Page 2745 - Week 13 - Tuesday, 21 November 1989
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administration's foreign policy, based upon a fundamental respect for a defence of basic human rights, was welcomed by the Labor Party.
President Carter put that issue squarely to the United Nations when he said, amongst other things:
... no member of the United Nations can claim that mistreatment of its citizens is solely its own business. Equally, no member can avoid its responsibilities to review and to speak when torture or unwarranted deprivation occurs in any part of the world.
What did our Government do after the massacre at Tiananmen Square? Well, I went to the Great Hall on that commemorative day and I sat in a near front row and I saw our Prime Minister shed tears for the situation as he saw it. But I thought, "Here is the same man who, in pursuit of his own agenda on China, did what no other Prime Minister in this country has done since Scullin; he agreed to the handing over of a Chinese official guest who had sought to remain in Australia". That handover was to uniformed officers of the PRC Embassy. The handover took place at Brisbane Airport and was described to me by an experienced and hardened veteran as one of the cruellest and most callous things he had ever seen.
The history of that handover is chilling in its detail - the personal notes, the telegrams, the very narrow clique who handled the affair. The Prime Minister's instruction was that the intelligence services were to have no contact whatsoever with this defector, the irony being that the defector himself really wanted to pursue his professional career, and the fact that he sought to remain in Australia at a time when there had been a high-level vice-premier delegation to Australia did not reflect well on the decision of the Australian Prime Minister. I could relate other matters, but convention and good taste dictate otherwise.
The Hawke Government's later handling of the first of the Irian Jayan refugees is another dreadful indictment of its lack of perspective. The then Immigration Minister described the first five refugees as "canoe-paddling job seekers". The respected Asia Watchgroup is well known for its detailed reporting on human rights in Asia, as is Amnesty International. Torture, killing and widespread physical abuse of prisoners are part of the Indonesian secret war in our near north.
As with China, we go to extensive lengths to find the Indonesians acceptable. If you had seen the bayonet wounds on some of those five, you would have known that the minor cultural disruption, as the then Foreign Minister, Mr Hayden, described events in Irian Jaya at that time, must rate, along with Neville Chamberlain's statements, as one of the classic understatements. Issues of territorial
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