Mr ABBOTT (Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations and Minister Assisting the Prime Minister for the Public Service) (11:01 AM) —All of us here in this place, before being anything else, are local members. All of us as local members, as much as frontbenchers in governments and oppositions, have letters and emails flooding in at this time. And I think all of us as human beings as well as members of this parliament—members of political parties, governments and oppositions—owe it to our constituents and to the wider Australian public to explain where we stand on this issue.

I can certainly understand the anxieties that so many Australians feel right now. No-one likes war. No sane person wants war. No government can legitimately do anything other than take all reasonable steps—short of an unreasonable surrender—to avoid war. No decent human being can do anything other than shrink from the carnage which war inevitably brings. I think the Australian people sometimes need to be reminded that, as members of parliament, as ministers in governments, as frontbenchers and as oppositions, we are as conscious of these things as anyone else. And no-one is more conscious of the heavy burdens of responsibility that all of us in this place bear right now than the Prime Minister himself.

People need to know that, as members of this parliament, members of governments and members of alternative governments, we do not have the luxury of consequence-free opinions. We have to acknowledge, as members of this place and as decision makers in this parliament, that there may be no cost-free choices, no painless options and no morally unambiguous decisions, and we may find ourselves in a situation where avoiding one evil inevitably brings on even greater evil. Confronted with the prospects of war, the natural reaction is to say `No, it's not our job. It's the wrong place, the wrong issue and the wrong time.' That is the inevitable reaction of the good and decent people of this country when confronted with the heaviest and direst decision of all. But it may well be that we in this place cannot adopt the same approach without making a bad situation even worse.

It seems to me that the clear issue facing this parliament, our country and the freedom-loving peoples and nations of the world at this time is Iraq's failure to disarm in accordance with repeated resolutions of the United Nations. We have to face the fact that we are dealing with the world's most brutal dictator, running one of the world's ugliest regimes. This is a regime which has poisoned its own people, successively attacked its neighbours, consistently supported terrorism, including suicide bombings, and has been directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people. The sad truth is that the dictates of sweet reason are not always appropriate when dealing with tyranny and a problem of this order. Worst of all, the Iraqi regime has consistently flouted UN resolutions—and, in that sense, it is certainly unique in the world.

For the safety of the world and for the security of its people, it is necessary that Iraq be disarmed—peacefully if possible, but by force if necessary. As the UN weapons inspectors have reported, contrary to its repeated assurances, its repeated promises and what it has been required to do by the United Nations, Iraq has not disarmed. Iraq is still in possession, it seems, of massive stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons that have the capacity to kill millions of people. As Kofi Annan, the chief of the United Nations has said, it is only because countries such as Australia have been prepared to back UN resolutions with the threat of force that we have UN inspectors back in Iraq and we now know more of what is going on in that country.

There is a clear choice here: we can support the UN resolutions in a meaningful way or with words only. It needs to be recognised by the Australian people and by members of this House that resolutions without enforcement are not worth the paper that they are written on. All of those countries, including Australia, which have been prepared to commit forces to the enforcement of the United Nations resolutions against Iraq are acting to support the authority of the United Nations and to strengthen the system of international law, the spread of which will be for the undoubted betterment of mankind.

Let me deal briefly with some of the myths which are contaminating this debate. It is often said that we cannot take action against Iraq because it will be another Vietnam. I believe that there is a clear distinction between what happened in Vietnam and what may eventuate in Iraq. In Vietnam, rightly or wrongly, Australia and other countries were acting to support an unpopular government. In Iraq we are doing the opposite; we are seeking to change the policy and behaviour of a dictatorial and unpopular regime. It is said that what Australia and other countries wish to do is just about oil. That is an extremely shallow, superficial and unthinking statement. It is an ignorant statement. Plainly it is not about cheap oil, otherwise why would Australia, America, Britain and other countries have acted for years to support an embargo on Iraq's oil sales? It is said that it is not our job and that someone else can handle this problem. If Australia and other civilised countries do not stand up for the authority of the United Nations, who will? We cannot shuffle off to others the difficult decisions and hard choices which must be made if appropriate international order is to be maintained. It is said that our actions in support of the United Nations in conjunction with Britain and America will make us more vulnerable to terrorism. I have no doubt that there is a sense in which our actions have put us more clearly on the radar screen of terrorists. But does anyone really believe, and will anyone really maintain, that weakness in the face of terrorists and terrorist regimes is going to reduce the threat they pose?

I want to say how much I have admired the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, who has conducted himself with exemplary statesmanship and courage throughout the course of these difficulties with Iraq. I would like to quote Tony Blair, who yesterday said so well that if we:

It takes great courage to make difficult decisions, and there is no more difficult decision that a democratic leader can take than to commit the armed forces of a democracy to possible conflict. But it takes real strength of character for a leader to stand up to his colleagues in support of difficult and superficially unpopular decisions. It seems to me that what we have consistently had from Tony Blair is that he has spoken for Britain, not just the Labor Party. He has spoken for the universal decencies of mankind, not just for political advantage. Much as I do not want to inject too much partisanship into this debate, I think it is sad that we have not seen the same quality of leadership consistently from the leader of the Labor Party in Australia—the same quality of leadership that we had from the former leader of the Australian Labor Party, the member for Brand, when Australia and the world faced a similar, although less intense, crisis back in 1998.

I thought the Leader of the Opposition's speech yesterday was unworthy of an alternative Prime Minister. It was clearly designed to smear the government, and I think that it had the impact of undermining Australia's position and calling into question the work of our armed forces. Listening to the Leader of the Opposition yesterday, you would think that the real threat to world peace was not Saddam Hussein but John Howard. How could the Leader of the Opposition say yesterday that he supported our armed forces but not their mission? How could he say that what the Australian government has done is an obscenity today but a necessity next week or the week after simply because of another UN vote? How can the Leader of the Opposition expect to be taken seriously when we got an almost hysterical anti-war message from him in this place in this country yesterday but a very different message from the member for Griffith, the shadow minister for foreign affairs, when he was in Washington last week?

One of the weaknesses and deficiencies of our polity is our tendency to see everything in terms of a domestic political prism—our tendency not to consider any issue on its merits but instead to deal with every issue in terms of the impact it might have on the relative position of a particular political party or a particular political leader. I would like to think that on an issue as grave as this it ought to be possible for us to leave that kind of petty politicking behind. I can assure anyone who is in any doubt in the wider community that this government and its members will not shirk from their duty to protect Australia and its people from terrorism and terrorist states, and to do what we can to extend the same protection to the wider world. We will do so in conjunction with our allies, and we will do so in accordance with international law.