Kim Beazley On Tampa and the 2001 Election

This is the text of a speech by Kim Beazley, ALP Member for Brand, in the House of Representatives:

Mr BEAZLEY (Brand) (12.49 p.m.) — Mr Speaker, I congratulate you on your re-election to high office. I also congratulate the member for Macarthur on his first speech in this place. There have been some magnificent contributions on both sides of the House from new members of parliament. One of the refreshing issues at this time of the year is that we have a chance to listen to those entering this place with idealism. There is no doubt at all, as the former speaker will find out, that this is an honourable place to find yourself. It is the best place to be— the best place to contribute to the life of this nation. But you have tasks when you get into this place and one of those tasks is to look critically not just at what your opponents do but also at what you do yourself. If Harold Wilson’s statement about a week being a long time in politics were true, it was demonstrated once again last week. At the beginning of that week, the government were in high triumphalism and high pomp. By the end of it, every person in this country knew that they had a tarnished victory; every person in this country knew that they were deceitfully misled; every person in this country knew that they could have had better.

Many began to be convinced of that, I think, when they listened to the Governor General’s speech, to which we are now preparing an address in reply. The Governor General’s speech was completely absent of vision; it was completely absent of a clarion call to the nation to address the problems that exist within us and to build on the strengths that we have. Completely missing from it was a program for three years; completely missing from it was anything that you would normally expect of a government coming into office, still relatively youthful in years—it was only 5½ years or so before the last election that it came into office. It was a depressing, deprived document, which followed a campaign that had been fought not as campaigns are normally fought by a government, on a total picture of the economy, the nation and society, but on one single issue alone—that of border protection.

I want to make one thing absolutely clear at the outset, because I notice that the Prime Minister, in full deception mode in the course of question time, has called into account our bona fides on this issue— would you believe that! After all that we have seen over the course of the last few days, he calls into account our bona fides on our undertakings to the Australian electorate. Let me make this absolutely clear: if I had been elected Prime Minister of this country, the government that I would have led would have protected the borders of this nation. We protected them when we were in office. Sometimes that requires hard decisions and hard actions. It requires tough legislation. If you believe, as I do, that the continuation of a massive immigration program is necessary for the success of our society, in order to sustain public support for that you cannot afford for the Australian public to believe that you are a soft touch—nor were we. The mandatory detention of those who come into this country was a policy of the Labor Party, put in place when we were in office. We ran tough policies, which succeeded. The avalanche of people crossing our borders illegally was not a problem when we were in office; we were tough enough to deal with it.

Why wasn’t it an issue when we were in office? Why didn’t people know that, when it came to people who entered illegally, we had a hardline policy of inspecting their bona fides to work out who they were, to see whether or not they posed a health threat or a legal threat to this country? Why was it not an issue? It was not an issue because we simply did not seek to exploit it. We did not seek to base our credentials on undermining what is one of the fundamental requirements of good government. When we were in office, we did not attempt to twist the tail of the racial tiger, however subtly, for our political benefit. We could conduct decent border protection policy without having to resort to lies, deception and subtle racism, and we could do it standing on our heads. During the campaign it became clear, on 8 November, that we as a people had been lied to, al-though the Prime Minister maintained the fiction for the next couple of days. You do not have to lie to protect your borders. I will add one thing to that: you do not need to trash the reputation of your country to protect your borders. It is not a requirement of protecting this nation that, as we pursue our border pro-tection concerns, we express ourselves in such a way that gives grave offence to the neighbourhood in which we live and gives grave offence to decent people not only in this country but elsewhere. That is not a requirement of proper border protection; it is a requirement that that not be the consequence of the way in which you talk about protecting your borders. National security is a very broad issue, and part of national security is the reputation of your nation. With our tough border protection measures, we left office with Australia’s honour enhanced in international councils. Make no mistake about it: to put it at one of its most basic levels, we would not have had the Olympics in this country if we had the reputation as a nation that we now have. The Prime Minister was seen running alongside every successful Australian athlete and cheering them on, but that Prime Minister would never have produced the Olympics in this country. That Prime Minister was the beneficiary of a change in the perception by the rest of the world of the character of the Australian people—a people who rejected racism, a people who sought a multi-cultural society, a people who sought to draw on the strengths of every single Australian, no matter what their background might be. That was the reputation of the nation that John Howard inherited. That is the reputation that he has trashed.

This government is in trouble on the basis of a report that is a whitewash. That report, from beginning to end, is a whitewash. But the government is not in trouble because it is a whitewash; it is in trouble because even a whitewash document cannot paint over the stain of deception that has been perpetrated on the Australian people. I know a fair bit about how gov-ernment is done; I was a minister for 13 years. As a result of the efforts of many in the Australian Labor Party—not least their leaders, Hawke and Keating— it is my privilege to be, together with about three other people, the longest serving federal Labor minister in Australian history. I know a thing or two about bureaucracy, and I still have a few teeth in my head and a few friends downtown, as Jack Nicholson said in Chinatown, and I know this.

The world painted in that report does not exist. The world painted in that report of Chinese walls on a policy issue that is out there in the public—it is not a tender document or something like that—does not exist. Knowledge from a department going into a minister ’s office reaches the minister. It might not reach them on day one, but you can bet that it reaches the minister by day two, three or whatever. So the ‘Chinese walls’ picture perpetrated in this whitewash document does not exist. It is more likely to exist under this government, I do concede, than it would have under us. When we were in office, relationships between bureaucrats and ministers proceeded through proper advice. Properly processed documents ap-peared before ministers. There were notes to file, there were memos, there were Public Service min-utes. There was a paper trail behind every great public policy issue.

In the world of Max Moore-Wilton and John Howard, which involves the suborning of our great Public Service as it involves the suborning of our defence department, I suspect that there are fewer paper trails. However, there are conversations, there are sighs and whispers, there is movement of the fingers across the throat indicating cut-throats in certain circumstances and there are circular hand movements. There are ways in which information gets conveyed, no matter how inappropriately. I believe that the manner of such information being conveyed produced this situation.

On 10 October, the Prime Minister knew. He may have known by a process of osmosis. He may have known by a process by which documents did not necessarily appear before him. These things do happen to leaders in election campaigns. I, for example, knew the state of our polling on the first weekend, though I was deprived of it by those who advised us; I simply knew it because bad news cannot be concealed in the faces of those who love you. The bad news was not concealed in their faces, and I knew I had an uphill battle on my hands.

When the Prime Minister, Mr Ruddock and Mr Reith first made their statements about the kids having been thrown overboard, I believed them. Why did I believe them? Because I am a fool? No. I believed them because for 13 years I was a minister in a great set of Labor governments. I was Minister for Defence for five or so of those years, and I knew that when an operational report comes to ministers it has been properly massaged; there are no barrack room tales in it. More senior officers have had a chance to look at the incident that has occurred; they bring their own judgment to bear and they massage contradictory opinions that are expressed. If it needs to get to you fast, then they have made at least the appropriate caveats on the document that goes before you.

I assumed that, give or take a bit of exaggeration by the ministers, the document was likely to be correct. I assumed that until 7 November. The Prime Minister ceased to assume that on 10 October. He defends himself now in this place by saying to us all that on 10 October he was simply responding quietly to the questions that were put to him. Look at the transcript, at the repeated questions being put to him, and look at the things he said a couple of days beforehand. Look at what he said then—and we should all have been tipped off—that not all was well in the kingdom of Denmark, let alone the office of the Prime Minister of this nation. He knew he had misled the Australian people. Whether he lied is another matter. He knew he had misled them. From 7 November he lied. From 7 November he lied—

The DEPUTY SPEAKER (Hon. IR Causley) — I would remind the member for Brand of the standing orders.

Mr BEAZLEY — I withdraw the remark. He misled them. He deliberately misled them from 7 November because I can tell you this. Even though in this place last week he said only that he had consulted Mr Reith on 7 November, in those little sleights of hands, which we who have long service in politics know so well, he introduced the fact last Friday that he had talked to others. He had talked to one who unquestionably knew the truth and he talked to him at length. So in the last two days of that campaign, the Australian people were deliberately misled by the Prime Minister. Then, when he had to fess up, he blamed the Navy.

I knew that, whatever happened in this election campaign, I was safe in my own constituency when I flew home because the Australian newspaper had its billboard out and its last billboard before the election was, ‘Howard blames Navy’. So the good sailors in my electorate walked into those polling booths absolutely determined to tell the Prime Minister what they thought of him. While their offence was great, it had not yet penetrated through to the rest of the Australian community. Remember this on the Wednesday of that vote. We were catching up at a rate of knots. Indeed, our pollsters told us we were about to win. I cannot believe that the Liberal Party pollsters did not tell them that they were in the same situation. None of us would know on that Wednesday evening which way this horrible story would break. As it happened, the reintroduction of the issue massively benefited the Liberals. But you could not have known that. Therefore, the Prime Minister continued to mislead the Australian people for a particular purpose. As somebody who represents a substantial proportion of the Australian Navy in parliament, as someone whose proudest service in this place was as defence minister of this nation, I cannot accept the way our defence forces are now being treated, and neither can they. I cannot accept that they are made the political tools of a government of the day. It is one thing to seek political advantage and praise for a selection of a particular item of equipment and having that displayed in a constituency where work will be obtained. It is one thing to be doing that; that is all part of the warp and weft of Australian politics. But it is another thing to take that sense of honour, which applies to those who serve this great nation, and trash it by making them your political servants during a political campaign. They cannot stop. Yesterday, to defend his wretched hide, the Prime Minister trotted out yet another serviceman to come out and say that the minister’s office had received only the pictures that they put out to the public. They cannot help themselves! By the end of the day, they corrected themselves and said, ‘No, there were at least 11 pictures that went across to the minister.’ But Howard had them out there contradicting that so he would not be embarrassed when he did the Sunday programs. This is a wretched performance for somebody who is supposed to lead this nation—a wretched performance. That wretchedness continues in a lack of responsibility to our defence forces.

What indulgence that trip to the United States by the Prime Minister since the election. We are engaged in an international war against terrorism. The ANZUS alliance has been invoked. Australian soldiers, naval and air personnel are in the field as we speak and have been since the latter part of last year with their lives on the line. The head of the alliance is the United States. Determination as to the fate of our soldiers in the field is being made in Washington and in Tampa, Florida. They are being made by civil personnel in the Department of Defense of the United States, led by their Secretary of State and junior officials to him, and by the chief of their armed services and their subordinate commanding the operation from Tampa, Florida. If you are an Australian Prime Minister, with your soldiers thus engaged, that is where you find yourself if you happen to be visiting the United States.

As you fly over to Jakarta, the one worthwhile part of the visit, you do not stop for a two-day holiday in Singapore—you stop at Bahrain where the commander of the Australian forces in operation happens to have his headquarters. That is what you do when you honour the people who serve this nation. That is what a proper Prime Minister does. He has a view of what needs to happen and he gets out there and he ensures that the Americans understand it and he takes from them what it is that they understand their task and role to be. We know that there is an intention to take this war further afield so there is an absolute requirement that we have clear understandings of it. There we have the picture: the service personnel doing their duty by the Prime Minister. There we have the picture: the Prime Minister failing to do his duty by them, but exploiting them continually through the campaign and as late as yesterday.

The Governor-General’s speech would have been very different had we been elected. The first week of parliament would have been different too. For starters, the first week of parliament would not have been last week; it would have been in December. It would have involved, firstly, an apology to the indigenous people of this country who found themselves part of the stolen generation, so we could actually move on from that issue as a united people, and not tweak the racial tail on that as well to see whether or not there is a bit of political advantage in it.

Secondly, you would have had the introduction into this place of a bill to protect workers’ entitlements, all their entitlements—workers who depend desperately on those entitlements when they find themselves out of work when a company has collapsed without proper provision being made for them. You would have seen the introduction of a bill to remove the money from the category 1 schools and its distribution among the needy primary schools and secondary schools in the public system of this nation so that all could benefit from a Knowledge Nation; it would not simply be a question of privilege. You would have seen a government engaged on getting an Ansett outcome that actually restored decent competition to the airline system of this country. You would have seen a bill in this place to restore the ability of the arbitration commission to deal fairly with all the industrial relations issues that come before it so that there is an understanding amongst the Australian people that they are fairly treated in that most basic area of their requirements: what happens to them in the workplace. You would have seen too a program to support our public hospitals with a Medicare bonus. You would have seen a hundred million loans going into the construction of our nursing home capital facilities so we could start to address those phantom beds so beloved of the government. You would have seen the beginnings of our Knowledge Nation plans: the education priority zones, the extra literacy and numeracy teachers, the extra training. You would have seen a total social agenda for the Australian nation. But, above all, what you would have seen was a government committed to the unity of all our people, the dignity of all our people, and a determination to use that unity and dignity to enhance our reputation and therefore our security as a nation. But that was not to be.

I do not claim that we ‘was robbed’; that is not my view of life. That reduces politics to the personal and not the national. The Australian people were robbed by deceit. Our Australian reputation has been robbed by chicanery by our political opponents. They will pay a penalty for that, and that penalty will come sooner than this government thinks.