Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Until this very moment, I was not sure how I would start this speech. I have to say that, probably like many people, I feel conflicted. I do not think anyone wants our soldiers in a place of danger. I think that in our hearts we all want them home. But unfortunately these decisions are quite often made with our heads. I would just like to say upfront that I believe absolutely that the government of the day, our present government, and our military leaders, have made the decision to be where we are for all the right reasons, and I support their decision absolutely.

I, along with Philip Ruddock and Senator Fielding, was extremely privileged to visit Afghanistan earlier this year as part of an exchange program between the Australian Defence Force and the parliament. We were there for nine days, plus two days of travel. We were well and truly on the ground. We mixed with the troops at every level: in the gym, in the mess and waiting between one event and another. We were briefed by General Petraeus and we were briefed by the departing leader of the Dutch forces and at the highest level of the Australian forces. We were incredibly privileged to be there.

That was my third brief stint with the military. I was with the NORFORCE up in the Northern Territory on the Tiwi Islands for a week a couple of years ago and I did a week’s basic training at Kapooka last year. I have to say that I did not go to Oruzgan province specifically in order to consider whether or not our role in Afghanistan was right or not. I actually went, as my colleagues did, to learn more about our Defence forces so that we, as members of parliament, could provide them with the support they need in the way they carry out their duties.

I want to say that, like my colleagues, the one thing you absolutely find when you spend time with our forces is that they are rightly seen as one of the best-trained forces in the world. They are exceptionally committed, unbelievably well trained and some of the best troops in the world at the kind of work that we are doing in Oruzgan.

They are some of the nicest people you will meet, actually—some of the most polite people and with an extraordinary sense of honour and duty. Even though I was raised in a military suburb, I continue to be amazed at the decisions these men and women make when they decide to serve our country in the way that they do. For those of us who spend small periods of time in relative safety in places even like Oruzgan, we will never know what they live through so that we can live lives that are not touched by the violence that touches so many civilians in other countries around the world. We owe them our greatest debt.

We were there when the election was called, by the way—just as an aside. The election was called on day 5. We were not allowed to tell people we were going in the first place and we were not allowed to tell people we were there, so the three of us disappeared from the radar for 11 days, including the first week of the campaign. That was an interesting time for us and for the soldiers, by the way, because they very much wanted to discuss an election that was happening a long way away. For them, of course, the decisions made by government profoundly affect how well they are able to do the job that they choose to do for us. That was an interesting time.

We arrived just in time for the ramp ceremony for Private Nathan Bewes. We arrived at the tarmac at almost the same time as he was being escorted by his comrades into the Hercules to fly back. That well and truly introduced us to life in Oruzgan, and if we had not already noticed when we got on the charter flight with troops going there for the first time, we well and truly began to come to terms with what life is like for our soldiers working for us as they do in Oruzgan.

As I said, I was in relative safety, as we all were in the compound at Tarin Kowt. I shared a chalet—as it is called, quite wrongly I think, but chalet is the word they use—with three female soldiers. Again, I was able to talk with them and many others about the way they felt about being there, and I want to share that with you more than anything else today. It was the chalet which was subject to a rocket attack two weeks before I arrived, and I did spend quite a bit of time in body armour. It was a truly amazing experience. The camp there could be described as a hellhole. It is 40 degrees plus, and there is so much dust you can barely see 300 metres. Because of the philosophy of the Dutch and the Australians in particular, the camp is not built in any permanent way. There are no permanent structures. The trade training centre where the members of the military train some of the local kids in basic trade skills does have some permanent structures, mainly built by the kids themselves. The police training compound has permanent structures and the camp of the 4th Brigade, which is the Afghan army, has permanent structures. But the rest of the camp, quite rightly, does not.

The conditions in which the troops live there on constant alert for rocket attacks have to be experienced to be believed. One of the first things you do when you get there is to learn to apply a tourniquet to one arm with your other arm. Australia has a very clever invention, a tourniquet which is essentially a rag and a stick, except it is made out of velcro. It is very clever. The assumption is always that you only have one arm at that point. You wear that tourniquet strapped to your chest for most of the rest of your trip. It is your basic piece of equipment. This is a very dangerous place and some of our troops who provide the advance movement for their comrades in searching out the IEDs live with a level of danger that would break many of us and will break many of them. Again, it is an extremely dangerous place.

The overwhelming sense that you get from the troops when you are there is that they believe that is where they should be. These are extraordinary men and women. They were free to talk to us; there was no commanding officer with us. We were wandering and we could talk to anyone, and they were free to talk to us. And they did. But there is no doubt in my mind that the overwhelming feeling I got from the men and women there is that they believed that they absolutely should be there, that it was a just fight, that they were winning, that they were making real headway and that we had to stay the course.

I would say though that that is not a reason why a government should choose to stay. These are good people. These people will choose to defend the weak and choose to stay if they think there is work to be done. That is their nature and we are lucky to have them. But I want the parliament to know that when you talk to these men and women they absolutely believe that it is where they should be.

The other overwhelming thing that you find when you get there is that while we in Australia talk about Australian troops in Afghanistan, this is an extraordinary international force. The troops there talk about ISAF and they talk about the international forces more often than they talk about the Australian force. We are, of course, part of quite a large force—the International Security Assistance Force under the UN Security Council mandate. There are 47 nations in that force, and we met people from around the world and, again, had the opportunity to talk to them about their contribution.

The Australian contribution is quite specific. It is about training the Afghan 4th Brigade. That is essentially what we do. There is an overwhelming understanding among the allies in Afghanistan that the role that we have there is making sure that Afghanistan can manage itself in a safe environment—that if we were to leave now the Taliban would be back in great numbers and that we are actually winning and driving them back. We are driving them and pursuing them into areas that they have not been before, as they move back up into the hills, which are more dangerous places. There is in Afghanistan a thing called the ‘fighting season’, when the fighting becomes much more aggressive. There are times of the year when there is very little fighting. As odd as it sounds, that happens to coincide with the harvest of the poppy crop. When the harvest is on, the fighting is not. So it is a very strange place in many ways, but there is no doubt that our troops believe that we are actually making serious progress and doing a job that is absolutely worth doing.

There is also a general sense of satisfaction with the equipment which is provided. I know we have had some debate about that but, again, my overwhelming impression is that we have some exceptionally good equipment there, which the troops simply would not and could not do without. They have nothing but praise for the standard of the equipment that they have and are looking forward to the chopper support particularly from the US. As the Dutch have moved out and the US have moved in to support us in Oruzgan, they have been particularly pleased with the US chopper support. The comments made were that if you are going to be supported by anyone in a chopper, the US will go in when no-one else will, so they are the ones that you want on your side particularly if they are picking up someone who is injured. They will go in under fire, under any circumstances, to bring a person out. There have been circumstances where Australians would have lost their lives if not for the support of that particularly extraordinary group of Americans who fly their choppers.

There are many things I would like to say about what I learned, but there are many things I cannot talk about. In fact, even my schedule was confidential and I had to hand it back when I left. So I have had to try and remember the many people I met. Many of my photos were deleted as well, and I cannot even tell you what was in them that caused them to be deleted. There are many things that I simply cannot talk about, so I am just trying to give you the overall impression of it.

It was a delight to meet the Afghanis themselves. I have a very large Afghani population in my community. Many are Hazaras but there are also Sunnis and Shiites. I have people representing the whole Afghani population in Parramatta. There are many Hazara refugees who tell me when I meet them that Oruzgan was their homeland. So this place of 40-degree heat and desert, which has wonderful green zones which I was not allowed to go into, was their homeland. When I talk to them I can see that flash of grief and longing in their eyes, because this is a place where they cannot return for the moment.

I said to some of the Afghanis there, ‘Tell me what Afghanistan is like when the things that should not be there are not—when there is no opium, no Taliban and no military.’ It is an incredible shame that many of them seem to have forgotten. Their lives have been so difficult for so long that that memory of what their country is without these terrible things has faded, and their lives are based on surviving day-to-day. When I get a break in November I am looking forward to sitting down with some of my Hazaras and talking to them about their memory of Oruzgan, which they clearly remember with the greatest affection. What has happened to that country, when you actually go there and see it, is the most extraordinary tragedy. Again, I can only stress that our troops themselves believe that we absolutely should be there.

I am told that the Taliban are one of the worst enemies that we have ever fought. They are unbelievably flexible. They come from a place in a world quite different from ours. In the West, you can choose one path. You can say, ‘This is what I am going to do,’ and you can go there. In places like Afghanistan only a mad person would choose one path. A sensible person has several options and walks several paths at any time. The Taliban manage to skip from one to another very quickly, which makes them a very flexible enemy which changes its patterns and its shapes as it needs to. There are people who fight with the Taliban who will stop fighting with the Taliban if there are other options. Again, this is because the people themselves will change paths as required. This is not a form of corruption, nor a form of disloyalty. It is a cultural pattern which comes from a country which is so harsh that you cannot survive with one goal; you need several layers at once. I think they are beginning to come to terms with the Western way of thinking in Afghanistan, but it makes for a very interesting place generally. I am running out of time. I would like to keep going, because it is an extraordinary place with extraordinary people, but my time has finished. (Time expired)

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