Harry Jenkins (Scullin, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Last week when the Prime Minister was flying around the Middle East, quite rightly visiting our troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, there was much speculation that he was to make a major speech about Iraq. I thought, rather naively, that he might come into the chamber and do it here. But last night this major speech was made to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. I pose the question: why was there not a prime ministerial statement in this chamber?

I do not wish to elevate this chamber above anything else as a clearing house of comment. But, of course, if there had been a prime ministerial statement made in the chamber there could have been a quite proper debate about the issue of Iraq. It would have given the opportunity for the opposition not only to put our case but also to put an alternative policy that an incoming Labor government under Prime Minister Rudd will put in place about issues to do with the Middle East, to do with Iraq, to do with Afghanistan.

Was it because the Prime Minister wants to hide behind going to a third party to give a speech, allowing people to find it somewhere online, and to put his case on what he believes the opposition’s policy is? So he fits us up with what he says we believe about what should happen in the future. It does not allow us to really ask: are we succeeding? The number of US personnel killed to March 2007 is 3,209; the number of Iraqi security forces, 6294. This is without talking about the tens if not hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians. Yet six weeks after hostilities started we had President Bush land on the USS Abraham Lincoln and declare ‘Mission accomplished’. There is a need for a prime ministerial statement and a full debate in this chamber—

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