Clare O'Neil (Hotham, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Justice) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today, in sadness and in anger, to express my deep concerns about the ongoing human rights abuses that are occurring in Cambodia. I do so because I hold this incredibly great privilege of representing so many thousands of Cambodian Australians in this parliament. MPs will note that this is not the first time I've stood in the parliament and raised these issues. In September 2017 I addressed a public gathering of hundreds of Cambodian Australians at Springvale town hall. Last year I and other members of parliament addressed a similar public gathering here on the lawns of Parliament House. I stood alongside the Deputy Leader of the Opposition, Mu Sochua, here at Parliament House, as she expressed her deepest distress and sadness about what is a growing political crisis in Cambodia.

The reason I am again on my feet on this critically important issue for our region is that nothing is changing. In fact, things are getting worse by the minute. We know that Cambodia has a general election due on 29 June 2018. We are not doing enough as a parliament, we are not doing enough as a country, to make absolutely clear our view to the Cambodian government that there must be a guarantee of free and fair elections in Cambodia in June this year. The current Cambodian Prime Minister, Hun Sen, stated late last year that the 2018 national election result does not require international recognition to be valid. This is the latest sign of his determination to continue to hold power after almost 33 years in office. I spoke last year about what I regard as an absolute outrage against democracy, when the opposition party in Cambodia was disbanded and the seats held by those opposition party leaders were distributed amongst other parties. Over half of Cambodia's opposition MPs fled the country.

Cambodia became a multiparty democracy in 1993. There was a flourishing of democracy. Since then, there have been people who want to hold power in Cambodia, who continue to try to suppress freedom of expression and the political rights of the Cambodian people. Last year, the Cambodian opposition leader, Kem Sokha, was arrested on so-called treason charges. He was charged with treason on the basis of a speech that he made in Melbourne, in my electorate, back in 2013. In July 2013, the last general election was held in Cambodia.

There was a fear that those elections would not be held fairly, and that was founded reasonably, I think, on the unwillingness of the Cambodian government to implement the recommendations on corruption and electoral fraud that had been made by the United Nations in 2012, and the fact that Sam Rainsy, the opposition leader in Cambodia, was not give a free right to stand in that election. What we saw, in that instance, was that the election quickly turned to civil unrest. The worst example of that was a perfectly peaceful protest, regarding an industrial relations issue in Cambodia, where union members were shot at and killed by police who were acting under the instruction of the Cambodian government. After that, 20,000 people marched in protest against these actions, and they were met with some very heavy-handed treatment.

We love democracy in this country, but we don't understand the fight that goes on in countries in our region to have the most basic rights—rights that we take completely for granted in this country. The Cambodian people have had to put up with more than any people around the world should ever have to deal with. The Khmer Rouge ruled that country in the most violent and oppressive way for a long time. Australia was pivotal in trying to establish a free and fair democracy in that country. We did so much to try to make this happen, and one of my predecessors representing the south-eastern suburbs of Melbourne, Gareth Evans, when he was foreign minister, was critical in bringing about democratic rule in Cambodia.

People thought that the Cambodians wouldn't come out to vote because they would be so scared—these were very reasonable fears—of violence. But people who were there on the day of the first free democratic election in Cambodia speak with such emotion about having gone to polling booths and having seen lines of hundreds of people waiting for hours at a time for the opportunity to have their say.

That was a country on the rise. What we are demanding is that Cambodia go back to the path towards democracy—a full and fair democracy. That is what I will continue to pressure the government to ask for and demand from the Cambodians.

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