Don Randall (Canning, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I too would like to support this resolution brought to this chamber by the member for Reid. I congratulate him for doing so and all the other members who have spoken, or are about to speak, on this motion. Your words are profound, and we are here to support the human rights of the people of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

There is no doubt that these human rights abuses are well documented. However, unless we continue to ventilate them, as has been done today, and particularly in supporting the United Nations Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, whose report was released in March 2014 by former Justice Kirby, we will not be doing our job.

I want to talk about some anecdotal evidence because late last year I led a delegation to Japan and South Korea. One of the clerks at the table, Mr Jerome Brown, was the delegation secretary, and he will confirm much of what I have to say in terms of some of the observations that we made. North Korea is a country that has been run and controlled by a tyrannical family dynasty since 1948. It started with Kim Il Sung from 1948 to 1994, 46 years, then his son Kim Jong Il from 1994 to 2011, 17 years. Now we have Kim Jong Un, who has been in place since 2011. This family company, which essentially runs North Korea on behalf of its own interest, does so by persecuting, starving and treating its own people with greatest of disrespect and the maximum amount of abuse possible.

It is true that they are starving. We went to the demilitarised zone. We looked at some of the issues. We stood on the border and looked across into Korea. Bizarrely, they have a convoy which leaves South Korea and goes into North Korea on a daily basis. They have to be escorted militarily as a convoy so that some of the families can go there and visit their relatives, as we have already heard. But what is even more bizarre is that there are companies now operating out of South Korea which take day trips of tourists to go and see the circus which is North Korea. Very expensively, they sell places for people to go and look at the mad, crazy, despotic circus which is North Korea.

The current leader, as I said, is Mr Kim Jong Un, with his great bouffant hairdo. It seems to be a sort of family tradition that you have to have that sort of hairdo to follow the family traditions. His greatest claim to fame is that his best friend is Dennis Rodman, the crazy, body pierced, heavily tattooed ex American basketballer. They sit there and smoke huge Cuban cigars and drink the best cognac while the people starve.

To that end, as our secretary will tell you, the people of South Korea who have family there and feel desperately for those people living there do strange things like get chocolate biscuits and tie them to helium balloons, wait for the prevailing winds and release them so that the people of North Korea can taste some luxury for once in their life. What is even more bizarre is that these chocolate biscuits are now becoming a currency in North Korea. If they get them, they can actually trade them and use them as some currency to buy proper food. This is just out of control.

To demonstrate how desperate they are: a former South Korean President along with the Hyundai company decided that they would try and help them develop a cattle industry. There are virtually no trees or grass because the people are eating it. They took 2,000 cattle in a great cattle convoy, which some people may well have read about, to go and start this cattle-breeding industry to feed the people of North Korea. Sadly, they ate the cattle. There is no cattle industry left.

Besides the fact that the North Koreans are persecuting and starving their own people, there is a greater responsibility from the neighbours in the region. Yes, North Korea can afford atomic weapons. Yes, they can afford great ships of destruction and the military that is in place, but they cannot afford to feed their own people.

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