Michael Hatton (Blaxland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

In my contribution to this debate on our commitment of troops to East Timor, speaking as the member for Blaxland and also as the Deputy Chair of the Defence Subcommittee of the Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade, I want to pay tribute to those people who are hazarding their lives and their health in the service of the Australian people and also in the service of the people of East Timor. It is a thing that not many people do. Not many people are in our defence forces; not many people put their lives at hazard for the benefit of others and in the service of others. Those who do, who have the courage to do that, need to be congratulated as often as we can do so and given the full measure of support from both sides, indeed from all parties, not only in the House of Representatives but also in the Senate.

It is in the very nature of military service that those who serve have no choice where they serve. They have no say in determining the approach a government or an opposition will take to a particular conflict. They are at the whim and behest of the government. And they are subject to a great deal of scrutiny by the media and by commentators world wide. The particular circumstances our troops find in East Timor are different from those they find in Iraq—the just announced redeployment, with the Japanese moving out of Iraq, will mean another different set of circumstances as our troops move from Al Muthanna province to another area—and they are different to the situation our troops face in Afghanistan and to the situation they face in the Solomons.

What has been proven over the whole history of our forces, but particularly in the last decade or so, is that Australian defence forces can be engaged for a variety of purposes utilising all of their expertise in a staged way. We have a commitment of about seven out of our 14 chief elements. We have the capacity to move troops in and out of all of the areas where they are, but it puts a great deal of stress on the organisation. It certainly puts a great deal of stress on our troops who are serving, because of the rapidity with which they are being moved from one area to another. Having served in East Timor, come back to Australia and possibly been redirected to the Solomons or, indeed, to Iraq, they can come back to Australia and then, because the situation in East Timor has deteriorated, be back in the firing line.

Looking back some few years, I also want to pay tribute to those members of the Australian Federal Police who, in the initial engagements in East Timor to resolve the problems of the militias, went there and worked without weapons, using their best offices and their capacities as trained officers, to help people restore order and create a situation where there would be a safe environment for everyone. It was a very difficult and tough assignment. I personally knew two of those Australian Federal Police officers because they were members of the Prime Minister’s security detachment. I know how well and effectively they undertook those tasks. It was our very best and most experienced people from the AFP who hazarded their lives to try and sort out East Timor in that first situation.

It has been suggested that, in the current situation, AFP forces should again be sent because the particular roles that can be undertaken by the military and the police are different and the nature of the task before us in Timor demands policing roles. While we understand that those forces do not have a choice or a say in determining where they go and what they are going to do and we know that their professionalism has been commented on and marked out because it is of such a significantly high standard, I think the population at large also needs to understand the range of skills that are demanded of our people and the fact that this is a lot more difficult than operations in the past.

This is not only because of the different environments that we are involved in in different areas of the world, but also because the nature of the task can rapidly change. The original efforts in East Timor were different to these. The Indonesian government was at its very weakest and there was effectively an imposition on Indonesia of a demand for the creation of East Timor. There were Indonesian government-backed guerrilla groups trying to maintain control of East Timor, and the resolution of that situation depended upon what was done at the border and on the effectiveness of Australian forces being able to dissolve the capacity of those guerrilla groups to act at will.

This situation is very different. The Indonesians are in a different position because East Timor is now free. Australia is in a much more powerfully important position because it has sought to take on a role—to intervene militarily or to provide police forces—in our region and take a leading part. The Prime Minister has said:

… Australia—a large, stable and prosperous country—has a special responsibility to act as a force for peace and order in our immediate region.

The world we live in is one where the problems of weak and fragile states, especially ones on our doorstep, can very quickly become our problems. And certainly in East Timor the problems became our problems, because of the actions of the Prime Minister and the government in what they did with Indonesia at that time, forcing this through.

There are some fundamental questions to be asked about the actions taken by this government and the sense, or lack of sense, of those actions. The fundamental first question, I think, is to do with the nature and structure of the military forces within East Timor and the fact that $70 million of Australian money was used to help set up that army. It is an army which a good many of the government in East Timor said they did not need. They said they needed a police force and doubted they actually needed an army.

The fundamental breakdown in their society does not reside simply in the problems within that army group, but certainly that was the area that allowed the whole situation to catch fire. These problems highlight the fact that Timor is not one single indivisible entity, and that the regionally based tribal groups that exist there are present in the army. They have not been moulded into an effective group that sees itself as the defenders of the country as a single unitary group. Indeed the core of the conflict goes to the differential treatment of those from the east and those from the west—the fact that some were promoted and others were not. A whole section of the force saw themselves as effectively being cut out and felt that, when they put those arguments forward, they simply could not get those in power to properly listen to them or address their problems.

So you first have to question the sense in setting up that force to start off with. You also have to ask the question of whether or not, having set up the army at a cost of $70 million, with Australian troops helping to form and shape it, understanding that there is that fundamental problem, the army should be disbanded and a reconstituted and extended police force should take its place. That is something we need to give a great deal of consideration to. The very core of this problem goes to the division within the society and the feeling that people have been dealt with unfairly and there has been an unequal approach to this. That is not easily resolved.

In all small, fragile states, but particularly in relation to a country like East Timor, which has very little in the way of natural resources and which will be dependent upon the deal done with Australia on the oil and gas resources that are in the East Timor Sea, once there are fundamental ructions between different groups, the grab for power by one particular group leads to the exclusion of the other. In that situation, which has occurred in the Solomons, in Papua New Guinea and in Fiji, independent states have significant trouble holding the society together. In that situation you have to be very careful what you do.

There are other fundamental problems of a lack of insight into and a lack of proper determination of just exactly what we are facing. To me this was evident in the decision to go into Iraq in the way that the coalition forces did. There was no proper appreciation of just how difficult it is with, firstly, a dismembered state such as Iraq, and, secondly, a nascent state such as East Timor, to put together a modern democratic country and keep it whole. It is the exception, not the rule. But the ideology being pushed over the last few years is that, on a regional basis, we and the United States should be there to create and enforce that situation for these small states.

There is a signal lesson with regard to East Timor, and that is that the problems that we now have could be much greater. Virtually everyone in the House would be aware of the significance of the tribal problems in Papua New Guinea over the last few decades. Holding that great conjunction of different groups together has been significantly difficult. Problems of corruption and the fight for power between groups have been significant. The scale of what we are dealing with in East Timor would certainly pale if we had similar problems in Papua New Guinea. That is different from Irian Jaya, because it is incorporated as part of Indonesia.

The fundamentals here go to the question of who bears responsibility, the manner in which we do it and whether the appropriate means are being used to buttress a new government. The Prime Minister, in his general discussion of this in answer to questions, has effectively tried to distance himself from the creation of the state and the creation of the burden taken on by the Australian government and the Australian people for the good governance of East Timor. It is not enough to say that the fundamental reason for this breakdown is a lack of good governance. We were there at the very birth of this nation and in fact caused it to happen. If we took on the responsibility for it in economic terms and the failure to sign up to a deal which would give an adequate and necessary income, we would simply burden Australia directly rather than through the deal that has been done here.

We do not fully appreciate the resources that need to go into not just putting our troops in now, having resolved the situation before, but going in at a point in time when they are putting their lives in hazardous situations. We need to put a lot more civil capacity into East Timor to help them to try to resolve the fundamental splits that exist within their community. This is a very hard thing to do, but if it is not done then this will be not the end of the problem but part of a continuum, where a fragmented, small and weak state could continue to be a significant problem for us and for our troops from now into the future.

What steps are necessary? Firstly, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade needs to come up with an appropriate appreciation of just what the complexities involved here are. Secondly, Australia, in taking the leading part in trying to resolve this, together with the UN and with other interested countries, needs to focus resources on trying to heal the fundamental rifts that there are within this community and trying to heal the fractures in this very new polity. If we do not seek to do that by putting adequate resources into it and trying to negotiate a way through to a proper result, then our forces, even if they are there for the short to medium term, will be forced back in the future. Civil resources put into this matter now will ensure that our troops are not put in hazardous situations. (Time expired)

See this speech in context