Nick Champion (Spence, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It's a great privilege to speak on this very important motion brought by the member for Adelaide, who I know is very passionate about, if you like, voicing the interests and concerns of his local constituents of Kurdish background, as am I, and the member for Makin. Many of those people have come to our state fleeing the persecution that speakers in this place have spoken about so eloquently.

Local Kurdish people are great Australians. They are often business people. They're community leaders. They're very friendly. We're happy to have them. But we wish that the Kurdish people could live in peace, preferably with some government of their own, whether that be some autonomous region or a nation of their own. There was a time in this parliament when you could not go a day without talking about ISIS in some way. That has now largely vanished from our national consciousness with the defeat of the regime. But we have to recognise that the ISIS regime was not defeated by ground troops from Western nations but, rather, local militia fighters like the Kurds. They are the people who defeated the extremist regime that occupied vast parts of Iraq and Syria. Their bravery should have been respected and celebrated.

Instead, what we have seen is the most dangerous of actions—and we now see this pretty regularly—unilateral actions by leaders, seemingly with a very narrow regard to nation interest. We saw it in the first instance with President Trump's withdrawal of US troops from this region. The flipside of that withdrawal was the Turkish intervention. This intervention was first flagged at the United Nations in leaders week, with President Erdogan proposing a 'safe zone' for refugees in Syria. We now know that was simply another way of masking a military intervention in this part of the world to basically push the Kurds from this region and perhaps replace them with other people. The United Nations is not involved and international observers are not involved and the whole thing is shrouded in the fog of war. We now that when that happens, tragically, extrajudicial killings occur, civilians are targeted and people are subject to ethnic cleansing. That is what happens in these circumstances.

What we should call upon the Turkish government to do is restrain itself. The previous speaker very eloquently mapped out the fact that this will be solely their responsibility if it goes wrong. What we do need is for this government to restrain itself, for the use of armed forces to be halted, for international observers to be allowed in, for the United Nations to play a role in the resettlement of any refugees and for international law to be paramount. Sadly, what we see more and more in the world is unilateral actions by countries, and these actions will lead to tragic consequences, not just for the people who are on end of the gun, if you like, but also for the nations committing these acts themselves. Turkey has a long history of responsible government, of being a responsible international citizen, and we can only hope that that tradition prevails against what have been very serious and alarming actions by the current Turkish government.

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