STATEMENTS ON INDULGENCE
Mr ALBANESE (Grayndler—Prime Minister) (14:00): Yesterday I had the enormous honour of speaking at the Australian War Memorial to mark 25 years since the beginning of Operation Slipper, the dawn of Australia's mission in Afghanistan. In New York, fires were still burning at Ground Zero from the September 11 attacks a month earlier when Australia came to the aid of the world.
The world at that time felt upended. All of us can remember where we were at the time of September 11. Though it would change so devastatingly a year later in Bali, it wasn't directly our fight at that time.
Yet what Australia did was so resolutely in our nature. We went to support our friend and our ally. We went because of what was at stake, and we went on the principle that September 11 was an attack on a way of life that belonged just as much to us as Australians.
The very freedoms at the heart of who we are as a people and a nation were under threat, and the enemy that had so devastatingly declared itself in opposition to those freedoms was al-Qaeda. As then prime minister John Howard put it at the time: If we left this contest only to America, we would be leaving it to them to defend our rights and those of all the other people of the world who have a commitment to freedom and liberty.
Over two decades, more than 35,000 Australian defence personnel served in operations relating to the war in Afghanistan. They made an invaluable contribution to a complex multinational mission, upholding the finest of Australian military traditions in the process. Their courage, the strength of their character and the bonds of their camaraderie are a beacon to us still.
I acknowledge those present here today who also served, and, likewise, every single Australian who served in what amounted to a whole-of-government mission. Members of the Australian Federal Police and civilians from DFAT, including AusAID, were also there on the ground. It was an environment in which vigilance had to be as relentless as the dust was, where every footstep could feel heavy in the landscape sown with explosives, where any crowd might hold a suicide bomber and where the threats came from without and sometimes devastatingly from within.
We also honour the courage of the many Afghans who stood against their oppressors and put their own safety on the line to help. Our nation respects and thanks all who have served in our name—the fighters for peace, the keepers of peace. We honour all who went and all who fell.
We honour those who came home wounded in body or wounded in soul, their hearts changed forever by the fight. We honour the families, those who have felt both the pride and weight that comes when a loved one puts on the uniform and those who have lived with the grief that is the pain of love wrapped around an absence that can never be filled. As we look to Afghanistan, we are reminded again of what Australians in war have faced and the difference they have made in humanity's truest spirit.
What Australians in Afghanistan embodied is something we must never lose. Lest we forget.