Mr NEHL (4:10 PM) —I am very grateful to get the opportunity of being able to participate in the debate on the motion moved by Mr Hardgrave. Let me say at the outset that, listening to the member for Moreton and the member for Prospect, I agree with and support totally every word they said. They have been to Tibet and to China and they are coming back and reporting with honesty.

It is sad that the same cannot be said about every member of this parliament who has visited China and Tibet. I have to say that I am very angry at the despicable conduct of Senator Brown of the other place, who sneaked into Tibet on a visitor's visa as a member of this parliament without even having the courtesy to advise the Chinese government that he was going there. He then came out and made the most outrageous statements. I will not go into the detail of what he said. All I can say is that he went in and did not see anything to change his mind, because he did not want to be confused by the facts: he had already made up his mind. All I can say is that the statements attributed to Senator Brown do not help Australia and do not help China—because Australia and China have a great future together, as has been said by previous speakers.

I want to touch on some of the issues that are commonly misquoted and misunderstood as far as Tibet is concerned. I had the privilege of visiting Tibet a few years ago and I am pleased to say that I am going back in two weeks time, immediately after the visit of President Jiang Zemin to Australia. As far as Tibetan dress goes, I went to Lhasa, Ganden, Xigaze and Gyantze, and on the day that we happened to be going through Gyantze the horse festival was on, with 20,000 people, and the claim that Tibetans are not allowed to use their own regional dress is absolutely absurd—and I have got dozens of photographs to prove it.

With regard to them being restricted in numbers of children, it is true that the mainland part of China has a restriction of one child per couple. In Tibet, Tibetan cadres or officials of the government are restricted to two children, but the herders and farmers have no restriction whatsoever. As we drove from Xigaze to Gyantze and saw the horse festival, we overtook dozens and dozens of little carts drawn by ponies or by yaks, carrying families on them. Typically, the family was a mum, a dad, a granny and four, five, six or seven kids. I never saw one family with fewer than four children. So to say that they have restrictions on the number of children is arrant nonsense and is certainly not the truth.

With regard to religion, as my colleagues and friends who have been to Tibet have testified, everywhere you go people are openly praying. I must say something else. Photographs of the Dalai Lama are everywhere in Tibet. I never went anywhere without seeing them. They were in motor vehicles, in monasteries, in shops. I might say that there were far more photographs of the Dalai Lama than there were of Chairman Mao—and I think that is another indication.

They also suggest that the Tibetan people are being overrun by millions of Han Chinese coming in. There are Han Chinese people there, of course: they are the administrators. But, as for being overrun, that again is nonsense. I have been there and seen it with open eyes—unlike, obviously, Senator Brown. I have to say that in reality the Han Chinese people do not really like Tibet, because there is not enough oxygen there—and some of my colleagues had felt that lack, too. I met one charming young woman who had gone back home to have her baby and could not take it back to Tibet because of the altitude and the lack of oxygen and so left it with her parents. The earliest thing that she wants to do is to finish her job in Tibet and to go back home.

The other thing is comments about the army. Certainly there are army people there. When I was there I saw a lot of them on bicycles, with their shirts hanging out. I saw quite a number around the shops. Outside the barracks there were armed sentries—when I say armed, they had side-arms. Our army camps have sentries too. The reality is that they have borders with Bhutan, Nepal, India and Pakistan. They have to have an army presence there. But it is not a police state. I have felt more threatened and intimidated by booze buses in New South Wales than I ever felt in Tibet.

I spent time with three Tibetan 18-year-old girls in Chengdu. One of them was very diffident about speaking. At one point, she finally spoke in English. She asked, `What is your chief impression of Tibet?' I said, `My chief impression is the poverty.' She sat back with amazement and asked, `What poverty?' We should not impose our values and judgments on other people.