Kevin Rudd (Griffith, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

When the Prime Minister repeatedly says—and he said it in his statement yesterday, which he has reaffirmed on a number of occasions today—that his attack on the policies concerning Iraq applies not just to Senator Obama but to the Democratic Party as a whole, that is by definition a generic attack. It is a generic attack on the alternative administration of the United States, in terms of the White House, and it is a generic attack on the party which currently controls the United States House and the Senate. Yet this Prime Minister stood at the dispatch box three years ago and provided the opposition with a lecture in which he said:

... it is never in the interests of this country to have that kind of generic criticism made.

Prime Minister, let us reflect on how these things have been deliberated upon in the councils of the Democratic Party today. It is not just Senator Obama who will be a candidate for the next presidential election through the US Democratic Party primaries; there is also Senator Clinton and Senator Edwards. All these individuals have different policies on Iraq. We may agree or disagree with elements of them. We do not know who ultimately will be the Democratic Party’s candidate for President of the United States—the most important and powerful office in the world—but we do know this: there will be one Democratic Party candidate. The designation which will be attached to that candidate’s name when American citizens go to their ballot boxes will be ‘Democratic Party’. The Prime Minister of Australia has said, effectively, that that Democratic Party—the great party of American politics, the party which led America during the Second World War, the party with which John Curtin formed an alliance in 1941—is the preferred party of terrorists. That is what this Prime Minister has said.

Given that the Prime Minister’s remarks were made only 24 hours or so ago, the reaction that we have had from the United States overnight is quite extraordinary. Democratic Party Senator Ron Wyden said:

The most charitable thing you can say about Mr Howard’s comment is bizarre. We’ll make our own judgments in this country with respect to elections and Barack Obama is a terrific public servant.

But, lest it be assumed that we are making some partisan recourse to a Democratic Party critique of this Prime Minister’s foreign policy pronouncements, let us also see what leading Republicans have said. Texas Republican—Texas is known to be a very conservative state—Senator John Cornyn said:

I would prefer that Mr Howard stay out of our domestic politics and we will stay out of his domestic politics.

We now have comments of that type, calibre and content ricocheting around the US body politic, and the Prime Minister assumes that this is just a trifling matter—that it does not have an effect. Prime Minister, the Congressional Liaison Office at our embassy in Washington—the Prime Minister is aware of its operations as much as I am; it has to deal on a day-to-day basis with members of the House and members of the Senate—will have to deal with these individuals as well. Those people will now have this obstacle to confront as they go through the door to lobby on behalf of Australian farm interests—represented by the National Party from time to time—and to represent other key elements of the Australian economy; they will now have this threshold problem to deal with: ‘You’re from the country whose Prime Minister says that our party is the preferred choice of terrorists.’

Prime Minister, that presents an operational obstacle to our men and women in the field. I do not understand how you can remain stubborn and stand by those statements simply to preserve your own political reputation. The national interest demands that the Prime Minister account to the parliament properly and use this forum which the nation gives us to set the record straight. If the Prime Minister did not mean that, he should stand at the dispatch box and say, ‘Your Prime Minister got it wrong.’ A week ago the Prime Minister did this on the question of climate change. The parliament’s challenge to the Prime Minister today is to do the same when it comes to Iraq. If, a week ago, the Prime Minister could marshal the courage to come in here and say he got it wrong on climate change, the challenge for the Prime Minister today is to do the same on Iraq.

When we look at the future and at how Iraq is going to unfold in the period ahead, one thing is for certain: our alliance with the United States is critical. It is no secret that we on this side of the House voted against the Iraq war. We did so proudly, having considered the arguments which were put by the government and the administration at the time. The decision taken at that stage was absolutely right. It was voted on by every member of this House. We, the Labor Party, voted to a woman and a man against it. Those on the government side voted for it. Four years down the track, let us think about where this war has got us. The Prime Minister has invested $2 billion of Australian taxpayers’ money in this war. This war has become the greatest single foreign policy and national security policy disaster that our country has seen since Vietnam.

This Prime Minister said that our troops would be in Iraq for a matter of months. That was four years ago. This Prime Minister said that the purpose of the Iraq war was to reduce the global terrorist threat. It has done the reverse. This Prime Minister said that we had to go to war to eliminate Iraqi chemical and biological weapons. What turned out to be the case was that there were no such weapons. The Prime Minister’s debating point is that those on this side of the House took the Prime Minister at his word. Prime Minister, here is the difference: we on this side did not believe there was a sufficiently strong case to go to war. You on that side took that decision. That is the difference. This is a hollow debating point about the evidentiary basis at the time, because there were still ultimately concerns about the possibility of other diplomatic opportunities through the United Nations, through Hans Blix, to get to the final truth of this matter. We said, ‘We don’t think you should go to war.’

Prime Minister, you took the country to war—that is what it ended up being—and all these years down the track, four years down the track, there is not even the faintest evidence of anything approaching an exit strategy. Against every measure and standard which this government has set for success in Iraq—within months, not years; ensuring that terrorism would be reduced, not increased; eliminating weapons of mass destruction which did not exist—it has been a rolled gold, first-class foreign policy failure. Despite all of that, the Prime Minister stood before the nation yesterday and provided a public lecture to the American body politic about how this war should be conducted. Prime Minister, it is time that some members of the government began to hang their heads in shame because this war has been nothing short of a public policy disgrace.

One other thing which is always left out of this debate on Iraq is the other argument used post facto, by the foreign minister and others, that this was a war to liberate an oppressed people. Prime Minister, I am not quite sure how we justify selling that message to the 60,000-plus Iraqi civilians who now lie dead from the war. The number itself is open to dispute: is it 60,000 or, as the British Lancet journal said, up to 600,000? There is a huge debate about the civilian carnage which has been wreaked upon that country. In the first months of this war, when the carnage was at its height, this government, through this Prime Minister, became one of the operating and controlling powers within Iraq responsible for the continuing protection of the civilian population. Against all those measures, this war is a rolled gold disaster.

The alliance which is the subject of our debate today has survived since 1941. We in the Labor Party are proud of this alliance because we formed it. This alliance has survived and prospered under 13 prime ministers—Labor and Liberal. It has survived under 12 US presidents—Republican and Democrat. It has survived and prospered because we have all chosen to refrain from the worst forms of partisan comment of the type that we saw from the Prime Minister yesterday. When it comes to the future of this alliance, my challenge to you, Prime Minister, is that you make sure your personal relationship with the President of the United States does not get to a stage where it interferes with the future operation of the alliance. Prime Minister, you stand censured. (Time expired)

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