Michael McCormack (Riverina, National Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Finance) Share this | Hansard source

To date, this year, more than a million Iraqis have been forced to flee from their homes. We have witnessed the dreadful human tragedy of beheadings, crucifixions and mass executions beaming into our living rooms via television and onto iPads. Peoples and cultures which have existed for thousands and thousands of years are presently faced with extermination. Women in the tens of thousands have been forced into sexual slavery. The United States President, Barack Obama, has labelled what is happening at the hands of the ISIS movement a potential genocide. I am so pleased that our Prime Minister refuses to call it a state, because it is not. Let us call it what it actually is, not what it claims to be. It is evil. It is terrorism. It has been described by the United Nations as a terrorist group. The United Nations has accused ISIS of committing mass atrocities and war crimes. This is not a debate against a religion; this is a topic for discussion against terrorism, as it ought to be.

I would like to read the words of an Australian Army general to departing troops, who were heading home after a deployment. I think the words of this major-general need to be listened to very carefully. They need to be followed. He said:

When you all arrive, I ask people to do three things. I ask you all to be brilliant at the basics, to work as a team and to see the bigger picture. The thing I want to reflect on most, not only the fact that you were all brilliant at the basics and you did your job, but how you have worked as a team. Across the Army, Navy, Air Force, you have all worked together. You worked providing logistics support, whether you have been providing intelligence support, whether you've been driving people around, you have all been supporting each other. It's been fantastic. I want to say 'thank you' to you, but I also want you to go home and do something for me – I want you to go to your families and say 'thank you' to them. Whether you've got a wife, children, husband, partner, sister or brother. Even if you're a tough guy and you've been over here on your tour and you know you can carry yourself – they all worry about you. And every moment you're away they care for you. They think about you and they worry about you. Please go home and pass on my thanks and our thanks for their support. Without them doing all the work, keeping your family and everything going at home, we would not be able to do the work we do here. So thank you for your service. Have a great trip home. You have enjoyed your time here. You have worked hard. But also, when you go home – one final thing – be prepared for another war. There are plenty of wars out there and plenty of conflicts waiting for you. Don't rush to it. Don't charge into it. It will find you in its own good time but I can assure you it will find you. So go home and have a break. Recharge. Repair. And be rested ready for the next one.

So again thank you.

Those words are not warmongering. Those words are not promoting war for war's sake. Those words are from an Australian Army general who knows the reality of the situation. He knew the reality then; it still exists today. And they fit in perfectly with what the Prime Minister said just the other day, and said very eloquently:

… peaceful democracies, peaceful pluralist democracies like Australia shrink rightly and understandably from reaching out to these conflicts but just because we would prefer to stand aside from these conflicts doesn't mean that these conflicts will stand aside from us.

His words dovetail in with what the major general said.

What Australia is doing is providing humanitarian airdrops. We have done that twice. We are providing logistical airlifts of equipment, including military equipment. There is no talk at the moment about combat troops on the ground, and hopefully that will not need to happen. But we are doing what we can and what we have been asked to do, and we are doing it very well—in a very dangerous situation, I might add. We should always, always applaud the brave men and women of our Army, our Air Force and our Navy for doing what they do not just on our behalf but for the people for whom they are serving.

I would now also like to quote from the member for Bass, Andrew Nikolic, who was the commandant of Kapooka, the army recruit training centre near Wagga Wagga, in my Riverina electorate. He was the commandant there in 2004 and early 2005, before he went to Iraq. He said:

… there's been a fair bit of hyperbole from Mr Wilkie—more attention-seeking behaviour from him. But let's talk about the facts. The fact is there's nothing in the Constitution or defence legislation that requires the executive to engage in endless debate with Mr Wilkie and Mr Bandt or to first get a vote through parliament.

And that is correct. He was asked by the ABC's Leon Compton: 'Are we going to war in Iraq again?' And his response was:

Absolutely not. What we're doing is we're responding to a humanitarian crisis. We're acting to prevent what many people can see has the potential to become a genocide, as we've seen, through dropping humanitarian supplies to people in mountain tops in Mount Sinjar, in the drops to Shiah Turkmen residents of Amerli in northern Iraq, and this has been done with the permission of the government in Iraq. In coming days we'll have C17 aircraft involved in airlifting equipment and supplies to Erbil in the Kurdish part of Iraq, and these are things that we need to do to stop the spread of ISIS or ISIL, or whatever they call themselves, and engaging in the sort of activities that we have seen on our TV on a daily basis.

I quoted the member for Bass because he knows what he is talking about, unlike the Greens, unlike the member for Denison. When it comes to these sorts of things, he has been there. He has seen it. He has served. He knows what he is talking about. I know that he, in his heart of hearts, has the best intentions for Australia and for the northern Iraqis very much at heart.

On Saturday, at the Federal Council of the National Party, an urgency motion—the very first, in fact—was moved:

That this Federal Council implores the Federal Government to urgently increase the humanitarian intake of vulnerable religious minorities from northern Iraq and Syria—

as well as calling for an increase in foreign aid to northern Iraq and a boost to the humanitarian refugee intake, as I said. That was passed as an urgency motion. It was moved by the National Women's Council of the Nationals and seconded by Queensland Senator Barry O'Sullivan, and it was passed unanimously, as it should be.

The Greens would have parliament decide our response to assistance in northern Iraq. But this action is, as it always has been, the decision of the Executive Council, and ultimately the Prime Minister of the day, based on—of course—the advice from our highest ranking military chiefs. This is how it should be. I am not quite sure what the Greens would have us do. They go around and they say things such as what was said by Senator Whish-Wilson:

I think we need to find better words than 'terrorist' and 'terrorism' because, to me, this implies a very one-sided view of the world.

As both major parties, Labor and the coalition, hold sensible discussions over national security, the Greens use the Senate to call for 'terrorists' and 'terrorism' to be dropped from the vocabulary because it encourages extremism. I mean, what would the Greens have us do? What would Senator Milne have us do? Would she have us debate the merits or otherwise of what we absolutely need to do—and that is humanitarian assistance—whilst they wring their hands and do media doorstops on this, or would they have our Army, our Air Force and our Navy get in and do the job that we asked them to do and that the Iraqi government has asked them to do? That is to provide much-needed assistance to people who are in a desperate plight—people who are facing death. As the Prime Minister said, this is not a state it is a death cult. If the Greens got that through, what would their next step be? Would they then request to go back to their branch party meetings whilst again wringing their hands, eating tofu, drinking chamomile tea and basket weaving while they decided what we should do to help the people of the world?

That is what this is about. It is actually providing much-needed assistance. It is not about—as the Greens would have us believe—making grandstanding mileage out of this very important human tragedy. We need to act; we are acting. I commend both Labor and the coalition for supporting this absolutely-needed assistance. And I certainly commend those people who are providing that valuable assistance.

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