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

He says, ‘That is not true.’ Let me refer the former Minister for Foreign Affairs and all members of the House to an ABC radio interview which occurred on AM just this morning. The interview was with a NATO spokesperson. The reporter asked the NATO spokesperson whether these complaints to NATO were new. He asked the spokesperson very deliberately, ‘Oh, do you mean Australia and other non-NATO countries have made these complaints before?’ And here is his response. It is very important. He said:

Countries like Sweden and Finland for example, that are very heavily deployed with us in Afghanistan, but are not NATO members have raised this issue in the past...

I repeat: ‘Countries like Sweden and Finland’. I did not hear any reference to Australia in the NATO spokesperson’s remarks. But the new government is determined that if we are to send our troops to war we must be privy to the war plan and we must always be part of the planning strategy. No government, surely, can make informed decisions about whether to send their people to war or keep them at war without access to the vital information required both to assess the risk involved and to assess the likelihood of success.

In Vilnius last week I told my NATO counterparts and the Secretary General that their failure to share information with the Australian government and to exclude us from those planning processes were both unsustainable. I am pleased to report to the House that no NATO country raised any objections to my appeals and that, along with a number of key defence ministers, including from the US, the UK, the Netherlands and Canada, the Secretary General made a personal commitment to me that he would do all he could to right this wrong. I was very pleased to hear the Secretary General’s spokesman today also reinforce that commitment that I heard in Vilnius last week. I was also very pleased to hear him acknowledge, on behalf of NATO, the very good work our troops are doing in Afghanistan. Advancing beyond the Vilnius promises will not be easy, nor will embracing or getting NATO to embrace new strategies, but the size of the challenge should be no reason not to try; the stakes are all too high.

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