Gai Brodtmann (Canberra, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

In the late nineties, I worked on the Middle East desk in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. One of the professional highlights of that time was being involved in the normalisation of Australia's relationship with Iran. As a result of the Mykonos affair in the early nineties, our relationship had been relatively cool. We had a mission in Tehran, but the level of significant engagement and dialogue was limited. That all changed with the election of the reformist and liberalising President Khatami in 1997, with 70 per cent of the vote. Despite concern from some of our allies, the then Minister for Trade, Tim Fischer, led the first ministerial delegation to Iran in 1999, and I was part of that delegation. The delegation comprised a cross-section of the business community and we negotiated a number of agreements, including a banking and finance agreement, in which I took part.

The Iran under President Khatami is very different from the Iran under President Ahmadinejad. While I am not in any way suggesting that we did not have any concerns with President Khatami's Iran—we did, particularly with regard to human rights—President Khatami's Iran was seeking to engage with the world. President Ahmadinejad's Iran is seeking to antagonise. The Iran of today is hawkish, to say the least, with its nuclear ambitions and human rights abuses, where journalists and political activists are being arbitrarily jailed, including President Ahmadinejad's media adviser recently, and public executions continue. Australia continues to raise concerns with Iran directly on these issues, here in Canberra and in Tehran.

I also lament the fate of Iran's people, who are not just repressed by the Iranian political system but disenfranchised from it. These people—many of them bravely demonstrated after the 2009 election—live in fear of speaking out against the regime. Earlier this year, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei told a gathering that politicians should not make claims or insinuate that previous Iranian elections were not free or fair. I presume he said this because there is an overwhelming belief that Iran does not hold free and fair elections. The Iranian leadership will not harbour any criticism of its electoral system, even though both the opposition candidates in the 2009 presidential race boldly stood up and said the vote was rigged. And what happened when these opposition candidates questioned the fairness of the elections? They were put under house arrest.

Less than a month ago it was reported that Ayatollah Sobhani was calling for the general elections to be scrapped and the next president to be hand-picked. As analysts noted, this is probably a result of the fear within the Iranian leadership that the national protests and uprising that followed the far from free 2009 election will happen again. My heart goes out to the millions of Iranians who want to see fair elections with opposition parties able to robustly and openly campaign without intimidation, arrest or worse.

Unfortunately, I cannot support the member’s motion, because he has rejected an offer by the government to agree to stronger text condemning the Iranian government and our concerns about its nuclear ambitions and human rights record. This seems to boil down to one reference—the reference in the member’s draft to Australia’s participation at the NAM summit. Australian officials participate in this summit for good reason: to prosecute a broad range of Australian foreign policy interests with the international community. It is called dialogue. Officials did not participate in the NAM meetings themselves, were not present during any speeches by members of the Iranian government and met only with ministers and officials in the margins of this meeting.

Australia’s position on Iran has been clear and strong over several years and there is no basis for any claim that our efforts to isolate Iran have been compromised. Our robust sanctions measures, our public commentary and our role in the UN Security Council speak for themselves. We wanted to support this motion and could easily have achieved a bipartisan motion that represented our collective interests and concerns on this important issue. This is simply another example of the opposition compromising a very important foreign policy matter, a matter on which Australia has a strong record, in a vain attempt to score political points.

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