Dr THEOPHANOUS (4:00 PM) —In this debate on the motion to take note of the paper on East Timor we are dealing with one of the most serious issues that we have had to face as a nation for a long time. All of the House supports the resolution of the United Nations Security Council on 15 September. In this House there has obviously been a discussion of the issues and of what led to the events in East Timor. Even today in question time, we had the Prime Minister making certain statements in relation to the matter.

He did make the point that governments of various persuasions over the last 25 years or so have been responsible for far too much acceptance of what has been happening in East Timor and the role of the Indonesian military and the Indonesian government in East Timor. I think that is a correct proposition. But he also went on to imply that, because government had done this, somehow all parliamentarians had been of the same view, and that is not true. That important point needs to go on the record. In fact, from time to time a large number of parliamentarians—obviously not the majority—on both sides of the House have raised concerns about East Timor. The Parliamentarians for East Timor group of the parliament raised issues in relation to the Timor question.

Today, the Leader of the Opposition referred to a comment by the Prime Minister in which he said that he criticised the left of Australian politics in 1985 in relation to their attitude to East Timor. The Prime Minister, in his reply to the Leader of the Opposition, did not actually deal with the question. He referred to the fact that governments of both persuasions had a certain position but he did not address the fact that there were many people, not just on the left I might say—although a lot of them were on the left of Australian politics—who expressed concerns in the community and in parliament in relation to the matter.

Therefore, I have to say that what has happened in the Timor crisis is a salutary lesson about the excessive influence of the executive over parliament. There were concerned people on both sides of parliament and they were not able, irrespective of who was in government, to get their message or ideas across that things were wrong in terms of human rights and what was actually happening to the people of East Timor. We have to ask ourselves whether in these foreign policy areas there ought not to be a greater assertion of the role of parliament over government, irrespective of who is in government.

In Westminster, foreign policy is discussed much more than it is in our parliament, and issues of foreign policy do need to be debated and dealt with by parliamentarians. We do have our foreign affairs committees and the like—and I have participated in those committees for a long time—nevertheless, I think that it is very important that parliament asserts its authority in these matters because we can make mistakes. And in the case of East Timor, even in recent times, we have made mistakes.

A lot has been written about the Labor Party's recent position on East Timor, and it has been asserted that there was a very recent conversion to that position. But the facts of the matter are these: in April 1998 I moved a motion in the full caucus of the Labor Party which was seconded by the shadow foreign minister in which there was a significant shift from the position which Labor had held before then in relation to East Timor. That significant shift was then followed up by the shadow foreign minister in a number of important speeches in which he explained where we were coming from—that is, the Labor Party since that time—in relation to events in East Timor. Hardly anyone could have seen the dramatic nature of these events, but it is true that the Labor Party's change of position predated the announcements by President Habibie and the others in relation to the referendum and to the choice that was supposedly offered to the people of East Timor.

Many people in this debate have spoken about the failure of the government to actually foresee what would happen following the referendum, and I think there is a point that needs to be made about this. We have an expert Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade but a department which is culturally dominated by certain attitudes. And what they brought to bear in this case was this: a certain culturally biased view. Because in Western democracies, or at least in democracies such as the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand—English speaking democracies, let us call them—people, generally speaking, accept a referendum result, they wrongly assumed that this was going to happen in East Timor. It was not what happened. If they had been sensitive to the intelligence which they received and, more importantly, to the cultural milieu in which these events were taking place, they would have realised that, just because a referendum passed, it does not follow that those who lose the referendum are going to automatically accept the result and go off peacefully.

It was this cultural failure to understand people of a different background and what their response was likely to be in this matter which led to false propositions, not merely on the part of the government but on the part of the advisers to the government in foreign affairs. Maybe in the multicultural society we have in Australia we should get some government advisers in the department of foreign affairs who are broader in their cultural outlook, who understand that the reactions are not always the same. If we had done that, if we had understood the Indonesian psyche—where they were coming from, what they were encouraging in terms of the East Timorese—we might have recognised that we were facing an extremely dangerous situation and that we should avoid it.

I think this is a lesson which we have to take on board straightaway, because we will make further errors if we bring to this exercise a mentality and an approach which is culturally very narrow, which presupposes that other people behave and act, notwithstanding their cultural background, in the same way, for example, as people in English speaking democracies do. Therefore we should try to make our foreign policy more sensitive to the cultural situation, to the understanding that other people have and not merely to the understanding that we bring to it.

We are facing very dangerous times in East Timor. It is not clear what is going to happen, especially in Indonesia where it is possible that there could be a coup. Even if there is not a coup, the government itself, when it is elected—if there is an elected government—may persist in a policy which is detrimental to the people of East Timor. That may happen; I hope that it does not. Australia has to be sensitive every step of the way in this process. Not only do we have to support democracy in Indonesia; we also have to support those progressive forces that want to have an arrangement between Indonesia, East Timor and Australia. That should be our goal, and we should approach that goal with sensitivity to the people of Indonesia, who are caught up in a battle for their own democratic rights. This is a very important matter. (Time expired).