Speech given at the closing plenary session of the Now We The People conference, at the University of Technology, Sydney, 24.8.03

Senator Andrew Bartlett

Thanks to the conference organisers for bringing together such a wide range of topics and view points for people to consider and to move forward from. This final session and the statement we have adopted is to look at where we go from here with some of these core issues. The topic of this final session is one of these core issues - how to make peace and justice a reality through building alliances. Since we are talking about building alliances I'm certainly going to avoid making a party-political advertisement here this afternoon.

This may shock you all, but voting a Democrat into parliament isn't going to save the world. We might save the Senate, we are trying hard to do that. But voting for anybody in any party and then sitting back and saying, 'they're good guys, they'll sort it out' will never work. It has to be an alliance of people inside the parliament, outside the parliament, across the community and all areas of society. Putting all our eggs into just one basket, saying support this lot, support that lot will make it happen, is always doomed to failure. There are too many other forces out there to compete with to simply go down one channel on its own.

Similarly, just all sitting round and agreeing with each other that Bush and Howard are bastards, and basking in our righteousness, is not going to solve very much either. We have to look at not just making people aware of the dangers of what those people are doing, but highlighting that there is an alternative way. That means building alliances across parties, across movements. Where there is room for agreement, look at trying to build that agreement in as many areas as possible. That means, not just looking for progressives on peace and justice. It's probably always been the case, but particularly in the world we live in today, it is about building alliances with others in other countries in our regions, indeed with progressive groups in the USA, with some other groups perhaps that people in the peace movement haven't looked at working with before. I'm thinking particularly of the defence, intelligence and veterans community. Some of them were very prominent and effective in the recent actions in the fight against the war on Iraq.

Despite talking about looking for alliances for peace and justice, I am not a pacifist. I think the statement we've just adopted is not a pacifist statement. Many people in the peace movement are pacifists of course, many people in my party are.

We have to look not just at how we move towards this ideal of peace, but how we deal with the barriers in the way. That does include combating tyranny, gross injustice, gross violations of human rights. I'm not sure of all the answers to all of those, but I know we can find the answers by working with people and trying to move forward and address them. Many people quite rightly in the debate about Iraq said we should be focussing on security in our own region, justice and peace in our own region. I strongly agree with that.

It amazes me - and I add myself in this group - I really don't know much about our own region. We're talking about the Pacific Island nations, South-East Asia. I haven't travelled very much - been to Indonesia for two days, been to Nauru for two days. That's the extent of my absorption of those two countries, and those two alone out of all the others present unique challenges. We have to recognise that many Pacific Island nations are in incredible financial difficulty.

Nauru has outrageous violations of human rights by the imprisonment and isolation of hundreds of men, women and children for years on end. But they can't do anything about it because virtually the only source of income for their whole economy is the Australian government funding for that camp. We've got to find other ways to assist nations in those difficulties. I'm not suggesting that every Pacific Island nation is are basket case that needs our charity. But I am saying that we need to acknowledge their special situations and circumstances, because otherwise they will be in situations where they are potentially client states of the US or Australia to assist their global military agendas which we are so keen to oppose.

Similarly if you look at countries like Indonesia, how do we tackle that challenge of working with Indonesians while parts of their governments and military are still engaged in massive human rights violations in West Papua, Aceh and other areas? How do we really deal with the gross violation that continue in China? The key way to do that is to try to build our understandings, connections and alliances with people in the region, beyond Australia and in other parts of the world.

Some of those issues if you're looking at directions for peace, the traditional ones always talked about of cutting back defence spending and putting more in overseas aid, investing in the peace rather than investing in the war - I think I used that slogan speaking here two years ago - looking at some of the situations now, the money we are spending in our defence budget is ridiculous, buying 100 more whiz-bank jet fighters - hardly anything we are going to need to fight terrorism or address security needs in our own region.

I do think we need to put more resources into intelligence. We obviously have to ensure that the intelligence community is transparent and accountable, but looking at the issues of terrorism raised in the conference statement, we have to look at that as well.

We have to look for different approaches, as well as the traditional approaches to the peace issue, look at least at opening up dialogue with some of the people we haven't talked with so much, such as the defence community. As Kerry Nettle said, there are heaps of areas we don't agree on, but try to find some alliances can be very significant in shifting away from what many in the defence community - many who have never seen themselves as in any way linked to the peace movement but who are totally horrified at the direction that the Bush - Howard alliance is going down - we have to look for ways to pull that away in a different direction. At the same time of course we need to reinforce the communication among groups working on issues of justice peace in our own country. It never works to build alliances around a particular issue by having one group capture the issue and be seen to be the one true voice of it. That always ends up ghettoising it and excluding people rather than building the broadest possible alliance.

Rather than building a bureaucracy to oversee the peace movement or justice issues, we have to continue to look for ways to coordinate and communicate about what we are working on. I can give the example of the refugee issue that I've had a fair bit to do with over many years. So many people in the community are doing so many good things and having an influence, making a difference. We mightn't have changed Ruddock's policy yet, and it mightn't look like we are about to tomorrow. But there have been a hell of a lot of people whose lives have been literally saved by the work of people in the Australian community, and many of these people are suffering despair and burn-out because they don't know how many other people are out there doing the same thing, doing the same as they do.

For the purposes of building the strength of an alliance, part of that strength comes from knowing that there are others out there who believe in the same things, who are working hard, fighting hard for the same things.

Part of it is in terms of just efficiency - not having a whole lot of people independently of each other doing the same thing, while there are other areas of work that need to be done but that aren't being addressed. There is a lot of improvement in the last few years about coordination among all the different groups in that area, but there is still a way to go. We need to look at ways to do that more effectively without building big bureaucratic structures. That can sometimes occur.

I've put out a lot of questions rather than a lot of answers, but those are the sorts of things we need to look at. I think the statement and the actions contained in it as ways forward are a good foundation. goo good foundation. Beyond seeing ourselves in two years time at another proposed conference, the more we can do at sharing information and inspiration in the meantime, the further we will be down the path not only of achieving peace and justice, but hopefully of turning the tide of some of the horrendous risks of war and permanently entrenched injustice that we are facing at he moment in our own country as well globally.

Senator Andrew Bartlett is the Leader of the Australian Democrats

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