Nick Champion (Wakefield, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is a great pleasure to speak on this motion, and I congratulate the member for Brisbane on bringing it to the parliament. Obviously, I welcome its support by the opposition and the member for Sydney, and I note the rare moments of unanimity with my colleague the member for Berowra. Obviously, Eastern Europe has had an interesting history. But one thing that has been consistent for a very long time until the beginning of this century, or the end of last century, was that people were ruled by one tyrant or another for a very long period of time. Democracy, liberty and freedom have only really recently graced these lands. So this is a rare and unique opportunity, but it is coloured, I guess, by history.

There are four principles that I think we should apply to the Ukraine. The first and foremost is that they have the right to select their own government through free and fair elections and that that government should be free of corruption and kleptocracy. There should be a right to protest. They have the right, if you like, to decide the future of their country. They should have the right to choose their own foreign policy. That seems, to me, to be a fundamental right in a nation-state. Obviously, every nation, when it is choosing its foreign policy, takes into regard its neighbours and their interests as well. But one of the fundamental things a nation-state can do is choose its own foreign policy. If Ukraine want to join the European Union or have good relationships with Europe, that should be something that the nation are free to do. Fourthly, they have the right to their own territorial integrity. These borders have been established for the last 23 years; they are not some new invention. It is Ukrainians who should decide the future of those borders, not anybody else.

What weighs over all of this is, of course, Russia. It has legitimate national, economic and security interests in the region that need to be taken into account, to have regard to, and history weighs on those. But Russia should not annex territory, and that includes the Crimea. It cannot place troops into its neighbour's territory, outside of those bases which have been agreed to in previous agreements—the member for Sydney went through those agreements—and it definitely should not have armed personnel, in uniform but without insignia, outside those authorised bases. That is a very, very distressing precedent to set because one of the key things about having armed forces is that you are able to identify them. It is a most distressing precedent to have had soldiers running around with no insignia and no clear chain of command that the world can identify so that it became very hard to pinpoint on whose authority they were acting—officially, at least, if we knew or suspected they were acting under the command of the Russian President.

Russia should not seek to use Russian language or ethnicity as a reason for breaching the territorial integrity of nation states. This would be a recipe for disaster if it were allowed to stand as a principle. It would be as disastrous as when it was previously invoked as a principle, in the case of the Sudetenland. It is a very, very dangerous precedent to set and we should not allow it to be set. We should not allow Russia to support separatism within Ukraine's autonomous regions as a method of expanding Russia's borders. As the member for Berowra has said, it is a very old-fashioned way of doing foreign policy. Russia should accept international law and the UN Security Council's legitimate concerns about its behaviour and withdraw its veto about the Crimean referendum.

Ukraine has a short independent history, just 23 years, and that history means that those in Ukraine have an obligation to govern wisely with a view to peace and stability within the region. That means taking Russia into account but not being dominated by it. Ukrainians have a right to liberty, to freedom and democracy, but these things cannot be expressed if they are under the yoke of foreign domination or foreign threat. I urge the UN to act and I congratulate the member for Brisbane for bringing this motion to the House.

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