Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is a true privilege for any Australian to spend some time with our serving personnel in the Middle East—something afforded to me and two of my colleagues, Ann Sudmalis and Andrew Broad. We had a few senators tag along as well: Sue Lines, Sarah Hanson-Young and Jacinta Collins. What we learnt there was that Australia is playing an absolutely indispensable role. The future of global peace, for this generation, will rest in Middle East solutions, and in Afghanistan Australia is doing an incredible job. Many of our service personnel are very, very young. They spend six months away from home—in this case, away over Christmas.

But, in the broader picture, Australia is investing around $100 million a year to build the capacity of both the domestic police and the serving personnel of the Afghan National Army. This is critical to stability. The view we often see in the media—that things are falling apart in Afghanistan—is not correct. The Taliban are active in only 15 of the 200 provinces in Afghanistan. They have only about 10 per cent popular support. Since August, when there were around three bombings, there have only been five—one of which, tragically, was just yesterday; 20 locals were killed. But Australia is playing an indispensable role—if for no other reason, in avoiding the pure Americanisation of the region, which would lead to, I think, a suboptimal outcome were there not these other 44 coalition partners working in the Middle East, though, of course, only about $1 billion is invested by non-US coalition partners out of the $5.7 billion that is invested annually. Australians here are doing a great job.