ASIA-PACIFIC ARMED FORCES AND COUNTER-TERRORISM
Senator The Hon Robert Hill
Leader of the Government in the Senate, Minister for Defence, Australia
[SPEECH TO IISS SHANGRI LA DIALOGUE, SINGAPORE, 9.30AM SUNDAY 5 JUNE 2005]
Senator Hill:
It is a unique meeting in the fact that it not only can be established but now that there is continuity I think is a great credit to the Institute. Of course, a fair share of the credit has also got to go to the Government of Singapore for again hosting us and putting in place what is a complex organisation and treating us so graciously.
I’m pleased that we’ve come back to the subject of terrorism because, from our perspective, it is the real hub of a threat that we face. It’s also been a consistent theme of these meetings over the last three years and, as you said, this is my fourth and I can remember a speech on the opening night of the first. We were warned of the extent of the networks of JI and those associated with that network, the extent of the threat and unfortunately his predictions turned out to be true and many lives have been lost and many people injured subsequently and Australians, of course, have been lost in Bali and even, since our last meeting, we’ve had the Australian embassy in Jakarta attacked, and lives were lost on that occasion and injuries occurred. But in many ways, with less luck there would have been much greater damage. If the attack had been at a different time of the day, for example, when many Indonesians queue to get into the embassy for visas and the like, it could have been an absolutely devastating result, so it is an issue that’s constantly on our mind. It affects us all and I’m pleased that we’ve come back to it this morning.
What we are looking at today is, in particularly, the role of our armed forces in combating this threat because, of course, our armed forces are only part of the response that each of us has and, in many ways, not normally the lead agency in that response. A look at my country’s response in recent years, we’ve spent a very large sum of money – I think some now calculate over $2 billion – with over a hundred different measures to try and protect Australia and Australian interests against a threat from Islamic extremists, and only a proportion of those measures, of course, have been undertaken by the Australian Defence Force. You are familiar with the whole range, everything from keeping our laws up to date relative to the threat, actions to disrupt finances, big investments in policing, very large investments in improved intelligence, customs, border controls and airport security – we now have air marshals on aircraft, port security. In all of these areas we’ve made significant investments and, I think, are safer than what we would otherwise have been. We’ve also put a great deal of effort into coordinating our agencies in order to maximize our capability and we have exercised quite extensively against the potential of the threat and are reasonably confident that we can meet the challenge but we don’t – whilst we think there is a greater chance of Australians being attacked elsewhere in the region, we don’t discount the possibility of an incident in Australia and in fact there have been arrests of suspected terrorists in Australia in the last 12 months. So in relation to the armed forces and where they fit into this picture of what are we doing, I thought I’d just mention a few specific examples of initiatives of recent times.
I mentioned at the last meeting that we, together with the other parties to the five-power defence arrangement, were hopeful that it might assume a role of exercising against a potential terrorist threat. This was quite a big step forward for the five-power agreement and parties, and I’m pleased to say that in the last year the first of such exercises did take place in September last year. I gather it was successful and we have an informal meeting of the five-power Defence Ministers today to look at how we might take that initiative further. So there is an inherent capability under an agreement that was set up for very different reasons to further build the counter-terrorism capabilities of this region up and I’m pleased to see that the parties are moving in that direction.
I thought you might be interested to know that in last June in Australia we hosted what we called a regional Special Forces counter-terrorism conference which was attended by Special Forces commanders and senior counter-terrorism policy officers from 13 Asia-Pacific nations. It was quite successful as a first meeting, and a second conference is to be hosted in Singapore this year. I’m pleased that Singapore has taken up that challenge, and a little later this year we’re planning a regional counter-terrorism subject matter expert exchange which will be held in Perth in August. That will bring together Special Forces commanders and operators and provide the opportunity to demonstrate the methods and procedures used by their counter-terrorism units.
At a bilateral level we’ve continued to build our relations across the region. We’ve signed Memoranda of Understanding on combating international terrorism with 10 regional countries - Indonesia; the Philippines; Thailand; Malaysia; Brunei; Cambodia; PNG; India; East Timor and Fiji. These MOUs provide an opportunity from a Defence perspective, or an armed forces perspective, for specific defence-based counter-terrorism cooperation including intelligence sharing, training, counter-hijack, hostage-recovery exercises, consequence management and command and control centres.
We also, of course, continue to contribute to the ever-growing PSI – the Proliferation Security Initiative – and whilst its objective is primarily counter-proliferation, obviously the skills and experiences that are learnt through that process also have a relevance in relation to counter-terrorism and I’m pleased that more Asian countries are now participating in that initiative and again, Singapore is to host an exercise which I think will be the first of such exercises in South-East Asia. The first across the world was held a couple of years ago in the Coral Sea off Australia. They’ve spread across the world; I’m pleased that they’re now being taken up within this region because it really does add some skills that may one day save lives in terms of counter-terrorism capability. I’m also pleased to see the coordinated patrols that are being initiated between Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia in relation to the Straits of Malacca. Maritime security is obviously critically important and from Australia’s perspective, we would want to encourage that cooperation. I read in the press this morning that it might even move into joint patrols. I suspect that will be the subject of some debate in the next session of this conference. If that is the case I will applaud it. I’m not sure whether you’re quite there yet, but I think it would be a good thing to see from an Australian perspective and anything we can do to help such a process we would want to do.
Now I think I’ll leave it at that. There is obviously a critically important role for Defence in defeating this challenge – particularly in situational awareness, in sharing of intelligence – and there’s been great advances in that area across the region in the last few years, in meeting the threat head on when it is necessary to do so, and also in responding to the consequences.
I guess my final point might be simply in relation to the last of those points. I thought that the degree of cooperation and really the effectiveness of the countries within this region in the way they came together to deal with the consequences of the tsunami was really quite impressive, and I hope that we might learn from that experience and maybe even improve coordination and cooperation because again, the skills and experiences learned through responding to that natural disaster are just as relevant to the need that might one day be there to respond to a man-made disaster in terms of a terrorist attack.
Thank you.
