Page 4763 - Week 15 - Thursday, 21 November 1991
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Mr Wood: You would not call a vote. Where were your members?
MR COLLAERY: Clearly, the Labor and Liberal coalition have the numbers. I do not intend to disturb people for useless displays - - -
Mr Wood: Two of your colleagues have gone home.
MR COLLAERY: I am sure they are upstairs. I also join with Mr Moore and indicate how frivolously the important legislation that has been discussed tonight has been approached. If the taxpayers had been in the gallery tonight, we might have seen a better performance.
Yugoslavia : Cambodia
MR STEFANIAK (11.19): I am not going to talk about the events of tonight or the comments made by Mr Moore and Mr Collaery. I am going to talk about something that is rather tragic in that a lot of people have been killed recently in another part of the world. I refer to the very troubled state, if one can call it that, of Yugoslavia. We have seen recently a city fall to the Federal Army of Yugoslavia, at great loss to civilians and military alike defending that city. Despite some proud rhetoric after the recent Gulf war, where for the first time since the Korean war the United Nations fought with some teeth and put some teeth into the ideals of that body, it seems that any chance of that continuing has come to naught. The tragic events in Yugoslavia pinpoint that.
It must be painfully obvious to everyone except Blind Freddy, and certainly it should be obvious to the United States, to the European Community and, indeed, to our own Federal parliamentarians and Government, that the state of Yugoslavia, like a number of other states in this troubled world, is very much an artificial creation. The problems between some of the peoples who make up that state, and certainly between the Serbs and the Croats, are historic and go back centuries.
It would seem quite logical that, with the dismemberment of communism in eastern Europe, many independent republics in the former state of Yugoslavia would, and probably should, go their separate ways. Some sensible and hopefully peaceful solution could be worked out - some loose economic federation, or whatever. Unfortunately, the fact that the Western world was quite prepared to wash its hands of the
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