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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 1 Hansard (19 February) . . Page.. 265 ..

MR STEFANIAK (11.08): Mr Acting Deputy Speaker, Ms Dundas misses the point again. She mentioned that they had already done a motion in November. That was a real blockbuster, wasn't it, Ros? It quite clearly did not work. It just brings home the point that Mr Smyth is making: it has not worked. And 17 UN resolutions have not worked because he totally ignored them. He is a dictator. He is a very nasty individual, and no number of resolutions-not backed up by force, not backed up by some threat-will have any effect whatsoever.

Dr Blix told the Security Council , on 27 January, which was after this Assembly's last resolution, "Iraq does not appear to have come to genuine acceptance-not even today-of the need to disarm."Mr Smyth has asked the Assembly to show some other way, a way that does not have to use force to make this threat-not only to his own people but to others outside his borders-disarm and do what the UN has been asking him to do since 1991. And nothing has worked.

Mr Smyth's motion is a perfectly reasonable one. Ms Dundas, sometimes you do need to use military force and exert pressure to enforce the peace. Sometimes, as an absolute last resort, when there is no other option, you do need to go to war.

Much has been made of the 1930s. Mrs Cross, very properly, referred to Hitler. She very properly referred to the complete inaction of France in 1936, when three unarmed German battalions marched into the Rhineland and the French, because they were in a huge appeasement phase then, did absolutely nothing. If France had taken action then and enforced its right, under the old League of Nations and under the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, to stop the Germans, that might well have stopped Hitler, and millions of innocent civilians and millions of men and women in the armed forces of many countries would not have died.

It was because of honest, decent people in the West who did not want war and who adopted a peace-at-any-price attitude, that dreadful dictators like Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin and the Japanese imperialists were allowed to get away with absolute murder. By the time they finally decided that enough was enough, it was almost too late.

The West only just prevailed in World War II. We do not want a situation like that again, especially when the weapons available to rogue states-and, sadly now, terrorist groups-are so much more destructive than the weapons available to the aggressors, fascists and dictators of World War II.

Unless force is applied and Iraq knows that the UN is serious-and I do not even know if that is going to be enough, but you need that military presence and the threat of force-you cannot ensure that this man will actually disarm. If, as Mr Smyth says, despite all that pressure he still does not, the end result may well be the use of that military force to get rid of a particularly nasty, evil human who has killed millions of his own people and who will continue daily to kill innocent people in his own country unless something is done.

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