Luke Simpkins (Cowan, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I appreciate the opportunity to speak on the motion moved by the member for Wills on the protection of civilians. I had prepared a speech, but I thought that I would set that aside and speak a little bit more about my in-depth feelings on this motion. There is no doubt about the member for Wills's history with regard to his view on what happened in Iraq, and obviously this is the key driver behind this motion as well. I would say that when you look back upon history, it is always so much clearer with the hindsight and clarity of years past.

I would remind everyone that, when we think about what it was like back at the time of the invasion of Iraq in the Second Gulf War, when Saddam Hussein was running Iraq, there was a resistance and an obfuscation of attempts to identify what these weapons of mass destruction were. There was a lot of thought that they were there, but the question was whether there should be more time or whether there should be immediate action. There were very few people saying that these weapons just did not exist anymore. Ask the Kurds, ask even his own people, about whether chemical weapons were used. The reality was that Saddam Hussein had a history and a track record of using weapons of mass destruction and chemical weapons. So there were lots of reasons to suspect—and, as is well documented, as even the then foreign affairs spokesperson, Mr Kevin Rudd, also said—there were weapons of mass destruction. So it was not as though they just did not exist at all.

When I see motions that talk about adventurism and that denigrate what happened as some form of recklessness or some form of shooting from the hip—a fun moment, 'Let's go and have a little bit of a party in Iraq'—I just do not get that at all. I do not think that there has been a government in this country's history, and I cannot perceive that there will be a government in the future of this country, who would take our soldiers to war, take our forces to war and support a war without being gravely concerned and giving grave consideration. I think that it is a cheap shot, and I think that it is a shooting-from-the-hip sort of allegation. Obviously there were debates as to whether it was the right thing to do. In hindsight, there were no weapons of mass destruction found, but there was certainly evidence leading up to that point that they could well exist. On that basis, action was taken.

When we look around at what the UN has achieved over time, there have been plenty of good things done by the UN, and there is no doubt about that. It is, however, a very big bureaucracy. I think that some of the troubles with the UN are the processes that they have. As the member for Wills has already clearly identified—and we have common ground here—when the permanent five members of the Security Council have the ability to veto action by the UN, whether it is a peacekeeping mission or whatever, then we start seeing the national interests of those five key players, the historical players from the victory at the end of the Second World War, and those sorts of influences starting to come into the decision making.

We have something like 130,000 peacekeepers currently deployed around the world on 16 peacekeeping missions. There is no doubt the world is a more dangerous place these days. When you look at some of the things that have occurred and some of the people out there—when I look at what is happening with IS or Daesh—I do not blame their existence on the decision to go to Iraq for the Second Gulf War. I do not blame it on that. I blame that on an Islamist history where this sort of violent destruction of opponents and disbelievers is what they have done for 1,000 years. When we really look at what has happened more recently, the decision to abandon Iraq, leave it and allow the sectarianism that took place is one of the problems that Iraq has had, and that is the legacy we are leaving. The problem was a decision to pull out too early without leaving guidance to that country.

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