Melissa Parke (Fremantle, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am very pleased to speak on this critical issue, and I thank the Prime Minister for her timely motion in support of nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament, which has in turn been seconded by the opposition leader. Every single point of the motion must be pursued with urgency if this most ominous of threats to worldwide peace and stability is finally to be eradicated. The spectre of nuclear war has haunted human civilisation for the past 66 years. By the time the Cold War ended, the US and the Soviet Union between them possessed more than 70,000 nuclear warheads.

In the 20 years since its creation, the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, also known as the NPT, and the further related instruments that have flowed on from the agreement, including the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, or CTBT, have operated to greatly reduce the stockpiles of nuclear weapons. But the fact remains that any outcome short of total disarmament is unacceptable, because it leaves us, the global community, at risk of suffering the effects of a nuclear explosion. No greater destructive event exists. As Professor Ramesh Thakur, Director of the Centre for Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament in the Crawford School and Professor of International Relations, both at the Australian National University, has noted:

Since the end of the Cold War, the risk of a Russia-United States nuclear war has diminished, but the prospect of nuclear weapons being used by other nuclear-armed states or nonstate actors has become more plausible.

I also thank Professor Thakur for sharing his expert view on the gravity of the nuclear status quo when he addressed Australia's UN Parliamentary Group in March.

While the Cold War persisted, the rally cries and wide public calls for nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament were loud and impassioned, but in the last couple of decades they have lessened. Grassroots protesters have, quite rightly, become a bit disillusioned by the slow pace of progress and by the apparent lack of political will that have come to prevail, notwithstanding the escalation of nuclear threats in the Middle East and Asia. As US senior statesmen Henry Kissinger, William J. Perry, Sam Nunn and George P. Shultz said in their collaborative efforts to re-energise the nuclear debate:

The accelerating spread of nuclear weapons, nuclear know-how and nuclear material has brought us to a nuclear tipping point. The world faces a very real possibility that the deadliest weapons ever invented could fall into dangerous hands.

The steps being taken to address these threats are not adequate to the danger. With nuclear weapons more widely available, deterrence is decreasingly effective and increasingly hazardous.

In September 2009, following its inquiry into nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament, the Joint Standing Committee on Treaties, of which I am a member, delivered its report—and I am very pleased that its 22 recommendations are acknowledged by the Prime Minister's motion. As the committee chair, the member for Wills, noted in his foreword to report 106:

We must do all that we can to try to break every link in this dangerous nuclear chain. Every one of us has a responsibility to help re-energise the international political debate, against a background of really a decade or more in which the international community has been sleepwalking when it comes to both non-proliferation and especially disarmament.

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We must never accept that it is alright to live in a world where some people have the power to kill tens of millions of their fellow human beings, and make the planet uninhabitable, in a heart beat.

The prospect of the global community sleepwalking its way through a period in which the nuclear threat goes unchallenged or grows would be unacceptable to any thinking person. But, unless we see a resuscitation and intensification of the debate in due course, that is exactly the scenario we will face. On this point I again defer to the words of Professor Thakur:

… not one country that had an atomic bomb in 1968 when the NPT was signed has given it up. Judging by their actions rather than the rhetoric, all are determined to remain nuclear-armed.

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To would-be proliferators, the lesson is clear: Nuclear weapons are indispensable in today’s world and for dealing with tomorrow’s threats

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The most powerful stimulus to nuclear proliferation by others is the continuing possession of the bomb by some. Nuclear weapons could not proliferate if they did not exist; because they do, they will.

As the Joint Parliamentary Committee on Treaties found in 2009, other countries can hardly be expected to disarm if there is no leadership coming from America and Russia, which harbour the vast majority of nuclear weapons. While the US has not yet ratified the CTBT, it was encouraging in 2010 to see the US and Russia negotiate, sign and ratify a new strategic arms reduction treaty, namely START II, which is intended to reduce nuclear arsenals by one third. I am hopeful that the START II process will eventually pave the way to significant near-term disarmament and that the proposed Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty, an instrument that would prohibit the further production of fissile material for nuclear weapons or other explosive devices, will be implemented. But, clearly, we are some way from that. Professor Thakur has warned of a palpable and growing sense that START II could mark the end of nuclear disarmament progress instead of being the first step on the road to abolition.

The chairman of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, Tilman Ruff, associate professor in the Nossal Institute for Global Health, University of Melbourne, recently warned on ABC Radio that Australia needs to be mindful of not sending mixed messages, for example, wanting the US to keep a strong nuclear arsenal while also advocating nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament. Professor Ruff asked: are we walking the talk or are we saying one thing and doing another?

In the view of many, including the Australian parliament, the world needs to be looking at an agreement for wholesale nuclear disarmament rather than being satisfied with the halting incremental steps that have been taken to date. A nuclear weapons convention, which would build on the 1968 NPT to prohibit the development, production, testing, deployment, stockpiling, transfer, threat or use of nuclear weapons and provide for their elimination has been championed by ICAN and is supported by more than 200 nongovernment organisations in 60 countries as well as by more than 700 members of parliament from more than 75 countries who have joined the Parliamentarians for Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament Group.

I would like at this point to acknowledge the fine work of the Honourable Gareth Evans, co-chair of the International Commission on Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament as well as the co-chairmanship of Japan to the commission building on the compelling case for action made earlier by the Canberra commission which said:

So long as any state has nuclear weapons, others will want them. So long as any such weapons remain, it defies credibility that they will not one day be used, by accident, miscalculation or design. And any such use would be catastrophic for our world as we know it.

I applaud the Prime Minister for reinvigorating this critical debate, a debate in which Australia has always played and should continue to play a loud and active role.

Debate adjourned.

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