11.2.13 Motion on Iran

Mr HAWKE (Mitchell) (12:22): I want to commend the member for Cowan for this excellent and timely motion and also the member for Kooyong on some fine remarks in relation to this matter. Taking up from the member for Canberra, and a little bit from the member for Melbourne Ports, I would say that there is a point of divergence in relation to this motion. However, it depends on your view of what you believe about the solutions to this terrorist state that is Iran. Do we believe that there will be a diplomatic solution that provides a solution to the Iranian question? Of course, the answer is, in my view, no, there will be no diplomatic solution to the question of this state. I think that is evident from the many, many years in Iran since the fall of the Shah.

It is timely that this motion appear today, 11 February, because it is the 34th anniversary of the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran. We know that in that 34 years we have seen repression and we have seen terror. We have seen external threats to other nations and states and we have seen the treatment of their own people. The 2009 election of Ahmadinejad for the second time is perhaps the best example of this. That defeat of Mir Hossein Mousavi gave rise to the Green Movement, calling for democratic electoral reform. As a younger member here, it was inspiring to see the hundreds of thousands of people jumping onto social media, an invention of the West, in a desperate plea to do something about their own government repressing them. At the height of it, there were 100,000 tweets per hour on June 16, just after the election, climbing to 220,000 per hour, with the hashtag '#iranelection' being the most tweeted of the entire world in 2009. That should say that the Iranian people themselves are crying out for change, and it is the responsibility of the international community and free nations such as Australia to do whatever we can to help with this situation.

On 20 June we saw the young Iranian woman, identified as Neda Agha-Soltan, shot by the Basij and dying in front of the cameras on Kargar Avenue in Tehran. In today's world that footage alone reached many billions of people and did more for the cause of freedom than we could ever do speaking in this chamber. However, if we are to solve the problem of Iran, we need to be supporting the Iranian people and movements like the Green Movement. We need to be standing up for people like Neda. It is not the case that there will be a diplomatic or UN mandated solution to Iran. When you listen to the words of Ahmadinejad, who travels around the world threatening freedom—threatening Israel and calling for the complete obliteration of Israel; denying the Holocaust; attacking homosexuals; attacking free people all around the world—you can hear from his own mouth the state that Iran is in under Ahmadinejad and Ayatollah Khamenei.

Iran is perhaps the biggest security question of our age. Its attempt to acquire nuclear weapons and the nuclear proliferation of such a state ought to strike fear into any free nation. Not just the internal repression of regimes that we see around the world but this attempt to acquire nuclear capability for the purposes of executing a philosophy that is spouted by Ahmadinejad should strike fear into every member in this place. It is the coalition's view, of course, that the world community needs to continue to apply significant actual pressure onto states like Iran. That is why on 10 January this year, when Minister Bob Carr announced a new round of Australian autonomous sanctions against Iran, we welcomed them: the financial and travel sanctions on additional individuals and entities active in the oil, gas and financial sectors; anything related to Iran's weapons of mass destruction—things that every member of this place supports. We supported those calls from Senator Carr. We support any call from the Australian government to do those things.

It is contrary to these initiatives that we saw in the second half of last year the Gillard government sending our Ambassador to the UN and the Prime Minister's special envoy to Iran to attend a meeting of the Non-aligned Movement. We do have a point of divergence on this. The member of Canberra said we are playing politics with this, but it is not the case. We have a legitimate view that engagement on that level with such a state that is attempting to acquire nuclear weapons for the purposes of executing its evil agenda is not helpful. We do not think it will work. The participation by some countries was used by the supreme leader to claim legitimacy and to affirm the failure of sanctions. That should be a signal to members opposite and everyone here that we ought to be doing everything we can to impose sanctions to support the very people of Iran—the Green Movement and people like Neda who have thrown their lives on the altar of freedom—to help find a free Iran in any way that we can.