Mike Kelly (Eden-Monaro, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is a pleasure to speak on this motion on the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, put forward by my good friend and colleague the member for Berowra. We've been collaborating on many things in this parliament, including on suicide prevention, and he is also a very assiduous contributor to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security, as is our friend and colleague the member for Holt. I'd also like to endorse the comments by my friend the member for Bennelong, who, rightly, concentrated on the very important humanitarian issues at stake in North Korea.

North Korea is a horrendous regime in many, many respects. We have heard about the issues they have in relation to their domestic population. No people in the world have suffered more in recent years than the population of North Korea—through starvation, mistreatment and horrendous repression. But the pressing issue of the moment is the North Korean pursuit of this nuclear capability and their missile technology. Certainly it is important for the region, for our government, to really engage actively now through a process of a full-court press of diplomacy and to keep cool, calm, and calculated in relation to those measures.

We have a lot of regional architecture whereby we should be incredibly active in marshalling pressure on North Korea. In particular, as has often been aired in this discussion, our relationship with China should be leveraged to the full, for them to obviously use their extremely important relations and connections with North Korea to achieve a good outcome here. I endorse what's been said by former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd about stepping back and looking at the grand bargain that we should be seeking to strike—identifying the bigger Chinese issues and interests that are at stake and seeing what we can leverage in relation to neutralising the peninsula. That can be done in a lot of ways in respect of the interests of China—not having foreign troops close to their border, et cetera. Certainly they have massive economic issues at stake, and it is in their significant interest to make sure that we have a peaceful outcome and that the trade and economic strength of the region is not undermined by the uncertainty created by North Korea.

The ANZUS alliance has been discussed in this space and is a very important part of our national security structure. We would be closely involved in working through issues related to any attack on the United States and would support our ally in defending itself. It is also important that very clear messages be sent to North Korea about the willingness of all of us to defend ourselves against these heinous threats from North Korea. But North Korea is not just a threat in our region. One of the things I'm particularly concerned about is the way North Korea cooperates so closely with Iran, another heinous regime, which brutalises gay and lesbian people, oppresses women and is a negative influence through all the tactics they employ in the region. We had news just today that they are investigating another $520 million in their missile technology, and it's been very evident that over the years they've cooperated extremely closely with North Korea on exchanging technology. All of their early missiles were in fact just straight copies of North Korean missiles, and the consequences of a nuclear armed and missile-efficient Iran is greatly concerning.

When I was in Strategy Group in Defence, it alarmed me greatly to learn of the correspondence that passed between President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and President Merkel of Germany, where, effectively, he commented favourably on how Germany had dealt with the issue of the Jews during World War II and was keen on entering into a dialogue about how the problem could be resolved in relation to the remaining Jewish population in Palestine—a 10-page letter that was extremely disturbing. It shows the potential that there is in an Iranian regime that is always going to be vulnerable to the particular whims, fantasies and distortions of a leader at any given time within that anti-democratic structure that they maintain.

So North Korea and Iran are part of that same dimension of the threat to the global peace and security that we seek to maintain. I really urge the government and urge members to stay abreast of this issue and to advocate, cohesively and together, an effective outcome. There is time. We should be treating this issue with the seriousness that it deserves, and I support any government effort to diplomatically achieve a good outcome on this issue.

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