Mr SERCOMBE (4:41 PM) —Probably all members of this parliament would agree with the proposition that the most fundamentally important role of a government at national level is the safety and security of Australia and the Australian people. That role of government obviously needs to cover the issues that arise from whatever source in whatever environment. In speaking on Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2003-2004, the criticism I would make of the government's broad approach on many of those issues is twofold. Firstly, the government seems to be prone to periodically wanting to play ideological or political games on issues that go to important matters of safety and security. Secondly, I am critical of what I, and I think many Australians, see as inappropriate priorities in the way in which the government handles these sorts of crucial issues.

In relation to the first point about playing political games, I illustrate that point by referring to an issue that is very close to my electorate, a facility close to Melbourne airport called the Melbourne Airmail Transit Centre. This facility, jointly operated by Australia Post, AQIS and Customs, has a vital function of providing checking and clearing of very large volumes of incoming mail not just for Victoria but for other states as well. It is a facility that, after we have seen the circumstances in the United States, for example, where anthrax was detected in mail, is obviously very important in the context of threats to Australia and Australians. Yet the facility in which this service is operated in Melbourne presents appalling working conditions. It is crowded, it is cramped, it is inefficient and it is from time to time dangerous because of the conflicts that arise between people moving around the building and vehicle movements and the like.

It is supposed to be only a temporary facility. It is a facility that over recent years has had live explosive material detected in it, including live grenades periodically. It is a place where white powders have been discovered—fortunately fake anthrax. It is a place of particular interest to quarantine: things like snakes, spiders and the like come through. It is an important facility and the safety of not just the whole community but particularly the workers there is very important.

Ironically, the government has made a commitment and I understand has provided funds to build a purpose-built better facility for this important function on the grounds of Melbourne airport. But the process has not developed. It has not developed and the ongoing safety of thousands of Australians continues to not be adequately serviced because of an ideological obsession by the Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations. The minister will not allow the purpose-built facility at Melbourne airport to be constructed by a building firm that operates, as virtually all building firms operate in Victoria, on an agreement that has adequate protections for wages and conditions of building workers. Rather, the minister says that funds will be used for this project only if everyone in the Victorian community—the trade union movement, building firms and the like—goes along with his particular approach on industrial relations that will involve a significant deterioration in the occupational safety and the conditions of the building workers who will construct this facility.

I think this is a fine example—a terrible example—of this government's behaviour. This is an environment where many people are particularly conscious of the need for adequate security. Checking inbound mail from overseas, and parcels, packages and the like, is critically important to that role. Yet the government is prepared, because of its ideological obsessions about building unions, to put this important work on hold. Frankly, as I said, this is just unacceptable. It is an example of the political and ideological game playing that the government goes on with from time to time.

I want to illustrate the question of inappropriate priorities by making some remarks about the approach that the Minister for Defence, in particular, has been taking to the way in which the Australian Defence Force and Australian security generally are organised. Last June Senator Hill argued that the old way of organising Australia's defence around what he described as `concentric circles' of the sea air gap was no longer relevant. He said that we were seeing a fundamental change to the notion that our security responsibilities are confined largely to our own region. He went on to talk about a more global ADF that was able to deploy troops overseas more often.

In other words, he talked about the need for Australia to operate largely as an annex to a great and powerful friend, and to organise and mobilise expeditionary forces rather than focusing—as it ought to, in terms of any realistic priorities in relation to this country's needs—on ensuring that our own immediate regional defence is absolutely our first priority. In the view of eminent authority on defence Paul Dibb, the head of the ANU's Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, any suggestion that these sorts of competing priorities can be adequately reconciled is unrealistic and unaffordable. So I think that, where the government is obviously continuing to be committed to a US strategic policy of pre-emptive strike unilateralism, we have a situation where Australians quite rightly can be very critical about the priorities this government sets in relation to our national security.

There is a little bit of light on the horizon in terms of the government's seriousness about regional issues. I have noted in the last week or so that the government, at long last, appears to be taking notice of the extraordinarily unsatisfactory situation that applies in our own regional area: in the Solomon Islands. I notice, in apparently well-sourced media reports, that up to 200 police in Australia, New Zealand and other countries will form the core of a plan to attempt to reassert some sort of control or authority in what is, effectively, a failed state. I think this is an important initiative. It shows that, despite its fantasies about expeditionary forces, the government is prepared, periodically, to focus on crucial needs. It is not as though, in what is called the arc of instability that surrounds Australia, there are not plenty of issues that urgently need the government's attention. Aceh, West Papua, East Timor, Papua New Guinea, Bougainville and the Solomons are, clearly, areas that an Australian government, acting responsibly in the interests of the Australian people, ought to give absolute priority to.

In the context of the Solomon Islands, I have been very interested—as I am sure other members have been this week—to have a look at the report produced by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute entitled Our failing neighbour, in which the seeds of what the government appears to be developing in relation to the Solomons are set forward. The report says, amongst other things:

The report goes on and says:

And so the report goes on. The crunch line is that the proposals for an Australian led but broadly based intervention in the Solomons to ensure the restoration of social, political and economic order show that it will be massively expensive. The ASPI report talks about $97 million in the first year and $78 million each following year, year in and year out, with a total of nearly $1 billion over a decade. This sort of activity is certainly not cheap.

As Paul Dibb would say, I think we need to determine our priorities and the structure of not only our Defence Force but also all the agencies and organisations that go towards a capacity to play a constructive role in our region. We need to look at the resourcing of those organisations and activities as an absolute priority for this nation, rather than the overseas expeditionary force mentality that seems to drive this government and, particularly, Senator Hill. It is welcome that, at long last, it appears that the government is giving consideration to the issue in the Solomons, but it is very late indeed. I remind the House that, back in 2000, the then Prime Minister of the Solomons invited Australian intervention to head off a coup that subsequently occurred, and our government simply turned its back on the Solomons. That is simply not good enough.

Having said some positive things, I come back to where the government's head has been and where I fear it may still primarily be. Paul Krugman, an American columnist who writes for the New York Times, wrote an interesting article that was published in the Melbourne Age a week or so ago. Unfortunately, it sort of resonated. The article states:

Then there is the tag line:

It goes on and talks about Robert De Niro, the political operative in that movie, saying to the President: `You want to win this election, you better change the subject. You wanna change this subject, you better have a war. It's show business.' There may be a little bit of humour in all of that but, unfortunately, it seems to strike a chord when we look at the increasing exposure of the hollowness of so many of the claims, particularly about weapons of mass destruction, that have been made to underpin the case for us—I think extraordinarily negligently—turning our back on the issues of fundamental concern in our own neighbourhood and racing off with our great and powerful friend in an expeditionary force. This is not to say for one moment that there are not crucial Australian interests in the broader Islamic world, in the broader Middle East and in the war on terrorism that ought to be properly addressed by Australia as part of a focus on security and protection of the Australian community.

I refer to a recent excellent book called Islam and the West: containing the rage recently published by Professor Amin Saikal of the Australian National University. Professor Saikal, whom I have the greatest respect for, says:

... ... ...

and one might say `the Australian approach'—

And we are seeing this tragically with the continuing deterioration of the security situation in Iraq and the regrettable increasing digging into a quagmire that seems to be embracing the occupation forces there.

Professor Saikal I think sets out very well in his book a number of critical issues that really do need to be addressed in order to create the right sort of multilateral and cooperative environment for seriously addressing this so-called war on terrorism. He talks about the priority of rebuilding Afghanistan with a stable political order now that the rule of the Taliban has gone and al-Qaeda is on the run. He talks about the intertwined goals of reconstruction, security and stability. He says:

Only $1 billion of the $4.5 billion reconstruction aid promised at the Tokyo donors conference in January 2002 was delivered before the end of the year, with 80 per cent being spent on food and other humanitarian purposes rather than long-term reconstruction.

Even the American Washington Post has talked about this in relation to the Bush administration—and one might say the Australian government, who played a role that I do not criticise in the context of Afghanistan; it was a justifiable role in that context. However, having achieved the military solution, the follow-up to avoid the continuing deterioration and the continuing festering of the problems that gave rise to the terrorism that found root in Afghanistan simply are not being addressed. That lack of attention to the political, economic and security reconstruction, as Professor Saikal makes clear in his book, underpins lack of confidence in a long-term solution occurring there.

The second issue Professor Saikal talks about is Pakistan and the central Asian republics. He makes the important point that what is required in those areas is a long-term commitment to structural change—structural political, economic and social change—rather than the quick-fix, Wag the Dog type solutions. He goes on to make the very obvious point that one of the most dangerous places in the world for possible nuclear conflagration is Kashmir and that is very clearly linked to the viable resolution of the commitments referred to above.

He also talks about Iran, and we have seen a bit in the press over recent times about Iran. And Professor Saikal, quite correctly in my view, is critical of the US attitude towards the Iranian regime. He says:

Rather the reformists—those interested in change in that country—ought to be not undermined by the sorts of approaches we have seen the US taking in recent times. He talks about the Palestinian problem, which is often talked about here, and the ongoing failure to resolve the issues there. We have only recently seen for the first time an American President actually prepared to be doing anything other than totally endorsing the Israeli position. For the first time—to Bush's credit—he has been critical of the Israeli leadership, but a lot more is needed to resolve the issues there and to deal with what is a fundamental cause of the cesspit of opinion from which people like bin Laden can draw sustenance for anti-Western sentiment. Professor Saikal also talks about the need for ongoing serious commitment to democratisation in the Arab world in particular and the Islamic world more generally.

Without continuing to rehash those points, the underlying theme is pretty clear. Being a part of expeditionary forces to go over on a Wag the Dog-type pretext and knock over Saddam Hussein and then not proceeding to do the appropriate things to find long-term solutions is an absolutely misguided and misplaced priority in terms of Australia's security interests. What we need to be doing is firstly and fundamentally focusing on long-term, multifaceted, reasonable solutions to the endemic problems of societies in the South Pacific like the Solomons, as I hope the government is now doing.

In the Middle East and in the broader world it is not a matter of expeditionary forces. It is a matter of using our relationship with the United States—which I think almost all members of this House would agree is a fundamentally important relationship—not simply to kowtow but to convince the US to come up with realistic, long-term, serious solutions along the lines that Professor Saikal is arguing. These involve a long-haul commitment to reconstruction in places like Afghanistan and engagement with countries like Iran, rather than continuing isolation and ostracism. We also need a wholehearted, full-blooded commitment to a bit more even-handedness over the Palestinian issue. They are the priorities Australia ought to have. (Timeexpired)