Max Chandler-Mather (Griffith, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

It's entirely true, but it's good to see that we're uniting the Labor and Liberal parties, the true coalition in this place. There are multiple 'get out of jail free' cards for the US under this agreement. If at any point the US think that providing nuclear submarines to Australia would not be in their interest, they can just back up their bags and leave, taking all their tech and all their money with them. This is deeply concerning, as Australia has already begun paying the US and UK nearly $10 billion in public funds. If the US and the UK withdraw, they have the right to take back and/or destroy all material and information provided, and the UK and the US only need to provide one year's notice.

The agreement also puts Australia on the hook to indemnify the UK and the US for any liability, loss, cost, damage or injury associated with the use of the nuclear submarines. That means, if something goes wrong with one of the US second-hand nuclear submarines, it is Australia that is liable. Again, this would be a sick joke if it weren't so serious and if the consequences of a nuclear disaster weren't so serious.

The UK and the US will even be allowed to determine the price of the highly enriched uranium they are selling to Australia. AUKUS also allows the US and the UK to intervene in Australia's relations with the International Atomic Energy Agency. Australia gets a guarantee of nothing. We have no recourse if the US walks away, we don't get independent consultation with the IAEA, we don't get fair prices for the fuel, and we don't even get a guarantee of nuclear submarines. But, if the whole thing blows up in our face and something goes wrong, we are financially responsible to the UK and the US. This is the deal of the century for the US and the UK, who must be chuckling all the way to the bank, having found an Albanese Labor government who's willing to dish out hundreds of billions of dollars to the United States and the UK for their own imperial ambitions.

On average, this will cost $12 billion a year for the next 30 years, in the middle of a cost-of-living and housing crisis. It is genuinely remarkable. Imagine what $12 billion a year could do to tackle the housing crisis. Imagine how many hundreds of thousands of good public homes that could build. What if we put our industrial capacity and our creative capacity not towards helping the US facilitate another disastrous war but instead towards helping people in this country by building enough homes, making sure we put dental and mental health into Medicare, transitioning to 100 per cent renewable energy and creating new industries that create wealth in this country? Instead we're dishing out hundreds of billions of dollars to the United States so they can project more power into the Asia-Pacific and make us all less safe.

Let's be very clear about this. If the ultimate outcome of all of this is a war with China, we lose. There's this flippant way that the political class in this country talks about war: 'Let's just continue to fund and expand the US's imperial ambitions in the Asia-Pacific and help create and enhance tensions as if this is some game.' Well, the consequences of war for future generations in the Asia-Pacific are devastating. No-one wins. There would be hundreds of thousands if not millions of people dead. Sons and daughters would be sent to war, for what? For a war created by the tensions created by political decisions like this. Have the Australian political class learnt nothing?

I note that there's a Liberal member in this place who had a bit of a go at me then. Well, the Liberal Party in this place has never reckoned with the disastrous invasion of Iraq and backing the United States in that. It has never reckoned with the disastrous invasion of Afghanistan. There were a million dead in Iraq. What did you do there? Australia went to war in Iraq, again backing the imperial ambitions of the US. What did we end with when you invaded Iraq? ISIS. Yes, great work—really good work! That's a fantastic foreign policy decision! What about Afghanistan? Trillions of dollars ended up being spent there in that disastrous war, with the stated intention of getting rid of the Taliban. And what did we end up with 20 years later, after death, destruction and more international instability? We were left with a more radical Taliban. What is it going to take for the Labor and Liberal parties to realise that tying ourselves to the hip of the United States and participating in their disastrous wars—which are never about peace or security and always about their own foreign policy ambitions—render us less safe and cost us money and precious lives? What is it going take?

At the end of the day, what we eschew and abandon is the capacity for Australia to pursue its own independent foreign policy. We could be a proud middle power that pursues and facilitates peace in the world. Instead, what we're doing is entirely surrendering our foreign policy to the interests of the United States, despite the fact that every time Australia has done that and participated in an overseas war it has led to death, destruction and less international security, making us less safe; losing our men and women, who die in wars they should not have been sent to; costing the country billions of dollars; and leaving the world a lesser and more dangerous place.

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