Mr ORGAN (4:27 PM) —Gates of hell indeed! I welcome the opportunity to make a contribution to this debate on the government's misleading of the Australian parliament and people on the question of prisoner abuse in Iraq. The way in which the government has handled the issue of torture of prisoners in Iraq is another example of the contempt in which it holds the Australian people. It is now clear that a number of people in the defence establishment were aware of the allegations and the government failed to discover the fact, preferring instead to adopt the stone-walling tactics of denial which have become this administration's stock response.

I hope that the government has read the report of US Major General Anthony Taguba, and I hope it has read it closely, because one of the people named by General Taguba has strong links with our country. I refer to Steven Stefanowicz, who General Taguba found had:

Stefanowicz has been identified by the Philadelphia Daily News as a former public relations specialist for the South Australian government, though other sources suggest his field of work was really information technology, at which he was not particularly successful in gaining employment.

The Australian newspaper cast more light on this, confirming in a report of 8 May 2004 that Stefanowicz worked in IT sales in Adelaide for 18 months until October 2001. It appears he returned to the United States and joined, or re-joined, the US Navy Reserve, where he held the rank of petty officer and served somewhere in the Middle East.

How he came to be working as a civilian contractor for CACI International is unclear from the public record. Nonetheless, his position with that organisation was obviously one of some significant authority. You can glean that much from General Taguba's recommendation about him, and again I quote from his report. General Taguba's recommendation was:

Despite this his family—presumably his mother, Jean Campbell, who lives in Telford, Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, near where Stefanowicz grew up in the Philadelphia suburbs—has confirmed to at least two major newspapers that her son remains in Iraq. And, despite that damning finding, the US Army has confirmed that he is still working at Abu Ghraib prison, the site of his gross abuses of human rights. According to that report in the Australian which I referred to earlier, he now intends to come back to Australia. He feels like Adelaide is home. Mr Speaker, I am here to tell you that this man must not—I repeat `not'—be allowed to re-enter Australia. We have seen how government stonewalling and denial delayed the truth about who knew what and what was going on in the Iraq prisons and when.

And that brings me to my final point. General Taguba's report reveals that US Major General Geoffrey D. Miller, the Commander of the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, reviewed the detention and interrogation operations in Iraq between 31 August and 9 September 2003 and, using the Guantanamo Bay procedures as a baseline, recommended that detention operations must act as an enabler for interrogation. Major General Miller was previously the Commander of Joint Task Force Guantanamo, and Taguba's report shows that he applied the Guantanamo protocols in his review. How can we be sure that there is not a report which the government can deny knowing about on the treatment of the Australian Guantanamo detainees David Hicks and Mamdouh Habib? How can the government be sure that the abhorrent techniques used on Iraqi detainees were not similarly used on them? And how can we believe them?

The DEPUTY SPEAKER (Hon. I.R. Causley)—Order! The discussion is concluded.