Philip Ruddock (Berowra, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I support enthusiastically this motion and I thank the member for Brisbane for proposing it. I thank the member for Sydney for her support for this motion on behalf of the opposition. It is rare in this parliament that there is a unanimity of view. But I think the circumstances that face Ukraine reflect why this is the case. It was on Thursday, 21 November last year that I rose to propose a resolution to formally acknowledge on behalf of the government of Australia the 80th anniversary of the Ukrainian Holodomor. This was an engineered famine between 1932 and 1933. It was appalling. It gripped Ukraine in a way that led to the deaths of some 3.5 million people, and possibly more. There was aggressive implementation of forced collectivisation and five-year plans across the old Soviet Union immediately prior to this period. It had a profound and significant impact on Ukraine. I mention it because I want people to know that this country has endured hardship, incredible hardship, over a period of time. These events occurred in the context of, I think, forced domination in that region which has coerced people to support a form of nation that was not to their liking. This was the old Soviet Union. It reminds me of the former Yugoslavia, where states, essentially, were forced and coercively required to model themselves in a particular way. What we have seen, I think, with the passage of time is that those forced states do not survive. They did not in the former Yugoslavia; they did not with the old Soviet Union. But we are dealing with the remnants of that situation—a form of transmigration in which people were moved in order to provide for the Soviet hegemony in that region over a period of time. Those people still live in regions that were not naturally theirs and people have not walked away from the idea that they ought to be able to impose their will. And that is what, I think, we are seeing in Ukraine.

From the point of view of Russia, it is a very foolish approach that they are taking. They ought to look at Australia, where people of different cultures, different races and different religions can, in fact, live together and build a future together. I would like to think that that was possible in Ukraine. As the shadow foreign affairs minister mentioned, in 1994, when people were thinking sensibly about resolving these sorts of issues—and the European parliament recalled this in a resolution that it recently passed—the existing borders of Ukraine were guaranteed by the United States, the Russian Federation and the United Kingdom in the Budapest Memorandum of Security Assurances when Ukraine relinquished nuclear weapons and joined the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. The European parliament was reminding the Russian Federation that, together with the two other countries mentioned, it had committed itself to the same act of refraining from economic coercion designed to subordinate to its own interests the exercise by Ukraine of the rights inherent in its sovereignty, and, thus, to secure advantage of any kind.

This is a very, very important time. Russia can position itself in way that makes it an outstanding international citizen. But it appears to be acting contrary to that. The Australian parliament, I do not believe, should approve of it; the Australian government certainly does not. I urge very strongly support for this resolution proposed by the member for Brisbane.

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