Melissa Parke (Fremantle, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Health) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In parliament two weeks ago the Prime Minister announced that Australia will commit 300 further personnel on the ground in Iraq to provide training to the Iraqi Army, even though, when Australia's air support involvement was previously announced, we were assured there would not be this kind of mission creep and despite the fact that 10 years and billions of dollars have already been spent trying to train the Iraqi Army. Considering the gravity of this action, it is really quite astounding that there has been no close consideration within the community or here in this parliament of the nature of our engagement and its connection or not to the national interest, its scope and limits, its strategy and objectives, its likely duration, and its likely cost in terms of resources and human life.

The crudest form of justification for our involvement is that, by engaging in a war against ISIS in Iraq, we are really working to prevent terrorism from occurring here, yet there is no evidence to suggest this is true, and the Australian community does not see it as true. In the recent Essential poll only 12 per cent of those surveyed said they thought our part in the war would make Australia safer, whereas 30 per cent said it would put us at greater risk. My own experience as an Australian working in the Middle East during Australia's disastrous involvement in the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003 and onwards has convinced me that it is by re-engaging in this war that we, in fact, increase the likelihood of terrorist or pseudo-terrorist events in Australia and make Australians everywhere less safe.

Defence analyst Tom Switzer has also observed that, by intervening to assist the Iraqi army, we risk being seen as siding with one side in a sectarian conflict—Shia against Sunni—and:

… we are helping radicalise young marginalised Sunnis in western nations and inadvertently encouraging them to join the jihadist cause, either at home or in the Middle East.

I urge colleagues to read Graeme Wood's excellent article in The Atlantic monthly March edition, titled 'What ISIS really wants', in which he explains:

The biggest proponent of an American invasion is the Islamic State itself.

Wood notes:

The provocative videos, in which a black-hooded executioner addresses President Obama by name, are clearly made to draw America into the fight. An invasion would be a huge propaganda victory for jihadists worldwide: irrespective of whether they have given baya'a to the caliph, they all believe that the United States wants to embark on a modern-day Crusade and kill Muslims. Yet another invasion and occupation would confirm that suspicion, and bolster recruitment.

As I have said a number of times before in this place, it is extraordinary that the decision by Australia to participate directly or indirectly in a war far from our region can be taken without any debate in the parliament or in the community. I am sure that Tom Uren, whom the Labor Party farewelled only a few months ago, would have been aghast. Tom's opposition to war was grounded in his own experience as a soldier, as a prisoner of war on the Thai-Burma Railway and as a prisoner in Japan who witnessed the glow of the atomic destruction of Nagasaki. Tom was twice jailed for his participation in anti-Vietnam war rallies, and this occurred when he was a member of federal parliament. I raise the example of Tom Uren to highlight the fact that today we are not seeing enough serious questioning, by the wider community or by the political class, of Australian military commitments.

The recent ABC Four Corners program, 'Bringing the war home', was a reminder of the impact that our participation in war has on individual Australian servicemen and servicewomen and their families and on the wider Australian community. I was particularly struck by the words of former Australian Army commando Geoff Evans, a PTSD sufferer who is now doing incredibly valuable work as a younger veterans advisor with RSL LifeCare. Reflecting on his time in Afghanistan, Geoff Evans described an operation that involved attacking a compound that was believed to house a Taliban insurgent. Grenades were used and the insurgent was killed, but so were a number of children and a teenage girl. In relation to this event and to his experience of war as a whole, Geoff Evans said:

When we went away to Afghanistan, we went to fight terrorists. But the overwhelming memory I have of the war is watching young men in their 20s trying to stop children from bleeding to death and of the mud of Afghanistan.

I abhor the violence of ISIS, Boko Haram and the Taliban. I abhor the violence of the Assad regime, as I abhor the violence of drone warfare. I believe people should be protected from violence, and I have supported and will always support properly framed peacekeeping and humanitarian missions to protect civilians. But I question whether western powers, venturing further into a conflict they helped to foment in the first place, will bring any meaningful decrease in violence, destabilisation or crimes against humanity or help to create a durable peace. This is the third time we have been to war in Iraq in the last quarter century and in some clear ways each new war has been carved from the one that preceded it. Our enemies and allies in the region often shift, if not switch entirely, and the groups we oppose use weapons we or our allies provided in earlier conflicts. It is fair enough to ask in this parliament about the too easy way in which the wars—and our place in them—are perpetuated.