Page 5255 - Week 16 - Thursday, 28 November 1991
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(3) Strongly endorses the 1982 United Nations General Assembly Resolution on East Timor that "the Secretary-General be asked to initiate consultations with all parties concerned, with a view to exploring avenues and achieving a comprehensive settlement of the problem";
(4) Calls on the Federal Government to formulate proposals for a United Nations supervised act of self-determination for East Timor as a matter of priority and to use its diplomatic resources to enlist the support of the United Nations Member States to ensure maximum support for such an act; and
(5) Requests the Speaker of this Assembly to forward the motion to the Minister of Foreign Affairs in the Australian Federal Government.
Members, a moment's reflection is required when we think of events in Yugoslavia and the recent events in Timor. The appropriate way to reflect on that matter is to go back to February 1939 when the Australian Broadcasting Commission instructed a Miss Ann Caton of the National Joint Committee for Spanish Relief to delete the word "German" from a reference to planes which had bombed Guernica. It is also appropriate, historically, to remind members of what was said in the Australian Parliament in May 1939. I refer, firstly, to comments by the Australian Minister for External Affairs, Sir Henry Gullett, with whose son, I might add, Mr Jensen and I stood at the Hellenic war memorial only a few days ago. Sir Henry Gullett spoke in the Federal Parliament of Mussolini's "genius, his patriotism ... and almost superhuman capacity", and Hitler's "shining - - -
Members interjected.
MR SPEAKER: Order! Order, members, please!
MR COLLAERY: Yes, Mr Speaker, I find it particularly difficult at this end of the chamber when this occurs, because of the acoustics. He referred also to Hitler's "shining record of service to his people".
Of course, they were gross errors of judgment, and it is a great tragedy that the person who spoke first, the then Minister for foreign affairs in Australia, Sir Henry Gullett, within a year lost his own son on the battlefield. Of course, a person in Australia at the time witnessing these events, H.G. Wells, said, when he got back to England, that what he saw in Australia laid bare "all that is most indecisive, disingenuous and dangerous in the present leadership of British communities".
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