Pat Conroy (Shortland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

And the 7th—thank you. He stood up for that, instead of Churchill insisting on it being sent to Burma, where it would have been captured along with a lot of other troops.

So Labor is proud of the alliance. But being a good friend, as Australia is to the United States, requires honesty and respectfully disagreeing when we believe that they are making poor decisions around foreign policy. That stands in stark contrast to the coalition, who have repeatedly followed the United States into poor policy decisions. The most noticeable was Vietnam, where 521 lives Australian lives were lost. We had a generation were scarred and betrayed. We had billions of dollars of wasted taxpayers' money, and all for what? A false notion that somehow being a good alliance member meant following United States into Vietnam on a lie. There have been extensive records kept about how South Vietnam did not request these troops. It required a lot of engineering from the Australian government, in conjunction with the US government, to basically compel the South Vietnamese government to request these troops. That is a great tragedy. The alliance did not require us to enter Vietnam, but Prime Minister Menzies and then Holt obviously disagreed.

The second instance of where the coalition government misunderstood the nature of our alliance and our strong friendship with United States was in the second Iraq war, where Prime Minister John Howard wasted over $2½ billion of taxpayers' money on a lie—a lie that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq that somehow required Australian intervention alongside the United Kingdom and the United States.

This is not about Labor or Liberal, because the British Labor government was wrong as well. We are reaping what was sown in that conflict. We have troops now risking their lives in Syria and northern Iraq because of decisions made around the second Iraq war. Lives have been lost, we have seen more than $2½ billion dollars of taxpayers' money wasted, and we have millions of people currently in the middle of a war zone because of the destabilisation that occurred during that period.

I do not say these things lightly. I do not say them to score cheap political points. I say them to make the point that friendship, supporting an alliance, requires honesty. That will be tested in the next four years, I fear. Respectful disagreement is the subject and the inherent essence of friendship. I am urging the coalition government not to follow any more follies of any US government, to stand up where it is required, to support where it is justified and to be, above all, good and honest friends. I thank the member for Canning for bringing this motion to the House. I reaffirm my deep commitment and the Labor party's commitment to the alliance and I look forward to the continuing debate.

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