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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 8 Hansard (25 June) . . Page.. 2118 ..

MR STEFANIAK (continuing):

refugees traumatised by torture. That has provided a valuable service. In a recent funding program for which I had to sign off some things, I signed off that one with great pleasure, because it is another example of just how we, as a community, can help refugees and those at the end of the scale who have been severely traumatised by their experiences in their former countries as a result of very nasty and often very inhumane treatment by the authorities in those countries. We, as a community, I think, have a very good and enviable record, not just as a nation, but also as a local community.

Ms Reilly talked about assistance that we give overseas. In recent years, Australia has been involved in a large number of peacekeeping operations. I think people would remember, in very recent times, the small deployment of medical staff that we sent into Rwanda, into some awful situations there, where there was ethnic violence and people running around madly killing thousands of people. Our small force there made excellent efforts in terms of assisting the sick, the maimed and the wounded. Also, we made a very significant contribution in Cambodia, in supervising the elections there. The general consensus was that the Australian Army contingent there was the best out of all contingents, and it certainly won the hearts and minds of all the people it assisted there. Many of those people were very much refugees within their own country. Some came to Australia; but very many of them were simply refugees within their own countries who had left their areas and their homes because of the various civil wars and internal strife occurring in those countries.

So, overall, Mr Speaker, we certainly have a very proud record which dates back certainly to the end of World War II. It is very timely that we think about Refugee Week. Mr Kaine has brought forward an excellent motion, which is certainly worthy of the support of everyone in this Assembly, and no doubt it will get that.

MS FOLLETT (5.26): Mr Speaker, I want to speak very briefly on this matter. I am conscious that my speech will be following some very fine speeches indeed. Obviously, I will be supporting the motion that has been put forward by Mr Kaine. I want to take a slightly different tack from the other speakers on this matter. The first thing that I want to say is that I have met many refugees over the course of my life, and I have been struck on almost every occasion by what a triumph of the human spirit it is that people survive the most horrendous experiences of war, of civil unrest, of famine, of natural disasters and of the most brutal forms of persecution imaginable, and, still, those people are prepared to come to a new country, to settle, to raise families and to make a positive and a very creative contribution to their new society. That really is, in my opinion, a triumph of the human spirit.

Mr Speaker, I think we must always bear in mind that the situation for refugees has not always been as open or as welcoming as it appears to be at present as far as Australia is concerned. I refer to the Australian community itself as much as to any other element. It is the case that, when I was growing up, when I was very young, the term "reffos" was a generalised term of abuse for anybody from a non-English-speaking background. At the time that I was growing up, in primary school and even in high school, there was a large influx of migrants and refugees, during the 1950s and the early 1960s, in the immediate period following the Second World War, as Mr Stefaniak has indicated. Those migrants did not receive fair treatment; there is no doubt whatsoever in my mind about that.

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