Page 2090 - Week 08 - Tuesday, 5 June 1990
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Government, instead of standing up and just passing verbiage, just words, will say whether it has taken some action.
Clearly, on this anniversary we should have taken some action, and that action, responding to Professor Jenner, would provide a very clear message to the Chinese Government of the attitude of this Assembly, as the message should be sent from governments all over the world. Already we see in America a softening of its attitude towards China and the elderly rulers - I do not use the word "statesmen" - in China. I think it is appropriate that we now find a way - and I think Professor Jenner's way is a particularly good way - to make quite clear, not just in words but in actions, the attitude of this Government and this Assembly. I would hope that it would be supported by the whole Assembly. So I put that question back to the Government to respond to now, at this most appropriate time.
Democracy in China
DR KINLOCH (11.03): Mr Speaker, it is very good to hear from both sides of the house the message to our friends from China. I would like to couple that remembrance with an event of fifty years ago, and I hope the connection will be clear. Fifty years ago, I was a small boy in a secondary school in Sussex. We did not get a summer holiday that year because there was the danger of invasion, but a ghastly thing happened. Our school cricket pitch was dug up to be an antitank trap; we had air-raid shelters in our school yard; there were air-raids going on that summer. It was a beautiful summer, and this was the week in which it looked as though Britain was at the absolute end of its tether. It was the week in which 350,000 people were brought back in those tiny ships from Dunkirk and onto the southern coast. My mother was a nurse in the south of England; she helped look after many of the wounded men who were brought back.
The connection I would like to make is that in 1940 things looked very grim indeed. Invasion looked to be in the offing. It looked as though Nazi Germany was all-powerful, even to the point of the invasion of Britain. It looked like a last-ditch stand, a phrase used earlier today. But within one year, two years, three years, certainly five years, what had taken place in the summer of 1940 was a bad memory and there was a renewal of freedom throughout Europe. I hope our friends from China, whom we welcome here - we welcome them as students, we welcome any of them who will remain here as Australians - one day perhaps, one year, two years, three years, four years, five years down the track, may also come to realise that freedom can be found again.
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