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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 1 Hansard (19 February) . . Page.. 250 ..

MRS DUNNE (continuing):

Because I am not saying that there should be no war under any circumstances does not make me a warmonger. It makes me someone who feels that it is legitimate to seek recourse to war as a last resort. I am a mother of two boys, one of whom is old enough to go to war. I do not stand here and say lightly that war is a matter of last resort. I cannot rule out the possibility that legitimately and morally we should go to war. In the past we have legitimately and morally gone to war. Until we become a better civilisation, until we do away with the power of original sin, we will continue to legitimately and morally go to war.

This is one of the occasions when it may be the case that, if we do go to war, it will be a legitimate moral decision for us to make. I have a lot of respect for people who have a consistent pacifist position. I wonder what a lot of these people thought about what happened in World War II, but they have a legitimate position. I am much more concerned about those people who cede control over their consciences to international organisations like the UN.

For the pacifist, there is no issue here; they are opposed to war qua war and that is the end of it. They are entitled to their position and their fundamentalist certainties on this subject. But for the rest of us who are not pacifists, for the vast majority of people in this country who are not pacifists, we have to make a choice. We cannot make that choice and we cannot inform our consciences in a climate like we have seen in this chamber tonight, with people wagging their fingers across the chamber and calling people wide-eyed warmongers and doe-eyed pacifists. That is not the way to go.

What we have to do in the case of the current unrest is to debate the specifics of the case. After we have put aside the fundamental certainties of those people who consider themselves to be pacifists, we have to address the other people, the vast majority of people who believe that there are some causes worth fighting for. The question we have to ask ourselves is whether this is a cause that is worth fighting for. We have here 17 people expressing their views on whether we believe that this is a cause worth fighting for.

I have a problem with much of what has been said in the debate. Part of what I have a problem with is the idea that we cannot do anything because we have ceded our conscience to the UN. The UN does some pretty good work through UNESCO, UNICEF and that sort of thing, but in the past few years, in the lifetime of my children, we have seen some spectacular failures on the part of the UN. We have stood by and watched them incapable and impotent in Rwanda. We have seen them stand back at Srebenica and let people be murdered because they did not have the power to do anything about it. Is this an organisation to whom we should cede our consciences?

Mr Hargreaves said that he was opposed to unilateralism. What is unilateralism? He is opposed to the unilateralism of the United States going off and undertaking pre-emptive attacks on Iraq. What is unilateralist about all those countries that have put their support behind the US-Canada, Bulgaria, Spain, Italy, Romania, Australia, most of the countries in the EU and most of the countries in NATO? We are hearing about a few countries, such as France, which have something to say on the opposite side. That is where we do come to the argument about whether it is a war about oil. Let's look at the motives of the French and the Russians and their oil interests in Iraq.

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