Mr LINDSAY (2:54 PM) —My question is addressed to the Minister for Foreign Affairs. Would the minister inform the House of the role of the Australian troops in the Al Muthanna province of Iraq? Are there any alternative views of what Australia should be doing in Iraq?

Mr DOWNER (Minister for Foreign Affairs) —I thank the honourable member for his question. I recognise that, as the member responsible for Townsville, he has a very great interest in the role of Australian troops in Iraq and of course elsewhere. The focus of the Al Muthanna Task Group of 450 Australian troops will be to provide a secure environment to the Japanese Iraq Reconstruction Support Group’s operations as they perform humanitarian, engineering and rebuilding tasks. It will also be to provide training to the Al Muthanna provincial Iraqi security force. This is yet another demonstration of this government’s commitment to seeing Iraq become the successful democracy that we believe it can become.

The honourable member asked if there are any alternative views. I am becoming something of an expert on Australian Labor Party policy on Iraq. According to my calculations, they have had 17 different positions on Iraq since 23 March last year, when the then Leader of the Opposition—remember Mark Latham?—said that the troops all had to come out by Christmas. The Leader of the Opposition, who professes to be a great expert on security policy—he is always telling us that—is sending a message to his backbench that he believes Australian troops should be out of Iraq. That is the message he is sending.

But, the day before yesterday, the member for Griffith, who is the spokesman on foreign affairs for the opposition, demonstrated quite clearly how the Leader of the Opposition is in fact walking on both sides of the street on this issue. The member for Griffith said that Labor’s policy was to assist the Iraqi people through enhancing border security. He said that there are terrorists coming through Iraq’s highly porous borders—through Jordan, which has a 181-kilometre border with Iraq; Syria, which has a 605-kilometre border; and Saudi Arabia, which has an 814-kilometre border.

I would like to know how Australia is supposed to be guarding these borders—a total of 3,650 kilometres of Iraqi border—and protecting the Iraqis from terrorists coming through those borders, but we should not have troops in Iraq. Presumably, the Leader of the Opposition believes we should send officers from the Australian Customs Service to set up customs posts—you know, in their neat uniforms, as you see them at Kingsford Smith airport, Melbourne Airport or wherever. Do they stand there and ask the terrorists to show their passports as they come into Iraq?

Not only is the Labor Party’s position on Iraq totally confused and intellectually incoherent, but the Leader of the Opposition on this question of Iraq says we should not have troops in Iraq but we should be guarding Iraq’s borders. The Leader of the Opposition, yet again, is walking both sides of the street.