Brendan Nelson (Bradfield, Liberal Party, Minister for Defence) Share this | Hansard source

Firstly, in relation to Iraq, we budgeted $392.7 million over the three years and, as the member for Barton can see, we have budgeted for the continuing Al Muthanna rotation through to the end of the financial year. From that, it should not necessarily be concluded that they will definitely be there for that period of time, but the government has chosen to responsibly budget for it, and the Al Muthanna contribution component is approximately $198 million.

What I have announced so far is that we are going to deploy 30 of our troops to the basic training centre, which is at Tallil, just inside the border in Daiqa, the large American air base. We will also send three of our highly specialised people to the counterinsurgency training centre at Taji, which is about 20 kilometres from Baghdad.

As far as Operation Overwatch is concerned, it relies very much on the decisions that are going to be made by the Japanese. In Singapore on the weekend before last, in a meeting with Minister Nukaga, the Japanese minister, I again made it very clear to him that, whilst we are very supportive of supporting the Japanese engineers, who have done a tremendous job in Al Muthanna, clarity on their future would be greatly appreciated by us in terms of future planning. The Japanese minister has made it clear to me that one of the things that is important to Japan, apart from supporting basically what we are all trying to achieve in Iraq, is that the move to the Iraqi national government and the appointment of key ministers, and then the transfer to provincial Iraqi control in Al Muthanna, will be key milestones in their own decision making.

Operation Overwatch is yet to be clarified to our full satisfaction. We are disposed to redeploying the approximately 460 Australian troops who are currently protecting the Japanese engineers in Al Muthanna to other tasks in the southern part of Iraq. We are not at this stage prepared to specifically nominate where they will be predominantly based, because we are negotiating that with the Iraqis, the British and our other allies, including the Italians. We are, however, certainly not disposed to being based in Basra, which seems to be occupying the minds of certain people in the media—if not the opposition.

The nature of the tasks that we envisage undertaking in Operation Overwatch is, as I say, the subject of negotiation, but will primarily involve training. We have already provided training to the Iraqi 2nd Brigade of the 10th Division and the Iraqis in Al Muthanna province are themselves already providing security forces and protection. Apart from training, mentoring and working cooperatively with the provincial Iraqi government and the Iraqi security forces, we envisage that, along with our coalition partners, we will be in a position to provide direct assistance to the Iraqi security forces should it be absolutely necessary to do so—in the same way that our own defence forces in Australia might occasionally, but very rarely, be required to provide aid to the civilian community. We are at the moment having detailed negotiations with the Iraqis and our coalition partners as to the terms and conditions under which we would do that. It is absolutely essential to the Australian government that we have that clearly defined before we move to that phase of our support in the southern part of Iraq. This will be one of the issues I will be discussing with the US Secretary of Defense when I see him in just over a week or so. It will also be the subject of discussion with the British Defence Secretary, Des Browne, when I see him a few days later.

See this speech in context