Mike Kelly (Eden-Monaro, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Hansard source

I commend the member for Cowan on his comments and his heartfelt appreciation for the services of Sergeant Wood. One of the great things about parliament is the way we are able to rally around our troops in a bipartisan way. One of the signal beauties of this parliament is that we can do that. It is based on an understanding and a knowledge of the people we are talking about. We share the experiences of having to go to the ramp ceremonies together and meeting and dealing with the families and getting out there and meeting with the men and women of the ADF as well. It has been tremendous in these last few years in particular to see the participation by members of parliament in the ADF's parliamentary exchange program. Many members have voluntarily taken the opportunity to get out there and meet with all our men and woman and understand all they go through not only in the service in operations but in all of the hard work and sacrifices they make to even be in the position to deploy into those environments. So I salute all members of parliament who have participated in that and have shared the experiences of our men and women, including, of course, the member for Kooyong, who is here today, who was with me most recently on that exchange program in Afghanistan.

Now we come to salute the service, the life and the achievements of Sergeant Brett Wood, and it is so fitting that we do so, because if there is one individual who really epitomises all that is fine, all that is good in the men and women of our defence forces it certainly is Sergeant Brett Wood. This was in every way an outstanding soldier and a soldier who was one of our excellent senior NCOs. How much do the Australian Army and the Australian Defence Force depend on the high quality of our NCOs? In these sorts of environments in Afghanistan they often talk about the role of the strategic corporal, the strategic NCO, because these environments place so much pressure, so much responsibility on the decisions that the corporals and sergeants make on the ground. They can make or break a mission by what they do and how they perform.

Sergeant Brett Wood was a man who typifies a lot of the reservists in our organisation today who have had previous experience in the Regular Army and in his case coming from Ferntree Gully in Victoria he joined the Regular Army in 1996. After recruit training he was part of one of our finest units, the 6th Battalion of the Royal Australian Regiment, which itself has a wonderful history going back to its days in Vietnam and Long Tan, a very storied regiment that I was proud to have a lot of association with. He went on to undertake the very demanding, very rigorous commando selection and training processes which are incredibly demanding of the individual in every possible way, mental and physical stress. He met the standards of excellence above and beyond what we normally ask for from the men and women of our Defence Force to become part of the 4th Battalion of the Royal Australian Regiment, now known as 2 Commando, in November 1998.

The member for Cowan has mentioned his operational service in Bougainville and Timor and Iraq. He was involved in his third tour of his operational experience in Afghanistan when he met his untimely death in the circumstances of an improvised explosive device detonation. These devices are such an insidious weapon. People should appreciate the extra stress and strain that that adds to just the daily experience of patrolling in that environment, never knowing when you will encounter one of these devices and whether it will mean the loss of limbs or your death, knowing that in some cases serious maiming is a worse fate to endure than death itself. It is an incredibly stressful experience to go through and we ask our men and women to do that on a daily basis in Afghanistan, and they do it. While we were in Afghanistan just recently, the member for Kooyong and I were briefed on the latest developments in the improvised explosive device tactics of the enemy. It is something that we focus on very heavily in terms of our countermeasures. We have a counter-IED task force in our weapons technical intelligence teams constantly working on ways to improve the way we approach dealing with these insidious weapons, which it must be said injure and kill far more civilians than they do the military personnel in Afghanistan. It is a devastating weapon for all those civilians as well as our own dearly appreciated and loved casualties. Sergeant Brett Wood was a special soldier. As mentioned by the member for Cowan, he received the Medal for Gallantry which indicates what a courageous man he was. This medal ranks second in the gallantry decorations and is awarded to military personnel for acts of gallantry in action or hazardous circumstances. It was a richly deserved decoration for the performance that Sergeant Brett Wood rendered in very difficult and demanding circumstances in the field.

He was in every way a professional, in every way an outstanding soldier, and he will be a great loss to our organisation. Every time you come here to speak—I know the member for Cowan will feel the same way, and I am currently still a member of the reserves as well—you always feel like you have lost someone in the family when we experience this. It never gets any easier. Of course, it will be doubly so for the members of Sergeant Brett Wood's family and particularly his loving wife and family.

We take to our heart, our thoughts and our prayers his family today and we make that commitment to be with them through this. They have made some wonderful statements, as we have heard from the Prime Minister today. That is one of the very special experiences which I think we have all had in dealing with these families—how courageous they are in the face of these losses. They have almost universally indicated that they feel their sons were doing an important job and that they would like the nation to maintain faith with our men and women in the field for the work that they are doing.

They are incredibly courageous people. Other members of the commando fraternity have had dealings with families through the loss of Private Greg Sher, who was another wonderful example of that outstanding fraternity, and his family is just so impressive and so inspiring. I continue to be in contact with his parents who are outstanding members of the community in Melbourne and proud members of the Jewish community there.

I salute you, Sergeant Brett Wood. You will not be forgotten. You have written an outstanding page in the fine traditions and history of the Australian Army, which has a tradition full of so many wonderful stories. Your story will stand out in that collection.

As the member for Cowan mentioned, in the circumstances of these losses we reflect on where we are at in Afghanistan and whether those losses continue to be worth while and continue to mean something. Certainly, having just returned from Afghanistan, we have seen some tremendous signs of progress on the ground. I feel it is one of the proud achievements of the government that we were able to reorient the strategy that was being applied on the ground in Afghanistan. We see there now a deeper understanding of how we apply counterinsurgency tactics in a situation like this.

It is one of the reasons we created the Civil-Military Centre of Excellence in Queanbeyan, which is doing an outstanding job of reorienting the approach of a whole-of-government strategy for environments like this. We see that perfectly illustrated on the ground in Afghanistan in the way the provincial reconstruction team—which I should emphasise is a multinational effort directed primarily by the efforts of AusAID personnel—is at the centre of the primary scheme of manoeuvre of the commanders in Combined Team Uruzgan.

This is exactly how the mission should be shaped. Instead of being an orphan child or an adjunct to that mission, the mission is wrapped around them because this is the way that we achieve our ticket out of Afghanistan. We build the capacity of governance, of rule of law, of the security sector in Afghanistan and we can get our people out of harm's way. We cannot leave it—as has been said so often—as a vacuum for those terrible terrorism elements to continue to exploit as they had prior to operations in 2001, when they had the full resources and capability of the state to support their effort.

We observed some of the wonderful projects that are underway there—the Sorkh Murghab mosque in Oruzgan that has been completed and is in operation; the wonderful girls school, a beautiful facility, that is not far from completion and that will cater for 750 children; the boys school, which is already complete; and the trade and training centre, at which our engineers are operating and training Afghans, sending them out equipped with tools to go straight into jobs in the construction industry. The wonderful work our Australian Federal Police are doing at the Defence Police Training Centre is starting to make some progress now in an area which has been problematic. But it is one area where we are seeing signs of improvement and I really salute the work of our Australian Federal Police in that effort in difficult circumstances. There has also been great progress in creating that security bubble within which good governance can flourish.

We were at Patrol Base Wali, which is seeing that integration with Afghan security forces in increasing the security space beyond where it has ever previously been in our experience in Afghanistan. There has been tremendous progress in that respect in the last eight months. The key to the effort there is whether that can be sustained through the so-called fighting season of the summer months. It will be challenging and we will face the risk of further casualties, but if those gains can be held during this period we will have made significant strides towards ultimate success for our efforts and for our blood and treasure in Oruzgan province.

The proof of the pudding for our efforts there comes from comments that Combined Team Uruzgan has received from other sources in Afghanistan, particularly General Terry, the Commander of Regional Command South, who has singled out Oruzgan province and said, 'That is what success looks like, they are on the right track; look at what is being done there.' That is the message that I would emphasise and get out there because what is being done in Oruzgan province is not being completely replicated throughout the rest of Afghanistan. We do need to improve that civil-military integration. The way in which that operation is being conducted in Oruzgan needs to be replicated as a model right across the country if we are to advance this cause at a more rapid rate.

The main mission in which our military is involved in the training of the Afghan National Army is probably making the greatest progress of all elements of our activities there. This tragic incident that has occurred in the last couple of days would give people cause to consider whether or not we are succeeding there and whether it is worth our effort, but the Afghan National Army 4th Brigade has achieved great standards and improvements and the Kandaks are being assessed rigorously. Just recently, one of them was given a very high rating for the progress he had made. So we are making progress. We will endure from time to time setbacks of this nature, which will lead us to question and test the resolve of our mentors and trainers on the ground in relation to how they interact with their colleagues in the Afghan National Army. That will be a challenge for them, but they are disciplined professionals and they will put this behind them and move on to achieve ultimate success.

Over in Afghanistan we also visited the men and women who are serving in embedded positions in Kandahar. We should not forget those people. They are often left out of references to what is being achieved there and what is going on. They are doing a fantastic job in the embedded arrangements they have with other components of the ISAF effort in Afghanistan and it is so important that they are doing this job because they are value-adding in key positions. I salute their service.

Finally, before I finish today, this is a day where we have also experienced the changeover of leadership in the Australian Defence Force. I firstly pay tribute to the outgoing service chiefs, particularly the CDF who has been an honest, decent and highly competent commander of this organisation through two terms which have been incredibly demanding, and I know that he has put body and soul into this effort. He was a fine man for me to have worked for in the Defence Force and to have worked with in the Defence portfolio. I wish him and his wife all the best for their future. I also salute the selections that the Minister for Defence has made. General Hurley is one of the finest men I have ever worked with, a man of outstanding honesty, who always looks to do the right thing and is incredibly competent in that. He understands the challenges we face in our theatres in Afghanistan and elsewhere, having been a commander on the ground in Somalia of the 1st Battalion Royal Australian Regiment. He is an outstanding choice, as are his support service chiefs: the Vice Chief of the Defence Force, Mark Binskin—a wonderful man as well and a fine leader of men and women; the Chief of Navy, Admiral Griggs; and General Morrison, who will also do a fine job, as will Brown in relation to the Air Force. So I salute those selections and I wish them the best and look forward to helping them in any way I can.

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