Kim Carr (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Housing and Urban Development) Share this | Hansard source

I have only just received a copy of this report by the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security. I have started to read it, so I can say that I am familiar with the broad terms of the report. The nature of committee members’ work is to be commended.

I draw the Senate’s attention in particular to the minority report by Senator Faulkner and Mr Duncan Kerr. The majority report supports, in effect, the government’s proscription of the PKK, while the minority report essentially calls for a much higher level of caution in the approach taken in this matter. This is a reassessment of the government’s proposed proscription of the PKK. I understand that it is not the first time that this matter has been addressed by the committee and that, in the past, attempts have been made to proscribe the PKK but that they have not been proceeded with.

The reason I am speaking on this matter is that for many years I have worked with members of the Kurdish community in Melbourne. Their offices are located two kilometres from my house. I have visited their premises on numerous occasions. In fact, I am a life member of the Kurdish Workers Association of Victoria. I am very concerned about the basis on which this proscription has been argued in the report, because I think there has been a failure to appreciate the important difference between support for military operations in a war of national liberation, as some would see it, and the political activities of organisations in support of Kurdish civil rights.

There is a fundamental problem with the way in which the report presents those arguments. It acknowledges that not all military action is in fact terrorist by nature, but it then fails to follow up that line of argument and deal with the question of the Kurdish minorities in the Middle East, the way in which they have been treated over the last 100 years and the actions that have occurred in relation to political developments, particularly in the south-east of Turkey.

I acknowledge that serious questions arise from the claims and counterclaims regarding the military campaigns that have been conducted both by the Turkish state and by elements associated with the PKK in Turkey. I would have thought that the report would have paid greater attention to the reports of the CIA and the State Department with regard to human rights abuses in the south-east of Turkey, which have given rise to the political disturbances in that region.

However, I am particularly concerned about the consequences of such a proscription on Australian citizens living peacefully, going about their normal activities but expressing a view as to human rights and social conditions in Turkey. At what point does one draw the line between the expression of views on those questions and claims of support for terrorist activities? Nowhere in this report do I see any definition of that question.