Dave Sharma (NSW, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Citizenship and Multicultural Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to also take note of answers to all coalition questions—and I thank the minister for providing details about the management of the consular crisis in the Middle East. But I want to make important points here. Firstly, this conflict was entirely foreseeable. We have had over the past few months two US aircraft carrier battle groups in the region. We have had dramatic negotiations underway directly between the United States and Iran in Geneva that were clearly making very little progress. Last week we had for the first time ever F-22 Raptors deployed to Israel—the squadron—and we had the US Fifth Fleet at Bahrain disperse.

All of those signals suggested that the risk of a conflict in the Middle East was high. Indeed, our Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade seem to appreciate that, because, on Wednesday last week, they ordered the evacuation of dependants of our diplomatic and other personnel in Israel. And on the same day that week—Wednesday last week, 25 February—they provided voluntary assistance for the departure of dependants of diplomatic personnel in Qatar, Jordan and the UAE. So the government knew the situation was deteriorating, to the point that they were mandating the withdrawal of some of their own personnel and facilitating it for others.

That being the case, why did the Foreign minister, the Prime Minister or the defence minister not step up in front of the cameras and tell the Australian public: 'We are updating our travel advice. We are warning. We have changed the level of advice. We are getting our own people out. The travelling public in Australia should consider using commercial options while they are available'? That's what the Canadian Foreign minister did. Before the war broke out, the Canadian Foreign minister put out a press release urged Canadians to use commercial options while they were still available.

The Prime Minister was asked about this last week. On an interview on ABC radio last Tuesday morning, he was asked about the risks of conflict in the Middle East and about whether he had any advice to give to Australians. He just said: 'Check the DFAT website. We're keeping that updated.' Here was an opportunity for him to communicate the risks to Australians and to mitigate the impact that Australians are dealing with now, and he didn't take it. Instead, he spent most of that interview talking about the person who is currently eighth in line to the succession of the House of Windsor. So the Prime Minister last week was dealing with what would happen if William and Harry and their children were to pass and who would take the throne of the United Kingdom and Australia, rather than dealing with the Middle East crisis that was unfolding in real time and on our watch.

The minister also said that the number of affected Australians dwarfs any consular operation the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade has ever conducted. Well, I don't know if that's an assertion she's made or something she's been advised by the department, but I would point out that, after the Boxing Day 2004 tsunami, in which 26 Australians were killed and many more injured, there were some 15,000 Australians unaccounted for. I would point out that, after the Sari nightclub bombing in Bali in October 2002, some 88 Australians were killed and the ADF had to conduct 66 medical evacuations to treat the injured survivors. So our consular services and our department have dealt with crises of this magnitude before, certainly, and unlike in those other two crises—the Bali terrorist attack and the Boxing Day tsunami—we had some forewarning of this.

If the public had been given advance notice—if the minister had stood up at the same time as the department updated its travel advice to highlight and publicise this, as you would expect a responsible government to do—then we might well have a situation today where fewer Australians had gone to the region or where Australians had deferred or changed their travel plans, which would have meant that the crisis we are dealing with right now would be significantly less. That is my complaint, at its heart—that the government had the opportunity to act here and to mitigate the impact on the travelling public. The public right now are understandably frustrated because they have uncertainty, they don't know when they're going be able to get out and they can't get through on DFAT's consular helpline. The lack of preparedness undertaken before this crisis developed is the cause of at least some of that. This is a basic duty of governments—to prepare for national security crises, to make contingency plans and to forewarn and forearm the Australian public. On that most basic duty, this government has failed.