Ms GILLARD (10:13 AM) —I am grateful for the opportunity to speak in this debate to note the United Nations Security Council resolution which centrally raises the question of the crisis in East Timor and the issue of bringing peace there. As a representative of this parliament I had the opportunity to travel to West Timor in June this year to act as an international observer in the Indonesian elections. During the week that I spent in Kupang and in the outlying areas of West Timor, the issue of East Timor was raised with me and with our party on a number of occasions as we travelled. Already there were refugee camps on the border between East Timor and West Timor, with displaced persons gathering there because of militia activity in East Timor. Already the question of insurgency across the border from West Timor to East Timor was being debated and addressed and was well known throughout West Timor.

As I travelled throughout West Timor accompanied by a member of our Department of Defence, Steve Lyon, our driver was an East Timorese man called Vince. He talked to us, during that week, of growing up in East Timor as an orphan, of being brought up by his brother and of his family who remained in East Timor. Given the heartbreaking events that have happened since the June Indonesian election, I can only wonder now where he is and how he is faring in the current circumstances.

While in West Timor I also met and talked with an East Timorese man who told me how he remembers his family, when he was a young boy during World War II, assisting an Australian soldier to hide from the Japanese. He told me how he would take a branch off a tree and brush the ground with it to obscure the Australian soldier's footsteps to prevent him from being tracked. Once again I can only wonder how this man is faring now.

These are, I know, small incidents, personal incidents, but they have put a face and a name to this tragedy for me. And what a tragedy it is—thousands killed, hundreds of thousands displaced. Having travelled in West Timor—and I think my colleagues are right to say that perhaps the greatest humanitarian crisis is now in West Timor rather than East Timor—I am left with an impression of how poor a nation it was before this crisis and what a disaster it must be now with hundreds of thousands of displaced people.

When you travel in Kupang you are at one minute outside a two-storey or three-storey building and 50 yards down the road you are in a village atmosphere, with pigs tied to stakes and goats wandering freely. When we travelled to the outlying areas in West Timor we saw the critical health and nutrition problems that the people there were already struggling with. You would walk through villages where women would have the goitre lumps visible in their necks from insufficient iodine in their diet—health problems that are unimaginable to us in Australia today and that are easily resolved through the provision of iodised salt.

That was the situation in West Timor in June when, apart from the refugee problem at the border between West Timor and East Timor, in reality the West Timorese were just trying to go about their business and feed and clothe and look after their own health care needs. Given that they were struggling with poverty then, with the question of nutritional problems then, with grievous health problems then—and I spoke to a nurse who worked in the outlying villages trying to provide what health care could be provided in West Timor; there were already major health problems facing the West Timorese people—you can only imagine how far that humanitarian problem must now be multiplied when, on an already poor and struggling place, you put hundreds of thousands of displaced people who have come presumably with no more than the clothes on their backs and who have critical needs for water, food, medical assistance, shelter and everything else that goes with looking after hundreds of thousands of people. We can only imagine, and never feel, the real need in the circumstances that must be in West Timor now.

Moving from those issues, I suppose that, having participated in the Indonesian ballot, the thing that has struck me as the events of the last few weeks have unfolded is how critical and, indeed, depressing it has been to move from the triumph which was the Indonesian ballot for its own election in June to the tragedy that we have now. In the course of the Indonesian elections, as our team moved throughout West Timor and other Australian observers moved throughout the other provinces of Indonesia, we were all struck by how peaceful, how ordered and how enthusiastic the Indonesian people were about having their first free and fair election in 35 years: a triumph of democracy, certainly a transitional democracy, not without some forms of trouble on the day but generally peaceful and generally participated in with an enthusiastic spirit.

One wonders now, as the events associated with the East Timorese crisis unfold in Jakarta, whether or not the birth of Indonesian democracy will turn out to be a stillbirth or a birth that is delayed in getting to maturity because of the impact of this crisis. It would be a tragedy indeed to see the enthusiasm which accompanied the Indonesian ballot dissipate and to see some form of undemocratic rule once again assert itself in Indonesia. But that might well be the consequence of where we are now.

The other thing that struck me as we travelled throughout West Timor monitoring that ballot was how welcoming people were of Australians and how reassuring they found our presence as we assisted with the Indonesian election. The very fact that there were international people there watching the election provided a form of reassurance to the people that it would be free and fair. We were emblazoned well and truly as Australians, with caps and T-shirts with the Australian flag on them and with lettering in bahasa which declared us to be part of the Australian election monitoring team. Wherever we went, no matter how far out into the West Timorese provinces, we were greeted with smiles and enthusiasm, and there was obviously a real affection for Australians amongst the people.

It is once again a tragedy that, as the events have unfolded in East Timor, that is no longer the case, either in East Timor or in Indonesia generally, and that the Australian-Indonesian relationship—not only at the elite level but also between the peoples—has suffered so grievously during this process. I think that is something that ought to concern us now and concern us over the next few years, because to have a good relationship between our people and the people of Indonesia is obviously where we want to be.

In the debate yesterday, in respect of the whole issue of East Timor and the course that Australia has charted, the Prime Minister said:

Ours has been the correct and only responsible course of action.

I must confess I am left a little, I suppose, disturbed by that comment—`disturbed' is probably the best word—because I find it impossible that we are able to conclude that, when tens of thousands of people have died, when hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced, there was no other course of action that could have got us to a better result. How can a course of action that has those consequences be the correct course of action? Are we so intellectually and morally limited that a course of action that results in those sorts of grievous problems can be described by us as the `only responsible course of action'?

I believe there had to be a better way and our shadow minister Laurie Brereton for many months now has been pointing to a better way. A better way would have been to secure the East Timorese people and the province through peacekeepers fielded before the ballot—not afterwards—and not to allow the many days to pass between the ballot and the outbreak of real violence in East Timor and the time that peacekeepers have actually arrived. None of us should sit here in some self-congratulatory way saying that we have done the right thing. Clearly, if that has been the outcome, we cannot have done the right thing. It is impossible.

Before I conclude my remarks, I would like to say that I have had the opportunity, and indeed my colleague from Melbourne Ports who is next to me has had the opportunity as well, to travel to Lavarack Barracks in Townsville and to meet with a number of people who now would have been deployed to East Timor as part of the peacekeeping force. When we travelled there, which was the week before this session of parliament reconvened, already the troops were talking about the likelihood, as they then believed, of going to East Timor and their readiness and, I would have to say, enthusiasm to do so.

Having met some of those people face to face, my thoughts are well and truly with them. I trust that, as a parliament and as a government, everything that can be provided to them is provided and that every step that can be taken to make their way easier is taken. Those troops in part have a connection with my electorate because it houses the language school at Point Cook. Many of the people who have been fielded in this deployment and who can speak the local languages would have undertaken that language training in my electorate. Once again, my thoughts are with them as they go about this very dangerous and difficult work. We wish them all the best.