Page 2446 - Week 09 - Tuesday, 6 August 1991
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We saw only last week that it is now apparent that Saddam Hussein had obtained mustard gas - or the necessary ingredients to create mustard gas - from Britain, and Britain has very strict guidelines on arms exports. Mr Stefaniak said that Australia has very strict guidelines on arms exports - as it does, and properly so. What has happened in the past, even with those strict guidelines on arms exports? I noted that we were quite proud in 1989-90 that Australia had secured a licence to export small arms to China. A company called the Austral Gun Company had a significant export contract for shotguns and cartridges to the Chinese defence forces. We could recall that a year or so ago relations with China were all the go and talk of closer cooperation in military and other areas was very enthusiastically supported by all sides of politics. What happened in Tiananmen Square? Arms were used against the people.
We all, in this Assembly, a year ago, stood up and made the appropriate statements opposing and expressing our horror at that outrage, and yet Australia had been quite pleased that it had secured contracts to supply equipment. I know that the correspondent at the Canberra Times last week in this debate made reference to what was regarded as another successful export contract from Australia whereby we supplied trainer aircraft to the air force of Burma, now Myanmar. A year or so ago there was a pro-democracy movement in Myanmar. Those of us in this chamber who are members of Amnesty International may have taken part in a recent letter campaign, because the leader of the Myanmar democracy forces, who was elected with his supporters to the Myanmar National Assembly and formed an appropriate majority government, finds himself rotting in a cell in that unfortunate country. Many people have been put down - massacred - by the defence forces of the regime of that country. Australia has had a part, providing some equipment to that regime.
If the nations of the world decided not to sell arms to other nations, war would be very difficult. That is hardly an initiative of the Australian Labor Party, ACT Branch. I think George Bernard Shaw wrote a play, Major Barbara, on the subject. If we all got out of this business, we would live in a much more peaceful world. That is the moral dimension that I have spoken of publicly on this issue in the last week. We have been receiving an extraordinary level of support, through my office, on this. This is the only issue, since I have been active in local politics and a member of this Assembly, on which people unknown to me have actually stopped me on the street and said, "Congratulations; good on you. I think you are doing the right thing".
I think most people in Canberra, who form a community that is probably more aware than most communities in Australia of what is going on in the world, are firmly behind the decision of this Government to say, "We are not interested
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