Roger Price (Chifley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Last year, in the company of some other Labor federal members of parliament, I was pleased to visit Israel and the Palestinian Authority. There was lots to see there: lots that gave me great hope and some sadness. We went to see the security fence or wall, as it is called, that separates Israel from the Palestinian Authority. I must say that it is really sad that there is such a physical separation of the two, but I understand the security reasons behind why it has been done. The fact is that it has slowed the rate of suicide bombers.

Since the start of the intifada, 144 suicide bombings have been carried out against Israeli targets in Israel and the territories. These attacks killed 515 people, including Israeli civilians and soldiers, foreigners and Palestinians and wounded more than 3,300 people. In fact, we went to the hospital where currently Prime Minister Sharon is recovering from his massive stroke to look at that hospital in general but more specifically to look at its emergency procedures for handling disasters, including suicide bombings. While we were at the hospital, we were informed that there had been an alert, but that alert, fortunately, did not result in a bombing.

I think the most confronting thing I was involved in there was talking to the father, who was formerly an Australian citizen, of a teenage suicide bombing victim. She was obviously a terrific girl, and I felt that he really had not got over the loss of his daughter. But parents never do, and to lose a child in a suicide attack must be very, very hard. At the time, I was completely unaware of this wheat for bullets scandal and the fact that the AWB, through Alia, a Jordanian trucking company without any trucks, was depositing money in the Rafidain Bank of Iraq and that this was the same bank that was paying $US25,000 to every family of a suicide bomber. I have always felt intensely proud to be Australian, and never more so than when travelling overseas as a representative of our country. To be frank with you, I do not know what I would have said to that father had I known of this scandal. I am deeply embarrassed and shamed that Australian money has through various means apparently ended up in the same account that pays suicide bombers.

It is true that there is the Cole commission, and I am sure that there will be some unhappy findings made against the AWB, but the commission cannot find against any diplomat, any member of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade or any minister about these things. I think that this is a great shame. I say to Australian parliamentarians who may again be hosted in Israel that I sincerely hope that we have acted honourably and decently to get to the bottom of this scandal, because it shames us all. It makes me feel no better being a member of the opposition rather than the government. I would sincerely like to see the Cole commission of inquiry’s terms extended. I want very much to be able to look an Israeli father in the eye and say, ‘We may have done wrong, but we fully investigated it and brought to account those that needed to be.’