Mr RUDD (4:14 PM) —There is nothing on God’s earth that prepares human beings for a natural disaster such as this. The impact on our common human family has been beyond comprehension. But, equally, our response as a human family has moved our hearts in a way we have not seen before. It speaks well of the better angels of our human nature which have not yet entirely been extinguished when we see the response of the world to our friends and neighbours in need. Such has been the impact of this great tsunami of 26 December 2004.

We have almost become numb to the statistics. The earthquake and resultant tsunamis which struck the countries of the Indian Ocean littoral on 26 December were among the greatest natural disasters in modern times and the third greatest in the last century. The exact death toll is not known and never will be, but it is probably at least 300,000 and may be more. This is exceeded only by the Yellow River floods in China in 1931 which killed over one million people and the great cyclone and floods in Bangladesh in 1970 which killed 500,000 people. The Tangshan earthquake in China in 1976 killed about 255,000 people while the great Kanto earthquake which struck Tokyo in 1923 killed 143,000.

This has been a disaster of truly epic dimensions. Its grim toll has been borne by many countries across the wider region—Burma; the Seychelles; the Maldives; Somalia; Malaysia; Thailand, where we saw 5,000 killed; southern India, 11,000; Sri Lanka, 30,000, where the toll has been particularly great—quite apart from the thousands of Western tourists who died in these countries, including members of our own Australian family. But no country has been greater affected than Indonesia, where the death toll has reportedly risen to 220,000. The sheer size of the numbers can sometimes prevent us from seeing that each of these is a very individual death, the loss of the precious soul, and in some cases families shattered, families lost altogether, and with them their entire communities.

In Banda Aceh a couple of weeks ago I saw just some of this at a hospital staffed in part by a medical team from Brisbane. They were good blokes, getting down, doing the job. They introduced me to a little boy of 11 sitting silently on a bed and staring ahead, rendered mute by the tsunami which had taken every member of his family three to four weeks before. He was staring ahead saying nothing. He is one of 11,000 orphans registered so far by UNICEF. In Jakarta, UNICEF told me that they expected that figure to rise soon to 35,000. The little boy’s story and UNICEF’s story are part of the greater tragedy of that province, the greater tragedy of the city of Banda Aceh, which once boasted a population of 350,000—I think the population of this city of Canberra.

If you travel across Banda Aceh by helicopter, as the Prime Minister did and as the Royal Australian Navy made possible for me, what you see is the impact on the city where for the first kilometre or two the surface of the city is rendered purely as asphalt. It has been rendered flat; there is nothing left. It is as though you are looking down on an archaeological site of some millennia ago. There is nothing left but the imprint of the foundations. That is why most people died, not by drowning but by being crushed by the sheer force of the wave. The locals said when the wave hit it was the height of two coconut palms—20 to 25 metres. For those of us who go to the beach often in this country that is beyond even our imagination. You go beyond the first kilometre or two, where there is nothing but asphalt and cleared surfaces, and then you see the odd building remaining for the following kilometre or so. There they all died largely from the impact of the wave and some by drowning. But, beyond that again, everything had been picked up by water and pushed into the remaining kilometre or so of the affected area. That is where people were injured badly by the impact of moving objects. Then there was simple flooding and inundation beyond that. The look of this from the air was like stepping back in history and looking at black-and-white film—a combination of Hiroshima and Dresden. I could think of nothing else, and it was something I had never seen in my life.

Such is the human cost. With the economic cost, the numbers become equally mind numbing. I spoke to the Indonesian minister for national planning in Jakarta about this. This was about three to four weeks after the disaster hit. Bear in mind that this is a very poor area. The initial up-front cost for reconstruction was $US6 billion and the figures continue to roll in.

What of the response? For me, our country’s response and the international community’s response to the disaster has rekindled my faith in the bonds of our common humanity. In Banda Aceh the first foreign aircraft on the ground were from the Royal Australian Air Force. The first fresh water to flow in that city was made to flow by engineers from the Australian Army who got off the plane, found the water main—which had been ruptured in many places by the earthquake, not destroyed by the tsunami itself—and then quickly applied a mobile filtration plant and began providing bottled water to the remaining 200,000 residents of the city on day 2. And Australians were among the first to begin delivering emergency medical services to a traumatised people.

When I saw these Australian Defence Force personnel doing their job, still doing their job, still on duty, several weeks later I felt nothing but pride in being Australian and doing what we as a nation are best at—that is, helping our neighbours and our mates when they need it. I want to place on record my personal appreciation and the appreciation of the opposition for the leadership of Brigadier Dave Chalmers and the 1,000-plus Australian Defence Force personnel from all three services who have committed with absolute professionalism to the task they have been allotted. We appreciate their personal commitment and their professionalism. As one digger from Robertson Barracks in Darwin, with whom I stood briefly in line handing out plastic bottled water to what seemed to be an endless line of folk from what was left of the city of Banda Aceh, said to me: ‘It feels good, mate, to do something practical and to see a smile on the locals’ faces when, mate, there’s not much to bloody smile about is there?’

The Australian effort has not just been whole of government; it has been whole of nation. The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, AusAID, the Australian Federal Police and many other government agencies are all doing a first-class job for their country. But, beyond government, there are our great Australian non-government aid agencies: Oxfam, Red Cross, World Vision, Caritas, Care and the others. Then we have the magnificent Australian people themselves: corporate Australia and the communities of Australia pitching in $230 million.

When I met Hassan Wirajuda, the Indonesian foreign minister—a good friend of this country, a good friend of the government, a good friend of us in the opposition—I asked him if he had heard of a town in Queensland called Coolum. He had not. I do not suppose many people here have heard of Coolum, either. Population: 500; on the Sunshine Coast, near to where I come from. When I was buying bread at Coolum on the day before I flew to Indonesia to meet up with Hassan and embark upon my tour of the affected areas, I saw on the baker’s counter a notice calling together the community of Coolum—population 500—to the local community benefit for the tsunami that Saturday evening. It was one such community benefit, of which there have been literally thousands across our country, and it has been a remarkable community effort. Hassan Wirajuda, the foreign minister of the Republic of Indonesia, asked me in the parliament to convey to all Australians who have participated in these local community fundraising efforts his thanks and those of the Indonesian government and people.

This has not just been an Australian effort. We sometimes perhaps think so. But I saw on the ground in Banda Aceh and, more broadly, in Medan and elsewhere that it was a truly international effort. First and foremost, it was an Indonesian effort. Let us not forget that the brunt of the reconstruction task and the immediate humanitarian assistance task was borne by the Indonesian armed forces themselves. The brave men of TNI, under the leadership of General Bambang Darwono, were faced with the extraordinary task of physically burying 120,000 corpses. This is something for which armed forces are not really prepared or trained. It was a task still under way when I was there. Then there is the United Nations. There has been criticism of the United Nations, but I have to say that what I encountered on the ground was praise for organisations like UNICEF and the World Food Program, who have borne the brunt of the emergency effort in providing food and water to many isolated communities, and they should be thanked.

Then there is the rest of the international community as well: Germans, Brits, the French—all, it seems, from ‘old Europe’, but all doing their bit. Then there are the Americans, who have also been unfairly criticised. Were it not for the immediate deployment of the USS Abraham Lincoln to the region with its heavy lift capabilities there would have been no ability to deliver emergency food and water assistance to isolated communities in the 100-kilometre stretch to the south of Banda Aceh which could not be reached by other means. The road had been washed away by the tsunami. There was no other means of getting in. There was limitation on the supply of large-scale helicopters; these were supplied by the USS Abraham Lincoln. The single reason why thousands of those villagers are alive today is the swift action of the United States armed forces, and they should be thanked.

We have focused in this debate on Indonesia. Let us not forget Sri Lanka, where the burden has also been great: 31,000 dead. There has been concern in this country about whether aid had reached all the communities on the island, a concern brought to my attention by various members of our House—the members for Lowe, Bruce, Holt, Chisholm, and others. I would like to thank and place on record my appreciation for the work of the Sri Lankan High Commissioner here in Canberra, who at that stage was in Sri Lanka himself, for the assistance he provided to the Treasurer’s brother, the head of World Vision, in unblocking bureaucratic blockages in Sri Lanka to ensure that aid flowed to the relevant communities immediately. His contribution should be acknowledged. I hope soon to be able to visit Sri Lanka.

So what of the future? Once the television coverage has passed—and it has—and once the international community has forgotten what has happened in this tsunami, there are those of us who are close to this place, who are close to Indonesia and who see our future as lying in this region, who have an enduring responsibility to be there for the long haul. I place on record the opposition’s wholehearted support for the five-year billion-dollar reconstruction package which has been offered to the Indonesian government. This is a good basis, framework and amount of money to work with, and it indicates that we are not there for the short-term fix but for the long haul. May we in this place constantly come back and ask ourselves each year, ‘What has happened to those communities affected by the tsunami?’ Let us not forget them.

The second thing I would say as we look to the future is this—and the Leader of the Opposition has already touched on this: out of adversity springs opportunity. We on this side of the House, and I particularly from this dispatch box, have had a lot of very negative things to say about this government’s handling of the Indonesia relationship. We would argue that that criticism has been well founded. What we see, however, is a remarkable opportunity which now presents itself, an opportunity which I think the Prime Minister so far has given positive indication that he wishes to respond to, and that is to use this event and our response to it to rebuild the Australia-Indonesia relationship. That is a remarkable opportunity which the government now have, and I urge and implore them to take it with both hands, because our country’s future and our security in this region depend on the strength of our relationship with Jakarta and the 230 million people of the Indonesian republic. Please, get it right.

The last thing I would say is, again, something that was touched upon by my colleague the Leader of the Opposition. The foreign minister said before—and he spoke well and with emotion in his speech on this motion before the House—that the government acted in the way in which it acted on the tsunami because it had a sense of humanitarian responsibility. I think he is right in describing what the government and the Australian community felt. I say this in addition, however: when we take that compassionate response and our sense, therefore, of humanitarian obligation, let us also apply it to the silent, non-telegenic, non-dramatic poverty that today afflicts 1.4 billion people across the world—members also of our human family. These are folk who are not often on television but for whom we have a universal human responsibility. The Millennium Development Goals, as noted before, provide a vehicle for us to do that. The review conference is up this year, five years into the millennium goals to which this government and this country are committed. Let us commit to them afresh, and to their concrete objectives concerning the elimination of poverty from our planet. I commend the motion to the House.