Page 2459 - Week 09 - Tuesday, 6 August 1991
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MR MOORE: Mr Humphries, this message will go loud and clear to the Federal Government.
MR SPEAKER: Mr Collaery, just before you commence, I advise members that the matter of public importance has concluded time-wise. But, of course, we are now speaking to a motion and therefore we have 15 minutes each for the first two speakers and 10 minutes for any member thereafter.
MR COLLAERY (9.04): Thank you, Mr Speaker, for pointing that out to members. Mr Humphries, speaking for the Liberal Party, categorised the people opposed to this exhibition as either from the Australian Labor Party or peaceniks. I am neither. I am not a pacifist; I am not a Quaker - and I have great respect for and brotherly camaraderie with my colleague Dr Kinloch. I am far from being a pacifist. I have had a career that has embraced seeing the outcomes of the deadly conflicts that have afflicted our world in increasing measure since the end of the great catastrophe of World War II. I have carried a weapon, and I have witnessed dreadful things that relate to the attempts to solve conflict by armed struggle.
I was in Japan a few days ago, and I noticed two things in the short time I was there. Before I went there I had no interest in ever travelling to that country, and I have had the opportunity on a number of occasions. I had no interest because I have some sort of natural hang-up from the Second World War. Anyway, I went there and visited a daughter who works in the far north of Japan, in an area that borders the disputed regions between the Japanese and the Soviets. It is interesting to go to an institutionalised pacifist country, with very little evidence of militarism, even close to the Soviet border. In just about every city I went to there were black fascist vans with loud speakers, and they are travelling around and working very hard in Japan at the moment to develop a fascist right-wing movement. They extol the rearming of Japan and they disturb the community. They go around at all hours of the night, and it is worrying for someone from this community to go and watch that sinister and insidious activity going on in that country which was bombed into pacifism.
I like to think that the Japanese society as it is will not change and that they have reflected on what occurred to them in Nagasaki and Hiroshima and in the enormous fires that swept Tokyo and other cities. In the ACT, many of us are not touched by war and know little about it. Listening to the Liberal speakers, I doubted very much that they had really lived. They have probably not seen some of the awful products of human conflict.
At the moment, the world continues to spend more on arms than it spends on anything else. In the past 10 years $US8,000 billion was spent on arms. Think of what that could have done for the Third World. The cost of mounting
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