Kevin Hogan (Page, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

As we all experienced on Monday, it was a very solemn day in the chamber as we discussed this issue. Just to echo the previous speaker's comments, I think at times like this we all question and, really, we look at the human race. It is my inherent belief that the human race is basically good, that we are good people and that we have loving and good thoughts about other human beings, but obviously there are in this world—and unfortunately there always have been—evil people. As to the genesis, the root, of it, who knows?

But there are evil people, and that is most unfortunate because it has coloured our history through the centuries and has resulted in some horrific wars and other things that we have had to get involved with.

What we are seeing right now in Iraq and obviously in other places around the world is that unfortunately, at the moment, the world does seem to be becoming a little more unstable than it has been in recent years. But, as the Prime Minister said the other day, doing nothing at the moment means leaving millions of people exposed to death, to forced conversion and to basically what is quite obviously ethnic cleansing. So far this year more than a million Iraqis have been driven from their homes, and we have seen that people and their culture—some of these cultures that have existed for millennia—are faced with extermination. The term that has been used quite often in the media and by other people is that a potential genocide is occurring.

We as a country have a choice. As people have said, as Australians we are apprehensive about how we respond to this. We can sit here and do nothing and be very sorry for what is going on over there. Or we can limit it—and at this stage it is limited—to aid. We have obviously done some humanitarian airdrops to people who have been trapped or besieged. This has been done at the request, as we know, of both the Obama administration and the Iraqi government.

It has been stressed also—and I think we really need to do this and we need to keep repeating this—that the target here is terrorism; the target here is not religion. People may do things in the name of religion, but they are certainly not representative of that religion.

A number of speakers have also mentioned the Australian involvement in this, in that we have Australian born citizens involved in this conflict in the sense of going over there and supporting this terrorist group. That obviously is of grave concern to us all and to the government. I would like to commend the Prime Minister and the foreign minister on their actions in not only this conflict but also the conflict that has been happening in the Ukraine: to be a voice of reason and a voice of good. But, with the Australian citizens' involvement in this, we have to look at this very carefully. Unfortunately, in many cases it has been reported in the press that this is often a younger generation whose parents are good people, whose parents are contributing to our community, whose parents are good Australian citizens. In many cases it is their children who have become radicalised and extreme in their behaviour.

So we as a community obviously have to take the measures that the government has taken. We have grown our own counter-terrorism funding and got some Australian authorities to increase their surveillance and their powers in trying to deal with people like that. And we are doing the positive as well. We need to engage every group in Australia and every subgroup. We have lots of subgroups for different members of different clubs and different things. We are going more into those groups and trying to engage those groups so we can work at this at both angles.

It is a very solemn thing to talk about. I commend the Prime Minister and the foreign minister on their actions in this conflict. I think it is the right thing for Australia to do that we help people who are basically at the point of a potential genocide and that we be on the side of good in trying to stamp out these extremists and radical people.

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