I rise to support the resolution by which this House marks the sixtieth anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe. Both the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition have spoken very effectively about the reasons why Australia should remember this anniversary, and why we should honour the approximately one million Australian men and women who served in our armed forces during that war, and especially the 27,000 Australians who gave their lives.
I rise to support the resolution by which this House marks the sixtieth anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe. Both the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition have spoken very effectively about the reasons why Australia should remember this anniversary, and why we should honour the approximately one million Australian men and women who served in our armed forces during that war, and especially the 27,000 Australians who gave their lives.
I want to speak about the significance of the victory we are now commemorating both at a personal level and at a broader historical level. The generation which lived through World War II is now growing elderly – the last veterans of the war to serve in this House, Tom Uren and Clarrie Millar, retired 15 years ago. But the war, and the crimes committed during the war, continue to cast a long shadow over the lives of many Australians. As I have mentioned in this House before, my paternal grandparents died in a Nazi concentration camp, and this is a heritage shared by many thousands of Australians.
Last Sunday I attended a very moving ceremony at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne at which more than 70 elderly survivors of the war, migrants to Australia from the former Soviet Union, were honoured by the Russian government with anniversary medals. The Acting Governor, Lady Southey AM, and the Victorian Minister for Finance, Hon John Lenders, were the guests of honour. Many of those who were honoured were survivors of labour camps, had fought with partisan units, and had lost members of their families in the war or the Holocaust. They accepted these decorations in memory of their murdered families. I know there are many more Australians, of many backgrounds, who have suffered through similar circumstances. This anniversary was an opportunity, in many cases the last opportunity, to honour these people and thank them for the sacrifices they made to safeguard the freedom we now enjoy.
This function was one of a series of events in Melbourne to mark this important anniversary, which I had the honour of helping to organise. On 1 May the Russian Ambassador, His Excellency Mr Leonid Moiseev, and I welcomed 2,500 people to Hamer Hall at the Victorian Arts Centre. We were treated to a wonderful concert in honour of veterans of World War II from the ex-Soviet Union, and also of Australian servicemen who served in the Soviet Union or on the Arctic Convoys to Murmansk. I take this opportunity of thanking Ms Emma Lippa, the artistic director, and all the artists, including dancers from the Australian Ballet and singers from the Australian Opera, who donated their time to create a wonderful evening, which was greatly enjoyed by everyone there.
Last week the Russian veterans in Melbourne held two other functions, a public meeting in Caulfield Town Hall and a banquet in St Kilda Town Hall, and I was honoured to be a speaker at both events. More than 500 people attended both events. I congratulate Mr Roman Mirkus of the Shalom Association and Mr Meer Khanazov, President of the Victorian Association of World War II Veterans from the ex-Soviet Union, for their heroic efforts in organising these events. I thank the City of Glen Eira and the City of Port Phillip for their assistance, and also my own office staff. I thank my parliamentary colleagues, the Hon Members for Goldstein and Throsby, Senator Mark Bishop, and Mr Tony Lupton of the Victorian Parliament, for attending these functions and speaking to the veterans and other guests. The Hon Member for Throsby is the only member of this House who speaks Russian, and her speech was very well received.
Mention of the Soviet Union reminds us the broader political questions raised by this anniversary. The Soviet Union was our ally in World War II, and the 25 million Soviet citizens who died in the war were part of the enormous price paid by the Soviet Union to destroy Hitler’s armies on the Eastern Front. Without the contribution of the Soviet Union, it is hard to see how the Allies could have won the war. Yet Stalin’s regime was every bit as oppressive as Hitler’s, and Stalin’s collectivisation famine in the 1920s and his purges in the 1930s probably killed more people than did Hitler’s Holocaust. Stalin’s victory allowed him to reoccupy the Baltic States, and to impose Communist regimes on Poland and the other states of eastern and central Europe, as well as on the eastern part of Germany. Thus our alliance with Stalin had dire consequences for many millions of people, consequences which were not reversed until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.
This serves to remind us that people in the 1930s and 40s did not have the luxury of easy choices. They had to choose between evils. Many millions of people in Europe were faced with a stark choice between Hitler and Stalin. I know a number of people in my electorate who served in the Red Army, or in the Communist-controlled Polish army based in the Soviet Union, even though they hated Stalin and Communism. But they knew that while Stalin was an oppressive dictator, he was not bent on genocide, as Hitler was. They knew that a rational choice between relative evils required a decision to support the Soviet war effort as the only means of destroying Hitler’s regime and saving what could be saved of the people Hitler was bent on exterminating.
Similar choices faced the leaders of the western democracies. Britain and Australia went to war in September 1939 in defence of the independence of Poland. But by the end of the war Poland was under Soviet occupation, and while it was technically independent it was ruled for the next 40 years by a hated Communist regime largely controlled from Moscow. This was an inevitable consequence of the victory of the Red Army on the eastern front. The Allies could not have it both ways. They could not gain the benefits of the vast commitment of lives made by the Soviets, which destroyed the cream of the German Army, yet avoid the consequence of Soviet occupation of eastern and central Europe.
Churchill and Roosevelt have been much criticised for their acquiescence at Yalta in Stalin’s domination of Poland, but this criticism is made without an understanding of the choices that were open to them. Stalin was in full physical control of Poland. The only way he could have been evicted was by a new and even more terrible war between the western powers and the Soviet Union. Such an idea was unthinkable in 1945 – there was no way the peoples of Britain, the United States or Australia would have supported a confrontation with the Soviet Union, our glorious ally against Hitler, over Poland. Churchill did his best to extract concessions from Stalin over Poland, but his bargaining position was very weak, as Stalin knew quite well.
Churchill always had a clear understanding of the importance of the Soviet alliance for the Allied war effort. When Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, Churchill at once committed Britain to supporting the Soviets, even though he himself had led the attempts in 1919 and 1920 to strangle the Soviet regime at birth. “No-one has been a more consistent opponent of Communism than I have. I will unsay no words that I've spoken about it. [But] we have but one aim and one single irrevocable purpose. We are resolved to destroy Hitler and every vestige of the Nazi regime. Any man or State who fights against Nazism will have our aid. . . It follows, therefore, that we shall give whatever help we can to Russia and to the Russian people.” There is no doubt that this was a sound judgment. It was part of Churchill’s genius that he was able to overcome his own ideological sympathies and make such a clear-headed strategic decision so quickly.
I might note in passing that Churchill’s successor as British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, has showed a similar grasp of strategic realities. Despite his background on the left, he has not hesitated to ally himself with the United States and place Britain on the frontline of the war against terrorism. He saw at once that the September 11 attacks were an attack on the whole western world and on the kind of free democratic and secular society that was built in the west in the wake of World War II – in fact, an attack on the idea of social democracy that both the British Labour Party and the Australian Labor Party stand for. Although his decision to ally himself with President Bush was unpopular with parts of his own party, he has carried the day and won a third term as Prime Minister, something even Churchill could not manage.
At the recent election the Conservatives, advised by Mr Lynton Crosby from the Australian Liberal Party’s dirty tricks department, ran a disgraceful campaign against Tony Blair, allying themselves with the extreme left in accusing Blair of being a liar, while at the same time seeking to exploit racist sentiment with their attacks on Gypsies and immigrants. This campaign was particularly disgusting coming from a party leader, Michael Howard, whose own father, Bernat Hecht, arrived in Britain as a Jewish refugee from fascist Romania in 1939Tony Blair, and Michael Howard has now quite rightly resigned. Tony Blair is a colossus among world leaders, who combines a humane social democratic philosophy with a firm determination to defend democratic and liberal values against theocratic terrorism. I take this opportunity of congratulating him on his re-election.
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