want to encourage our Indonesian friends to be sensitive to the regional interests of people in West Papua. The same is true of Aceh, which, although once an independent sultanate that was incorporated into the Dutch East Indies in 1871, has been an integral part of Indonesia since independence nearly 60 years ago.

The recent trial of Abu Bakar Bashir has reminded Australians of the great stake we have in the future of Indonesia and of Indonesian Islam. The Minister for Foreign Affairs is now here, and I express my appreciation for a recent opportunity to be with him on a visit that he regularly makes to his ministerial colleagues; a number of Australian parliamentarians were taken with the foreign minister on his visit to Jakarta. The Australian parliamentarians had extremely useful meetings with our colleagues in the Indonesian parliament, including with the Speaker, Amien Rais. We also had particularly useful meetings with the leadership of Indonesian youth organisations and Indonesian Muslim organisations, including scholars and youth leaders who were remarkably well informed about Australia. Many of them had been educated in Australia, and some had undertaken PhD studies at Flinders University. They expressed no great antagonism towards Australia, although they did have politely expressed policy differences in a number of areas.

The Indonesian archipelago has been Islamic since the 16th century but Indonesian Islam, influenced by the archipelago’s Buddhist, Hindu and Animist history, is very different from the Islam we see in Saudi Arabia. Indonesian Hanafi Islam was until recently unaffected by the drift towards Islamic extremism. Most Indonesian Muslims supported moderate Islamic organisations such as Mummadiyah or Nandlatul Ulama, and most still do. I am sure the minister has met with these organisations many times, and I and parliamentarians from both sides had the opportunity to meet with them for the first time a couple of years ago when we were in Jakarta.

Today Indonesian Islam in undergoing far-reaching changes as part of a process that the honourable member for Griffith has called ‘Middle-Easternisation’. As Indonesians have become better educated, they have become more aware of world events such as the conflicts in the Middle East. Indonesian youth in some of the poorer regional areas are attending madrassas and being inculcated with extremist ideology by preachers from the Wahabist sect, funded from Saudi Arabia. In recent years this ideology of Islamist extremism, including various dislikes of Americans, Australians and Jews, has been widely spread in Indonesia by extremist clerics such as the infamous Abu Bakr Bashir. Unfortunately, Indonesia’s welcome but uneasy transformation from authoritarianism to democracy has given some of these foreign inspired Islamist groups new opportunities. Older Indonesian Muslim leaders, such as the former president Wahid, have been challenged by groups such as the Council of Indonesian Islamic Scholars (MUI) and Abu Bakr Bashir’s Indonesian Mujahideen Council. When I was in Indonesia in early 2003 Australian parliamentarians met a number of moderate Indonesian Muslim youth leaders and scholars. They told me how they are fighting back against the militants and their imported ideologies, which they understand to be immensely harmful to the great religion of Islam and to the people of Indonesia. Australia can and should be doing everything it can to help moderate Indonesian Muslims, by providing funding for secular and moderate Islamic schools in the villages to counteract the insidious effects of this imported Wahabist ideology. I have spoken a number of times in this House about the need for Australia to do more to assist the forces of moderate Islam in Indonesia, particularly in the area of education. I agree with some of the initiatives of this government in this area, noting that the Minister for Foreign Affairs is here. Yet

I also draw attention to the comments of the honourable member for Griffith about the importance of restoring the full operation of Radio Australia’s Indonesian language broadcasting as a means of countering the anti-Western influences in Indonesia. The terrible tragedy of the tsunami provides new opportunities for strengthening Australia’s relationship with Indonesia, and the fact that our generous aid was so well received is something that all Australian people, including both sides of this parliament, will be very pleased about. I do not think that anyone on this side of this House had any partisan concerns about the Australian government’s great initiative towards Indonesia at the time of the tsunami; we all welcomed it. We should use that influence and goodwill to work with Indonesian civil society groups to strengthen Indonesian democracy and the forces of religious and political moderation. This will make it harder for extremist groups like JI to recruit Indonesians to terrorist organisations and make it easier for the Indonesian police to detect and prevent terrorist planning before we experience repeats of the Bali bombing or the Australian Embassy bombing.

I welcome this bill and the generous financial commitment to reconstruction that it embodies. But that financial aid must be part of a wider policy framework to strengthen the bonds of friendship between the Indonesian people and the Australian people. This is in the long-term interests of both countries.