Ian Macfarlane (Groom, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Energy and Resources) Share this | Hansard source

I rise tonight to offer my condolences to the people of Japan, a country which I have been fortunate enough to visit on a number of occasions. It is a county of incredible beauty and a people who have in their own way a culture and gentleness which I admire.

Australia has been a close friend of Japan for many decades now. I know that deep in our past, and in my father’s generation, there were conflicts and a residual anger that existed between people of that generation and the Japanese people. But, fortunately, most of those differences have been resolved. In my lifetime I have only known the Japanese as people who come here as tourists, people who have welcomed me when I have travelled to their land, people who have traded and done business with us and people who have been very much a part of the development that has gone on particularly in Queensland and, in fact, right around Australia in the resources industry.

The graphic images of what happened in the Miyagi prefecture and the devastating impact of the earthquake, followed by the tsunami and the ongoing issue with the meltdown of the nuclear power station are issues which bring me great sadness. I come from an electorate and from a city that has suffered its share of natural disasters in this recent year, and the hurt and the misery that has been brought upon the people of Toowoomba and of Oakey, and out of my electorate in the Lockyer Valley, Brisbane and Ipswich, is small by comparison to the devastating impact of what we have seen on television.

I think that the most moving image that I saw, watching what I know as a beautiful and resilient, resourceful people trying to deal with this disaster, was the sight of snow falling on these people—homeless and bewildered, but still with the outlook on life that they know they are going to recover. I can think of nothing worse than to be beset by this string of natural disasters. As a friend of Japan, and as someone who, as I said, has been socially and in a business sense in close contact with them over my parliamentary career, I extend my deepest sorrow. I find it a challenge that I know they will recover from.

I say to the Japanese people that the people of Toowoomba, of the Darling Downs, of Queensland and of Australia will stand with you every step of the difficult path that I know you face on your way to recovery. I know you are a courageous people and I know you are a people who are deep in culture; but you are also a people who inevitably look to the future and to the future opportunities that you can give to your country, to your people and to your children. Australia will always look to you as a friend.

We are, of course, business partners, joint venturers in commerce and trading partners. But most of all we are friends, and we from my electorate want to make sure that that message is reinforced at a time of incredible hardship. No-one in the electorate of Groom or in Australia can imagine the incredible adversity that the people of Japan are facing. We had a taste. We had floods and homes swept away, but they were small in number. Whilst we did have two fatalities in my electorate—and they were in tragic circumstances—no-one can imagine what it is like to have a death toll that is in all likelihood going to exceed 20,000 people, perhaps even more, and a recovery bill in the hundreds of billions of dollars. It may, in fact, take decades to reinstate the country to what it was.

I have no doubt at all that the people of Japan will rebuild their community. Like all human beings world wide, they will learn how to rebuild their community, as we will. I have no doubt that the Japanese people will see this as one of the challenges that befalls them in life. I have no doubt that as they go forward the Australian people will stand beside them.

This is a terrible time for our friends in Japan, but it is a time in which friends need to stand up and speak for them. That is why, even with the lateness of the hour, I have come to this place to make a point of expressing the deepest sympathies and condolences of the people of my electorate, of my own family and of my wife and me in particular. We have travelled to Japan and dined and lived with the hospitality of the Japanese people. I want to take this opportunity to express our very heartfelt sympathies and to say that we are thinking of you now, we will think of you next week and we will be thinking of you in a month, in a year and in five years time. We will always be there to help you.

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