Joel Fitzgibbon (Hunter, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Defence) Share this | Hansard source

What a patronising, ill-informed and inaccurate contribution we have just had from the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Foreign Affairs. There was plenty of patriotic fervour, but, sadly, it was ill informed and inaccurate. For a moment, I thought the Minister for Defence had turned up for the debate, such was the hand-on-heart approach in the contribution we have just heard from the parliamentary secretary. He is familiar with the approach from the Minister for Defence; we have seen it too often from him. Parliamentary Secretary, the people of Australia and our troops expect more from their Minister for Defence than hand-on-heart rhetoric. They need a government with the capacity to make real strategic decisions and put in place infrastructure that supports our troops.

This brings me to the point on the Minister for Defence. The Prime Minister and senior ministers of the government are very fond of the phrase ‘cut and run’, and here we are, on the fourth anniversary of the deployment of our troops to a dangerous theatre of war far away, and they cannot even come in here to debate the issue. The Minister for Foreign Affairs and the Minister for Defence are not even prepared to come in here and have this very important debate. They are not even prepared to come in here on this anniversary and acknowledge the very good work of the Australian troops: their bravery, their skills and their commitment to their country. At the very least, I am sure that the men and women of the ADF would have expected no less from these ministers, but alas we effectively get a backbencher contributing to this all-important debate on this all-important anniversary.

As each day passes, the Howard government’s case for remaining in Iraq—in the southern provinces in particular—grows weaker and weaker. As each day goes by, the Prime Minister grows increasingly lonely on this issue. I drove to Avalon Airport this morning for the Australian International Airshow—and I quickly congratulate the organisers of that event—and was listening to ABC radio on the way, as you do. The announcer lamented the fact that yesterday they had put considerable time and effort into organising a forum on the Iraq war and Australia’s participation in it and, alas, he was unable to find a single expert willing to participate in the forum in support of our intervention in Iraq.

Worse, the Brits are leaving. We learned that the US has a withdrawal plan. The only person in the international community without a withdrawal plan from Iraq is our own Prime Minister—and, of course, his government. So he becomes increasingly lonely—although we put a caveat on that following question time. Does the Prime Minister have a withdrawal plan? We have had a bit of a debate about the way he answered that question today. He was asked about the US contingency plan and he said, ‘The answer is yes.’ The question was: ‘Does the government have a contingency plan; does it have a phased withdrawal plan from Iraq?’ He answered, ‘Yes, it is normal for that contingency planning to be made.’ So we are in doubt about whether, in the face of current opinion polling, the Prime Minister is now developing a withdrawal strategy from Iraq. Hopefully tomorrow, during question time, he will get an opportunity to clarify that point.

When I arrived in this portfolio, only about three months ago, I thought my perspective on Iraq might change. I thought that, as I did the rounds with the experts—organisations like ASPI, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute; former deputy secretaries of the department; even the chiefs of our defence forces—and I wandered the corridors of the Australian National University, I might be convinced that I was wrong on Iraq, but, alas, I did not experience any road to Damascus; I have not been convinced I was wrong. In fact, if anything, I have been absolutely and overwhelmingly convinced that the Labor Party and the opposition generally has been right on this point all along and that it is right to say that this is one of the most disastrous foreign policy decisions ever taken by this country.

Today, on this matter of public importance, we have given the government the opportunity to rebut the case—to state the reasons they intervened in Iraq in the first place and to give justification for our ongoing involvement in Iraq. Again, all we got from the parliamentary secretary was rubbish. Predictably, he started to roll out the view about almost the end of the world if we were to withdraw our Overwatch Battle Group from the southern provinces of Iraq. There would be all sorts of crises as a result, according to the parliamentary secretary.

Does the parliamentary secretary understand that Dhi Qar and Al Muthanna provinces are dominated by Shiites? Al-Qaeda is a Sunni based organisation. We are not finding al-Qaeda in the southern provinces of Dhi Qar and Al Muthanna; we never will. There is a very tenuous connection at best between our involvement in the southern provinces in Iraq and the fight against al-Qaeda. It is a point that the parliamentary secretary simply does not understand.

The first priority for any government is the safety and security of its country and its people. That requires sound strategic decision making in the first instance. After that, it requires a responsible use of our troops and our military assets. This means never putting our troops in harm’s way unnecessarily. That is exactly what the Howard government did when it took the decision to deploy our troops in a faraway war without the sanction of the United Nations. It has failed in its first commitment to the nation and to its citizens. Both the men and women of the ADF and Australians generally expect more from their Minister for Defence than that, they expect more from their Minister for Foreign Affairs than that and they expect more from their Prime Minister than that. The parliamentary secretary, again predictably, spent a fair bit of time trying to suggest that Labor were walking on both sides of the street: we have one position on Iraq and another position on Afghanistan. I have partly answered that question already by making the point that the role we are playing in the southern provinces has a tenuous link at best with the war against terror.

But Afghanistan, as the member for Barton has pointed out, is a very different proposition. Iraq has descended into a civil war between ethnic groups, a civil war which will not end with guns and bullets. It is time the government dusted off the bipartisan report of the Iraq Study Group, took on board its recommendations and heard the message about the solution in Iraq—if there is ever to be a solution. I remind the House that it was only a matter of weeks ago that the Minister for Defence told a conference in Canberra, organised by the Australian Defence magazine, that there is no victory in Iraq and it simply is not possible to impose a Western style democracy on a country like Iraq. It poses the question: why then are we there? First, it was about weapons of mass destruction, then it was about establishing a democratically elected government, and then it was about bedding down that government and the security of that country. But the minister tells us it is not possible to impose a Western style democracy on a country like Iraq, so why are we there?

But Afghanistan is a very different situation. It is the home of terrorism. All the Bali bombers were trained in Afghanistan. It is the home of drugs; a huge narcotics industry has its base in Afghanistan. We have a deployment in a war that can and must be won. Of course, the opposition supported our intervention in Afghanistan post 9-11 and we have supported it ever since. Indeed, we were rightly critical of the government when, in the lead-up to its intervention in Iraq, it withdrew our troops from Afghanistan rather than sticking it out and seeing the job through. So there is no argument. They are very different circumstances and the government stands condemned for its position on Iraq.

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