East Timor, The New Howard Doctrine And Immigration Policy

Radio Interview with Vivian Schenker and Cathy Van Extel

Transcript - Radio National, ABC Radio - 4 December 2002

E & OE

VIVIAN SCHENKER: As the federal government moves to defuse anger in the region about Australia's position on pre-emptive military strikes, there's a more immediate crisis unfolding on our doorstep. Violent protests in the East Timorese capital of Dili have left up to five people dead and the city trashed. Almost 100 people have been arrested, but foreigners and tourists have started fleeing the country, some accusing local authorities of failing to act to curb the violence. The East Timorese government has responded by imposing a curfew rather than declaring a state of emergency, and it's blaming the United Nations for the protests. The civil unrest in the fledgling nation poses another challenge for the Australian government at a time when it's busy hosing down a diplomatic controversy.

Of course, Cathy Van Extel is in our Parliament House studio. Cathy, has there been a response from Australia?

CATHY VAN EXTEL: Not specifically. There are, of course, still Australian soldiers based in East Timor but at this stage there's no indication that our presence there would be expanded, but obviously this is something that the government will be keeping a close eye on in terms of how it develops. Labor is saying that it certainly highlights the need for a refocusing of security in this region, and in the studio with me now is the Shadow Foreign Affairs spokesman, Kevin Rudd. Thanks for coming in today.

KEVIN RUDD: Good to be with you, Cathy.

CATHY VAN EXTEL: In relation to East Timor, is there a role for Australia to play in relation to this latest unrest?

KEVIN RUDD: As far as the security problem yesterday in Dili is concerned, we haven't got the full facts on that. I think it's a question of proper coordination between the East Timorese government and of course the United Nations security forces. But I won't make a detailed comment on that because it's an operational matter.

More broadly, however, when I was last in Dili it was plain from discussions then with President Gusmao and others that the huge problem in urban East Timor—and that's principally Dili we're talking about—is of large numbers of unemployed young people.

CATHY VAN EXTEL: So you believe that behind this unrest is the economic issue?

KEVIN RUDD: As I said before I don't have the complete details but I do know a grave concern of the government at the time of independence in May when I was last in Dili was what to do about the large number of urban youth and the drift from the country areas of East Timor into the city and the lack of training opportunities, lack of job opportunities. Now, I think this might be a wake-up call for the donor community, including Australia, to look afresh at how we are dealing with the problems of urban youth. And more broadly what it is a further wake-up call to the fact that in our region, our own neighbourhood, our own backyard, Australia faces a significant security challenge, not just terrorism in South-East Asia but basic problems of law and order across Timor and Papua New Guinea and other parts of Melanesia and the South West Pacific. Yet we seem to have an Australian government under Mr Howard spending the bulk of his time and his energy on questions in Iraq rather than on this immediate security challenge in our own region, in our own neighbourhood.

CATHY VAN EXTEL: Looking at the way that local authorities then responded to the protests in East Timor, the government has been criticised for not acting enough to curb the violence immediately. The government itself there is blaming the United Nations. Essentially though the United Nations is still responsible for security there, so can the blame be shafted to the UN?

KEVIN RUDD: Completely unwise for an outsider to make a comment on that in the absence to details of what caused this incident and how it was handled. We will be getting a full briefing I hope in the next couple of days in the Department of Foreign Affairs on what actually transpired. But the bottom line is this: as a significant donor country we can do something on the economic front and I think we need to refocus on training and job programs for urban youth. That would go a long way towards fixing some of the fundamentals at work here.

CATHY VAN EXTEL: What are the security implications?

KEVIN RUDD: If we fail to address questions of underdevelopment in East Timor then plainly if people do not have sufficient work or sufficient training opportunities, then the prospects of them forming armed gangs becomes larger. We've seen evidence of that in the Solomons, we've seen the evidence of that elsewhere in the South West Pacific. And over time, that creates a grave security crisis. And let me tell you, this is not just Australia being concerned about security problems in our neighbourhood because we have Australian nationals there, although that is important in itself. If you have a security meltdown in some of these small countries in our region, then you have a problem also of the outflow of refugees and asylum seekers as well, of continued concern to Australia.

CATHY VAN EXTEL: All right. Looking more broadly at the region, the Australian government held talks with diplomats from 10 ASEAN nations last night to defuse some of the anger that arose as a result of the PM's comments about pre-emptive strikes. Do you expect that this will calm things?

KEVIN RUDD: Well, what we're in the middle of now, Cathy, is I think a full-blown diplomatic disaster.

CATHY VAN EXTEL: But the government has made the move now to try to calm things down.

KEVIN RUDD: Four days late the government has brought in the ASEAN heads of mission here in Canberra, and it seems that Foreign Minister Downer has offered them a cup of tea and Bex and a quick lie down. The bottom line is: nice language in a briefing from the Foreign Minister doesn't go to the fundamentals of the problem here. What's the fundament of the problem? The Prime Minister of Australia on Sunday said in his new announcement of a new Howard doctrine, that Australia under certain circumstances would contemplate the possibility of a pre-emptive military strike against the territory of a neighbouring state. That is a new formulation of Australian policy. All he needed to do ....

CATHY VAN EXTEL: The PM's office has pointed out that he's made a similar comment in June this year.

KEVIN RUDD: The Prime Minister has not to my knowledge made a statement without qualification of that type. Foreign Minister Downer ...

CATHY VAN EXTEL: He had qualifications in the comment that he made on Sunday.

KEVIN RUDD: Foreign Minister Downer was at pains on Monday on the ABC to point out that of course what the Prime Minister was talking about was working cooperatively with regional governments before any such action was taken. Unfortunately, because I have the text of what the Prime Minister said himself on his interview on Sunday, there was no such qualification. Furthermore, when we, the opposition, asked him this question directly in the parliament on Monday, John Howard stood up and said: I'm not changing a word of what I said. That, actually, is what compounded the problem. No-one was asking the Prime Minister to apologise. A simple word of clarification would have come in very handy at that point, but what we had was John Howard putting his personal political interests first over the long-term national security interest of this country.

CATHY VAN EXTEL: So you're saying then that this meeting last night to try to calm things down isn't enough. What else should the government be doing?

KEVIN RUDD: What the government needs to do is to address the fundamentals of the problem it itself has created through poor language by the Prime Minister last Sunday. All he needed to do on Monday, all he needed today is just clarify his statement. I don't think he set out last Sunday to say what he did. I think he simply messed it up. But we have a Prime Minister who I think has learnt his lesson in politics for the last decade is never qualify anything you've said before in the past. He should, because Australia's long-term national security interest demands it.

I cannot understand how any government of this country could believe that as a nation of 19 million people on the fringe of a region of three billion people and with an economy in our case slightly smaller than that of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, next door to the largest Islamic country in the world, that we think it's a smart thing for this country's long-term national security interest to make enemies with our neighbours.

CATHY VAN EXTEL: Just to finish today, the issue of asylum seekers will be voted on by caucus. It's obviously going to be a feisty meeting. Do you expect that there will be significant change forced through?

KEVIN RUDD: That's always a matter for the caucus itself. Labor has been debating this for the last 12 months. We've had a solid debate internally, externally. Julia Gillard, our Shadow Immigration Minister, has done a fantastic job in pulling together a very complex policy. But it's up for caucus to decide. We're a democratic party. We're in the middle of our democratic process right now.

CATHY VAN EXTEL: Kevin Rudd, thank you.

KEVIN RUDD: Good to be with you.

VIVIAN SCHENKER: Labor's Foreign Affairs spokesman, Kevin Rudd. And Radio National did invite the Foreign Affairs Minister, Alexander Downer, to speak to us this morning but he declined our offer.