Ted O'Brien (Fairfax, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Australia stands with the United States of America and Australia stands against the government of Democratic People's Republic of Korea. An editorial in the Global Times, published by the Chinese Communist Party's official People's Daily, ran last week saying, 'China should make clear that if North Korea launches missiles that threaten US soil first and the US retaliates, China will stay neutral. If the US and South Korea carry out strikes and try to overthrow the North Korean regime and change the political pattern of the Korean Peninsula, China will prevent them from doing so.' While these words from a Chinese state-run newspaper have been analysed by many a Western commentator over recent days, few have sought to glean the message China may be sending North Korea, instead focusing on China's likely message for the United States. The Chinese are strategic and the Chinese are smart. If, indeed, this editorial was in fact a message from Xi Jinping's Communist China, what it signals to Kim Jong-un's North Korea is far more enlightening than that which it might be signalling to the United States and her allies.

Chairman Mao Zedong, the founding father of the People's Republic of China, is renowned for having written in March 1926 the words—

Mr O'Brien then spoke in Mandarin

Womende diren shi shei? Womende pengyou she shei?

'Who are our enemies? Who are our friends?' Mao saw these as first-order questions for the revolution, arguing that previous revolutionary struggles in China had achieved little, due to a failure of revolutionaries to unite with real friends, to attack real enemies.

It is not for me to advise China on who their real friends or enemies are. What is crystal clear as we look at the crisis unfolding on the Korean Peninsula is that North Korea is acting like anything but a friend with respect to China. China knows it was North Korea that was the aggressor that instigated the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, which saw the shedding of so much Chinese blood. China knows that since the armistice in 1953, the North Korean regime has indulged in extreme brinkmanship with the international community, including breaching resolutions of the United Nations Security Council, of which China is a permanent member. China also knows that North Korea has breached the terms of the Sino-North Korean Mutual Aid and Corporation Friendship Treaty of 1961. Article 2 of that treaty declares that the two nations guaranteed to adopt immediately all necessary measures to oppose any country or coalition of countries that might attack either nation. The treaty says that both nations, and this is vitally important, should safeguard peace and security. Aggression and provocations by North Korea, especially when it involves the threat of use of nuclear weapons, is deeply inconsistent with this duty.

For those who may be unfamiliar with north-east Asia, do not assume that China and North Korea share that much in common. North Korea, after all, is a country that markets itself as a proud nation amidst an ongoing socialist revolution. In truth, it is a closed, failed state under totalitarian rule—under the perverse, so-called juche ideology that, in practice, oppresses its own people while threatening those abroad. It is a state that consistently defies China and the international community's request to cease development of nuclear weapons—rather, accelerating their development—while unashamedly threatening the sovereignty of other peace-loving nations that are abiding by an international rules based order.

When it comes to dealing with North Korea and ensuring the peace and stability of our region, I say to China: the United States and her allies, including Australia, are your real friends, and we need to work together to bring North Korea to its senses through economic and diplomatic means.

Jason Falinski (Mackellar, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

More than anything else, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea reminds us of who we are by what they are not. Led by Kim Jong-un, North Korea stands as an alternative universe of what happens when you don't have democracy, you don't have individual freedoms, you don't care about morality and you don't have any of the principles that we have based our society upon. North Korea's abuse of its own citizens and its active destabilisation of the world order serve as a reminder that all of us are tied together on this same planet. More and more of the challenges we face can only be resolved through international cooperation and agreement.

Undisputedly, one of the worst places to be born, the North Korean regime's crimes against its own citizens have been flagrant, systematic and widespread. Any critique of the regime is swiftly and harshly punished. Executions are often public, detentions are arbitrary and horrible punishments are regularly intergenerational. Former High Court Justice Michael Kirby was appointed to the United Nations Human Rights Council in 2013, where he found that human rights violations in North Korea went so far as to constitute crimes against humanity, equating them to some of those committed by the Nazis in Germany.

The gravity, scale and nature of these violations revealed a state that does not have any parallel in the contemporary world. The UN Human Rights Council estimated that 80,000-120,000 prisoners are incarcerated due to political crimes. They are subjected to forced labour, physical abuse and execution. In this day and age, these atrocities are being perpetuated by a dictator on his own people, his own countrymen. Freedom of speech, freedom of movement, a free press—all sometimes taken for granted in our own country—are all unimaginable for the people of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. What an ironic name, indeed. The thing about civilisation is that, first, you need to be civilised. When you remove civility, what do you have left? What is left to such a regime but bullying, threats and brutality?

In North Korea, endless energy is dedicated to rallying against the perceived threat of the Western world, when endless resources should be dedicated to taking care of its own people. What threat is the West to the North Koreans, if they were to stop threatening nuclear annihilation and take care of their own? As it stands, Kim Jong-un continues to test his missiles, increase his nuclear strength and throw rhetorical tantrums during which he threatens our nations so he can protect his people against the supposed, imagined threat we pose. Like the bully that he is, he blames the suffering of his people on others and threatens with violence those who would see his people prosper.

I ask myself what lessons we must draw from this escalating conflict. The truth is that we have provided the North Korean regime with rice and wheat and had hoped that their own economic self-interest and survival would make them see reason, while they have continued arming themselves, silencing their opponents and starving their population.

Finally, and I applaud the government's role in doing so, the world community has sharpened its rhetoric and acted on its words. UN resolutions are imposing strict sanctions and embargoes that show how serious we are about the stability of our world. It is time for China to act. I lend my voice to those of my colleagues and the government in arguing that the Chinese government, close neighbours to North Korea, play its role on the world stage and do more to resolve the current conflict peacefully.

Andrew Wallace (Fisher, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The recent actions of the North Korean government in pursuing illegal and provocative nuclear and ballistic missile programs and in making very serious threats towards the United States and her allies should be condemned in the strongest possible terms. Their actions are highly dangerous, totally unjustified and deeply irresponsible. At a time when the people of North Korea are suffering wholesale, indiscriminate deprivation, brought about by their own regime—a regime that would rather funnel scarce funds into weapons of mass destruction rather than feed their own starving people—this dictatorship has shown itself to be entirely unfit to govern its own society responsibly. The prospect of such a government acquiring the power of nuclear weapons and the ability to project that power to other parts of the globe is deeply troubling. It is unacceptable to the international community and to anyone who cares about the safety of our own people. We must do everything we can to stop it, and the government should be commended for the strong action it has already taken.

It's sometimes is easy to believe that large-scale and bloody conflicts are a thing of the past and that the world is too interconnected and too economically advanced for any significant war to take place. History, however, teaches us otherwise. It's hard to imagine a time that, on first glance, seemed less conducive to a major war between global powers than 1950. The world had only five years prior gone through the largest and most bloody conflict—the second such conflict in living memory. Tens of millions of people lay dead and societies across the globe had been destroyed. The consequences of war were clear to all, and hardly anyone in the world had not felt at least some of its effects.

Five years on from that conflict, people and communities were beginning the slow road to recovery, learning once again how to live in peace. So how can anyone have wanted another major war? How can anyone have truly expected what North Korea's aggression would bring about? Yet there was a war on the Korean Peninsula which commenced in 1950—a three-year conflict between global powers in which probably more than a million people died and in which Australia was heavily involved. The Korean War between 1950 and 1953 teaches us that instability on the Korean Peninsula can have the most serious consequences. It teaches us that, though it might seem like an outcome that no-one wants, though it might seem in no-one's interests and though it might seem like it could not happen, we can never discount the possibility of war when faced with an aggressive and unstable regime.

That experience teaches us something else: that any conflict on the Korean Peninsula is likely to be protracted, difficult and extremely bloody. Though times have changed since the 1950s, the significant size of the North Korean military, its aggression and its difficult terrain have not. Though there is no doubt whatsoever that the brave and well-equipped men and women of the Australian Defence Force, as part of a coalition task force, would prevail, there is also no doubt that restoring peace and stability in the region would come at a heavy price in lives taken and families devastated.

Seventeen thousand Australians served in the Korean War, 350 were killed, 1,216 were wounded and a further 29 were prisoners of war, so history, with reason and compassion, tells us that we must do what we can to pursue a peaceful settlement to this dispute. We must explore every diplomatic avenue to make the North Korean government understand that its own interests and the interests of its desperate people depend on the closure of its nuclear and ballistic missile program. The only thing worse than a conflict with North Korea now would be a conflict with a North Korea that possessed weapons of mass destruction and the means to deliver them to our shores. Any military option must be the absolute last resort to prevent that happening. We should seek a peaceful settlement of this dispute, but, if that settlement should not prove possible, we must act to defend our sovereignty and that of our allies.

Debate adjourned.

Sitting suspended from 13:16 to 16:00