This Liberal MP took a journey from northern China — heading somewhere few Australians dare visit

Ted O'Brien's path to Parliament has taken him where few Australians, and indeed Westerners, have gone before: North Korea’s capital, Pyongyang.

Before becoming an MP, the Opposition foreign affairs spokesperson worked across Asia.

He was living in Beijing with his wife Sophia, who was working for the International Crisis Group, when the opportunity came to join a small group of fifteen to visit the authoritarian state in 2010.

The occasion was the 65th anniversary of the ruling Workers' Party — at a time when Kim Jong-il’s reign was waning, and the transition was underway to son Kim Jong-Un.

"The North Koreans choreographed everything, but you can't hide everything," he told SBS News.

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He spent most of the visit in the North Korean capital, arriving by air and leaving by train through northern China.

The Australian government now lists North Korea in the "do not travel" category on its official Smartraveller advice portal.

"You'd hop in a bus, you'd go to a school and you'd meet a few parents and school kids. Then you'd go to a small shopping strip, and you'd realise the kids from the school, the same kids at the shopping strip."

"It'd be like this theatre that would follow us around trying to portray a very different North Korea."

One encounter with reality came, perhaps ironically, at the sprawling Kumsusan Palace of the Sun, where the state’s leaders are buried, and it serves as the sacred centre of the North Korean mythos.

O’Brien says the "organisers muddled things up" and his tour ended up sharing a room with a group of workers, the best in each of their factories, given the coveted opportunity to pay their respects.

"This was the moment of their life … wearing their best possible, albeit all the same uniform," O'Brien recounts.

"That is where you saw their real poverty, and it sounds crude to say it, but you could smell the poverty, you could see the poverty, the eyes completely focusing down.