Date November 7
Speaker: Senator Bob Brown (AG Tasmania)
COMMITTEES
Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade References Committee
Reference
Speech
Senator BOB BROWN (Tasmania) (5.38 p.m.)--I thank those who have contributed to the debate. I do not know; there is something missing in the human psyche that very often allows busy people in very powerful places to fail to relate to people who suffer great tragedy, indignity and irreparable harm in their lives. To me, this is one of those cases. I was recently talking with a friend in Sydney who said that a friend of his had lost 11 family members in this tragedy in Pakistan. I have not read that anywhere in Australia. It is as if it does not relate to us. Quite a few other people in Sydney have also lost family members and friends in this appalling tragedy. When one reads the front page of the current Guardian Weekly about the kids who are having limbs amputated, who are going through terrible suffering and indignity and, above all, who have seen school friends flattened and have lost their parents and relatives, it is heart-rending, and we cannot undo that.
But we now have our eyes wide open to a possibly bigger death toll as the winter comes on. There is no sanitation, there is no clean water, there are no good food supplies and there is no protection. We read about kids who have already been picked out by unscrupulous people for prostitution and labour for years and years because they have got nobody left to defend them. What can we do? We can certainly rapidly come to the aid of Pakistan, which does not have the wherewithal to give these people medicine, food, shelter and warmth during the coming winter.
We can have a bit of lateral thinking. Lots of people I know have got sleeping bags which are stuck in their cupboards--good quality sleeping bags, bought for the once-only outdoors trip. The government says: 'We're sending a thousand sleeping bags to Pakistan.' On my calculation, with 3½ million people homeless, that means there is one sleeping bag per 3½ thousand people. I would guarantee that there are tens of thousands of high-quality sleeping bags just stuck in cupboards in Australia which could save lives. I ask the government: will it coordinate an effort to get those sleeping bags together and take them in a plane across there and distribute them to the men, women and kids who are facing minus 10 or minus 20 degrees in the coming months out in the open?
I do not know; are ordinary tents that we take for granted of value here or do they have to be coordinated, the same size and taken in a uniform way? If not, I am sure there is a lot that Australians could do there as well. I take my hat off to the people in Queensland who raised the money and immediately got 1,000 tents across there by working in the public domain.
But I want to come back to the government's contribution. It is miserly--$14 million so far from a government that has spent, we are told, over $100 million this year on advertising and, we know, four times as much money just on advertising for the industrial relations campaign. It is money into thin air. Who is that really going to help? Sure, we live in a materialist society in which the impulse to buy promotes the economy and in which there is the chimera of belief that it makes us better people to have this or that good based on advertising, and the biggest advertiser in Australia is the government. Surely it could pull in the belt a bit there and send a few tens of millions of dollars instead to Pakistan.
These are our neighbours. On the planet these days, everybody is our neighbour except we are rich and they are poor. As a kid, I read with huge dismay about the Irish famine in the 1840s. Not a few of our forebears, luckily for them, managed to get out of that, survive it and get to this country one way or another and, of course, elsewhere around the world in the Irish diaspora of the time. The population of eight million was halved. It is not known how many million people--men, women and kids--starved to death in Ireland while England was a country of plenty. What is more appalling than that is that ships were actually taking some food out of Ireland to Liverpool and elsewhere because that country was rich. This was in the middle of highly religious Victorian Britain.
Surely we can do better 160 years down the line. Pakistan is our Ireland. The government is not going to come under criticism for rapidly sending much more money and goods to the aid of this stricken mega-disaster. The government says it is sending 1,008 doses of the anti-tetanus vaccine. Really? There are 3½ million people homeless and needing medicines and 120,000 children still stranded with their parents in the mountains and we are sending 1,008 anti-tetanus doses. Of course there is a limit to it. Of course this is being coordinated with international aid. President Musharraf, the ally who has risked repeated assassination attempts because he has supported the Bush administration and the Howard government with the intervention in Iraq--sorry; the war against terrorism, as it is described, not the intervention in Iraq--is now appealing to the world to help. And here is Pakistan with 12 helicopters in total, bless its heart. It has a massive population but with massive poverty--and with massive cruelty coming out of this natural event, which is leading into an oncoming disaster which, next time round, is human made. It is not because we are going over there to hurt people; it is because we are not going over there to help. We are a mega-rich country. This is an appalling human disaster. I appeal to the government to think this over again. I appeal to the government to look again at the words of Pakistan's minister for social welfare, Zobaida Jalal, who said just last week:
The earthquake was a natural calamity that nobody could do anything about, but if these people--
referring to the millions who are homeless--
are allowed to die now, that would be more of a tragedy. It will be on the consciences of many people and many governments for ever.
If we cannot do it for the Pakistanis' sake, let us do it for the sake of our own consciences.
Question put:
That the motion (Senator Bob Brown's) be agreed to.
