ADJOURNMENT
Senator SHOEBRIDGE (New South Wales) (20:08): Yes to that, Senator McLachlan! Today I met with a delegation of people from West Papua led by Benny Wenda, the chairperson of the United Liberation Movement for West Papua, who came here to Canberra to speak of the devastation happening right now in their homeland. West Papua is only 250 kilometres from Australia.
There's more distance between Canberra and Sydney. This is not an issue we can close our eyes to. The briefing on West Papua told us that the songlines of First Nations people in Australia are related to and connected to West Papua.
There's a shared ancient history. Currently the largest deforestation process in the world is happening in West Papua. At least 1.2 million hectares of beautiful ancient forest is planned for destruction.
That's the size of all of Greater Sydney being destroyed. The total emissions of this project are in the hundreds and hundreds of millions of tonnes of CO2, three times the annual emissions of Australia each year. It's a climate bomb that will go off and is already hurting our friends in West Papua.
People have lived on that land for thousands of years—communities, culture, language, connections—and they are now being violently dispossessed and forced from the land, often with military force. And we've heard of the helicopters; we've heard of the violence. There are now over 100,000 displaced West Papuans, almost all of which are without a home because of the ecocide and the violence that is occurring.
One of the delegates said very clearly that 'we all know someone who's been killed, we all know someone who's been raped and we all know someone who's been abused'. This is what is occurring to our neighbours. The government can act, and as a first step it can do what it's already promised and pressure Indonesia to allow the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights into West Papua to investigate.
It was in 2019 that Australia joined with over 100 other countries to demand this, and it still has not happened. I want to thank the delegation for coming to parliament. It's an historic delegation to this parliament.
I want to thank all those parliamentarians who came to listen and learn. Together, we must not forget the people of West Papua. For eight days now, three Palestinian families have been under siege in their homes in Qusra, in the occupied West Bank.
Israeli settlers surrounded the Abu Rida and Hassan families on 9 August, cut their water, cut their electricity and blocked their food from reaching them. There were 15 people, including children under seven, trapped by a mob while the Israeli military and police stood by. These attacks are on the minds of the Australian Palestinian community, and I thank them for sharing their fears with me as well as their concerns for their families and friends.
They asked me to raise this today in parliament. On Thursday, instead of removing the settlers, Israeli soldiers forced the families out of two of their homes. The attackers stayed.
This is not a fringe incident. Even the United States's own ambassador to Israel, who is a committed supporter of the illegal settler movement, called what's happening in Qusra an act of terror. Amnesty International has been clear that this is not isolated.
It's part of a coordinated, state backed campaign of dispossession across the West Bank that's happened thousands and thousands of times. The settlers can no longer be meaningfully considered as separate from the Israeli state. Their actions are yet another reason we must sanction Israel.
Labor will say: 'Don't worry. In 2024, this government sanctioned seven individuals, and one single hard-line youth group.' That was a start, but it falls so far short of what is needed right now. Sanctioning a handful of individuals while Australian trade, investment, imports and industries keep flowing back and forth into an economy built on illegal and violent occupation in the West Bank is nothing but a PR response to complicity in what is part of a growing genocide.
We have serious unanswered questions about whether Australian made steel is finding its way into settler construction. We know it's being used for settler vehicles to displace people. We have questions about supply chains, and Labor has refused to act on these.
Sanctioning a handful of individuals while the settlement enterprise expands is not accountability. Australia should be banning trade and investment that sustains illegal settlements, and this government should come to the chamber and tell us exactly what due diligence has been done on this government's supply chains. The families of Qusra need global solidarity and they need it now.