Mr HATTON (4:57 PM) —The motion to take note of the paper in front of us today concerns a horrific situation in East Timor at the moment where virtually the entire infrastructure of the island has been destroyed. The country that was there previously, with its own designation as a territory within Indonesia, has been virtually wiped away. Australian troops are now serving with the INTERFET force in a country where most of the population has been displaced. It is a country where at least 200,000 people in the past 25 years have been killed by the occupying Indonesian forces. It is a country where the militias numbered two just over a year ago. Those militias now number 13. They cover every region of East Timor.

The notion brought up by the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Mr Downer—and as the Prime Minister indicated in his speech on this matter—that some elements or rogue elements within the Indonesian military forces were responsible for helping the militia does not bear even the slightest or most marginal examination. The deliberateness with which the Indonesian armed forces have gone about increasing the number of militia, from two to 13—increasing its geographic spread from a part of East Timor to every region of East Timor—and the manner in which they have conspired and colluded to drive the anti-independence militia campaigns, has been, and should have been, evident to this government before they made their major decisions.

As our shadow minister for foreign affairs has indicated, there was ample evidence before the government throughout this year and prior to that that the Indonesian military were in a position where they determined their position in case East Timor should become independent. Effectively, that position was to raze the land to nothing, to displace its peoples, or to do away with them through the agency of the militias.

The argument of the Prime Minister that there has been only one course to follow—only one reasonable, sensible course in all of this—is open to question. It is open to question in particular because of the misreading of history, either deliberate or unintended, that has been at the back of what should have been an informed view of what the intentions of the Indonesian military and the Indonesian government were.

In 1965, during the period of time when there was a problem throughout the archipelago of Indonesia with the Indonesian Communist Party—from memory, the PKI—there were about 750,000 people killed by the Indonesian military in order to put down what the military typified as a communist coup or an insurgency. Since that time, since the establishment of the Suharto government and the relative stability brought by the Indonesian military to every village, every small part of the Indonesian archipelago, that was imposed with immense and brutal force in the 1960s, not one person who has worked in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade over the past three decades would be unaware of that campaign. Not one person seeking to give advice to the government would be unaware of the long history of what has happened, not only in East Timor but in other places.

Irian Jaya is very close to Australia, as is East Timor. Papua New Guinea is free; Irian Jaya is part of Indonesia. But because there has been virtually no media coverage of what has happened in Irian Jaya over the past many years, it does not come up as the slightest blip on the Australian radar. But the department of foreign affairs has background information in relation to what has happened in Irian Jaya and in other places in Indonesia—certainly, in the last year or so, as to what has been happening in Aceh, Ambon, Kalimantan and the great instability that is there since the fall of Suharto, since his replacement by President Habibie and since the Indonesian economy was flattened to the point that 30 years of work building that economy were wiped out overnight. This is an unstable and difficult economic, political and social environment that the Indonesian government faces.

The move towards democratic elections, despite the result, still hangs in the balance, and it hangs in the balance because the military still have an effective control over what happens in that parliament. Nothing demonstrates it better than what has happened in East Timor in the past year. And it is demonstrated absolutely when you look at the fact that they have been able to turn the militias on and off at will. The Prime Minister said it was just `elements' of the military. The foreign minister repeatedly said they were simply `rogue elements' of the military.

During the election day, 78½ per cent of people bravely voted for independence, an independence vote that they were precipitously driven to by Foreign Minister Alatas and President Habibie, and which this government drove towards and pushed, against resistance from the leading East Timorese leaders who had cautioned time and again that the great problem in East Timor, for its people and for the country as a whole and its future, was its security and that, unless security was guaranteed in East Timor, what has happened would happen. All of those leaders warned in relation to that.

As the shadow minister indicated, the Defence Intelligence Organisation did its job. It is not a secret that the United States listens in to every telephone call that is made in Australia. Equally, it is not a secret the Defence Intelligence Organisation has the capacity and has for many years been listening in to all communications within Indonesia and to the Indonesian military communications as well. That is how they have gained a lot of their information. All of the Western countries have that capacity. In fact, Australia gets information from the United States that it chooses to give us from its intelligence gathering activities, and we share our views with them.

The Prime Minister and the foreign minister have argued that they could not have been prepared for what happened, that it could not have been predicted because there was very little information about what impact there would be after the independence vote. But, as Laurie Brereton pointed out on 23 September 1999 in his press release:

The Shadow Minister . . . said today that the Australian Consulate in Dili received from UNAMET in early August, copies of documents detailing intimate cooperation between the Indonesian military and militias and their plans for widespread violence following the vote, including the mass deportation of population and liquidation of pro-independence East Timorese.

That was in August of this year, before the ballot. In fact, if we look at what material was there, in one long paragraph there is a full indication of the Indonesian military cooperating with and organising the militias, planning what would happen if the independence vote was positive, and planning not only what they would do prior to it to try to disrupt it but what would happen afterwards. They laid out a plan for the devastation of that country and the destruction of the people.

Our soldiers have entered into a very dangerous situation. It was argued by East Timorese leaders that foreign soldiers coming as a peacekeeping or peace enforcement force should have come in as soon as possible and that preparations should have been made before. Their preference was not to be driven by Foreign Minister Alatas and Prime Minister Habibie and then the Australian government into a precipitate vote, but once that had happened, even though they wanted a long period of time, they said there needed to be a peacekeeping force straightaway. Instead of that we had a wait of almost three weeks.

The reason for that is the Australian government's failure to properly interpret and take regard of all of the military intelligence that it had in front of it. I think they did not take that into account because they simply chose not to. They chose not to because they placed their reading of the situation above the accurate information that was coming in, not just a small amount, but in droves from our intelligence sources.