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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 1 Hansard (19 February) . . Page.. 243 ..

MR STEFANIAK (continuing):

What our government has done is not worthy of condemnation; it is something that is worthy of support. My colleague Mr Pratt has ably espoused the situation and how the Prime Minister is very keen to ensure that the UN does take its job seriously and we will, if we have to, go in with UN approval. If Saddam Hussein is such a reasonable person and we are being so unreasonable, why doesn't he just disarm. He does not need these weapons of mass destruction. My colleague Mr Pratt says this is about the 18th chance he has had. He has broken 17 resolutions.

To say that the actions of the West set a precedent for pre-emptive military action is absolute nonsense. It is basically attempting to enforce a whole series of sanctions that have been applied, the most recent being resolution 1441. There is some argument as to whether another UN resolution is needed. It is quite ludicrous, I think, to say that. I think it is important to make that point.

Ms Tucker goes on in the motion to say that it serves the interests of the promoters and organisers of global terrorism. I really think that that is a nonsense. It gets back to the old appeasement argument. People used that with Adolph Hitler, people used that with Mussolini and people used that against the Japanese imperialists with very little effect. We are told that this war will drive Muslims into the arms of the al-Qaeda. People should remember that Bin Laden said in the days after 9 September 2001, "America is weak. It cannot take casualties. It ran away in Somalia."

Throughout the 1990s, the West responded tamely to attacks by Bin Laden: the African embassy bombs, the attack on USS Cole, two attacks by groups linked to Saddam Hussein, the Saudi barracks bomb attack, the assassination attempt on Bush's father and, indeed, the first World Trade Centre attack to which Saddam Hussein was linked. Also, there has been the continued refusal of Iraq to disarm, as required by the Gulf War ceasefire and the continued attempts to import further weapons and materials of mass destruction.

Why didn't Saddam Hussein just import food? Any decent government faced with the situation he was faced with would look after its people's basic interests to start with, but he has been quite happy to have half a million children starve to death, to have a lot of his population constantly hungry-not him and his cronies; just ordinary people-while he has continued to circumvent the will of the United Nations.

I think it is important that we learn the lessons of appeasement. Lots of people marched on the weekend. They might have been well meaning. Unfortunately, they probably just gave succour to one of the worst dictators the world has seen. One has only to witness what came out of Iraq from Radio Baghdad as a result of those marches. I do not think they helped the ordinary citizens of Iraq one jot.

Mrs Dunne: Or Australian interests.

MR STEFANIAK: Or Australian interests, as Mrs Dunne says. Eastern Europeans know very well that when they suffered depression America and several other countries in the West tried to help them. (Extension of time granted.) In those days it was those in the Western Left who marched in tacit support of their oppressors. It was interesting to learn after the Soviet Union fell that the Politburo never believed that NATO would respond to the deployment of its SS20 missiles.

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