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

Nothing is certain in life but death and taxes; but, in this instance, we could add a third: the eventual end of communist regimes, whether in Europe or in the rest of the world. I commend the member for Fairfax, Alex Somlyay, for bringing this motion before the parliament. His motion recognises the 50th anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution and the fact that that failed revolution was the first major expression of massive discontent and the willingness to break free of the Warsaw Pact which had been imposed on eastern Europe. It was an attempt to break through the Iron Curtain which had descended between eastern and western Europe—as Winston Churchill intoned at Fulton, Missouri, in 1949. That Iron Curtain separated the peoples of the east and west, and separated the Magyar peoples who had formed the central core of the Austro-Hungarian empire. It separated those people in the east in not only Hungary but also Czechoslovakia, where they had their uprising in 1968, under Prime Minister Dubcek. They, like the people of Hungary, were put down through the use of steel and bullets. They, like the people of Hungary, said they wanted to be free people and that they did not want to live under the yoke of serfdom in a communist dictatorship. They were willing to put their lives on the line.

It is just the same this very day for the people in Vietnam and those people who signed up to the Bloc 8406 group. In April this year those people said they wanted freedom. They wanted democracy just like the Hungarians did in 1956 and the Czechs did in 1968. They did not want to be subjected to a one-party dictatorship and a form of totalitarianism which says that you can only think in one way—in a way that is measured by your adherence to a philosophy based on Marx, Lenin and Stalin, in a way which admits no other thought at all.

The Hungarian people have demonstrated in the 17 years since 1989 just how good they are at doing business and just how excellent they are at building on the native capacities of their people to build a modern, new and vibrant country that has been at the very leading edge of the Eastern bloc countries that have emerged from the grip of the Warsaw Pact and moved into the full light of freedom. These days, under the Bush doctrine, it is easy to say that freedom and democracy should be there for everyone in the world, but it is enormously hard to construct. Historically, the first thing that people had to do was to break free from a tyranny that was not only exercised throughout eastern Europe; it was a tyranny that had its adherents throughout the rest of the world.

The movement of communism worldwide as an ideology was extremely broad and very deep. The year of 1956 was the year that Nikita Kruschev made his speech to the Communist Party congress in Moscow. He laid open the nature of Joseph Djugashvili Stalin’s regime and the fact that it had murdered tens of millions of its own people and had subjected people across Europe to an absolutely unnecessary brutal regime. The people in Hungary were some of the first victims of the attempt to escape from that. The depth of feeling that was around then was expressed by what happened during the Melbourne Olympic Games. In those Olympic Games in the water polo arena, Hungary came up against the Soviet Union. That pool ran with blood, as the streets in Hungary ran with blood when the Soviets subjected the Hungarian people to their revolution being crushed out of existence.

The member for Fairfax has done the parliament a great service in bringing to our notice the 50th anniversary of this revolution and the fact that people can strive in the darkest conditions. As Arthur Koestler put it in Darkness at Noon: it is what prevailed in those communist societies, where there was no other way to see the world but what the regime imposed. It took enormous courage to stand up against the regime, just as it takes enormous courage this very day and these very months for the people in Vietnam to continue their fight to run their own country in their own way. I absolutely commend this motion to the House.

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