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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 4 Hansard (1 April) . . Page.. 1167 ..
MR SMYTH (continuing):
To finish the article, for the sake of honesty, Mohammed then stresses he was not speaking on behalf of the Multicultural Council-he was speaking for himself.
There is a voice who knows-there is a voice who has suffered. I think it is important to stand here and look at what is being said. We can all trot out quotes. Mr Stanhope quotes from Mahatma Gandhi. It says:
Liberty and democracy become unholy when their hands are dyed red with innocent blood.
When we had this debate several weeks ago, Mr Speaker, I finished with a quote which motivates and guides me. I quoted the words of Edmund Burke, the Anglo-Irish philosopher, who said, in seeing the horror of the French Revolution, that the only condition for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
That is a hard call-it is a tough decision. That is the decision which has been faced by the federal cabinet. I feel that, in what they have done, they have made the right decision. In this case I think that, reluctantly, we have to accept that it is the lesser of two evils.
Mr Speaker, whatever our views on the war, the war has commenced and Australian troops are committed. We must remember that there are young Australians over there doing their duty, and I believe it is vital for us at home to give them our full support and not give succour to those they oppose.
On the front page of yesterday's Daily Telegraph, there was an article headed, "Please don't hate our dads."The sub-title is, "Emotional plea by troops' families to Australia."The wife of an RAAF technician is quoted. The article reads:
No-one wants the war to end more than the families of the people fighting, Peggy said. "If the war wasn't on. my husband would be home safe with me", she said. "But nothing's going to get resolved peacefully. Saddam has to be stopped."
That is interesting. A young wife, Rebecca 22, who is married to Luke, who is 23, who must be a member of the 4th Royal Australian Regiment which has units over there, says:
"I hope our country and all our politicians get behind our boys because we sit on the phone and we say that we are proud of them and that we support them. It would be 100 per cent better if the rest of the country could get behind them and say that they support them as well, because it is affecting them."
If we affect our troops in the front line, if we impair their judgment or hurt them in the way that they carry out their work, then we are placing them at risk. We do not have that right. We do not have the right to say that to our troops.
Mr Speaker, it is simplistic and popularist to simply say, "Bring the troops home."I believe it does nothing but undermine the morale of our defence services personnel. I believe the statement of the Chief Minister does them a great disservice.
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