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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 1 Hansard (19 February) . . Page.. 241 ..

MR HARGREAVES (continuing):

The war in Korea in the 1950s was a United Nations engagement. The war in Vietnam was a political exercise perpetrated by the United States, with assistance from Australia, and here we go again. Australia is being asked to legitimise a war not sanctioned by the world community that will rain death and destruction on innocent Iraqis. Don't they have enough to deal with under the Hussein regime without this added threat?

Mr Speaker, I am unhappy about our small defence force being deployed in a region which has no geopolitical significance to Australia. Our commitment of troops will ensure that Iraq and/or terrorists sympathetic to Iraq will become a direct threat. Other speakers have put the case for our withdrawal. They have questioned the reasons for engagement. I wish merely to record my opposition to any engagement of our troops in Iraq.

I support the thrust of what Ms Tucker is proposing and I support the amendment put by this side of the house. The crowds recently in Civic, in other capital cities and in other cities round the world have had but one message: no war in Iraq. The United Nations is the appropriate place for global decisions and the Security Council is the appropriate forum for considerations of collective security. The White House, Downing Street and Kirribilli House are not appropriate places for these decisions and they do not have a world mandate to invade Iraq. The liberation of an invaded Kuwait is one thing; the invasion of Iraq on challengeable grounds without United Nations authority is quite another. Let us not be party to the killing of innocent men, women and children in Iraq and, inevitably, in Australia.

MR STEFANIAK (9.35): I will speak firstly to Mr Wood's amendment, Mr Speaker, as I might wish to have two goes. I do not think that I have ever been quite so concerned about what is going to happen to this world as I have been in recent times. In fact, historically there has not been a similar sort of situation since the 1930s and we need to ensure that we do not go down that track.

Mr Pratt has ably set out the horrible nature of Saddam Hussein's regime. It is an appalling regime. It is a regime that has about 10 per cent of its people in its security force and its secret police. It is a regime that has used weapons of mass destruction against its own civilians.

A rough estimate has been made that at least 25,000 people have been killed by chemical weapons used against Iraqi villages, and that is just one instance. Saddam Hussein is estimated to have killed between one million and two million of his own people in the last 20 years. The man has been equated, and rightly so, with Adolph Hitler. In fact, Max Van der Stoel, a former UN rapporteur on human rights in Iraq, found that Hussein's regime was "of an exceptionally grave character, so grave that is has few parallels in the years that have passed since World War II". That is quite appalling and quite telling.

My colleague Mr Pratt has indicated the extent of Hussein's torturing and killing of his own people and provided an appropriate quote, I thought, from an Iraqi woman who had lost 17 members of her family. To quote another Iraqi, Sufa Hashim said, "We know that no swift war in Iraq could ever be more devastating than the losses we have incurred over the last 35 years."

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