Andrew Bartlett (Queensland, Australian Democrats) Share this | Hansard source

by leave—I move:

That the Senate take note of the document.

I will briefly speak to this and then seek leave to continue my remarks. I think it is valuable and a positive thing that the government has tabled a statement in regard to this issue. There has been a decline in recent times in ministers making or tabling statements about important matters, and it is pleasing to see that on this occasion there has been a statement made. I do think it is important to take the opportunity to state for the record the Democrats’ view about Australia’s commitments in Iraq and the broader situation in Iraq. It has been the Democrats view all along that, while it was no secret that we did not support the invasion of Iraq, once it occurred we had an obligation to help rebuild that country and for our troops to stay there while it was still beneficial as part of the rebuilding process, and obviously to contribute in many ways other than just military ones to help with the rebuilding process.

I think it has been clear for some time that it would, on balance, be more beneficial if Australia were to withdraw. The ongoing instability in that country over a number of years now is well documented. The widespread problems that have occurred are also well documented. Indeed, the disappearance of support among the neoconservatives in the United States for this war has also been well documented. It is disappointing that the level of media debate on all sides and the media coverage about a variety of aspects to do with the situation in Iraq is much more dynamic and much more diverse in the US and the UK than it appears to be in Australia. You get a much narrower view about both what is happening on the ground in Iraq and what the varying views are about where to go from here if you just read the mainstream media in Australia compared to reading the mainstream media in the US or the UK, including the right-wing or conservative press and media in those countries. That is a bit unfortunate.

It is a crucial time in terms of the Australian military contribution in Iraq. There is open speculation now about whether our troops may be home by Christmas. ‘Troops home by Christmas’ is a phrase that is probably going to be resonating in the political lexicon for some time to come due to a previous Christmas that it was suggested troops might need to be home by. I believe it is time for our troops to withdraw.

The other important thing I noted today was a suggestion that one of the problems that applies is what might be called an attention deficit disorder: there is a lot of focus on something for a while, then everybody gets bored with it and focuses on something else. Frankly, one of the problems I saw with the intervention in Iraq was that we had not got anywhere near addressing and trying to finish and stabilise the situation in Afghanistan before we went off on some other grand adventure, with the flow-on consequence that not only Iraq but also Afghanistan is in a much less stable situation than it might otherwise have been. If we had kept our focus on Afghanistan then things might be better there than they currently are.

We do need to maintain attention. Even if our troops are withdrawn, it is very important that we maintain attention on that part of the world and try to contribute in a better way to help to stabilise not just the country of Iraq but also the region more broadly. That is something that I think will, sadly, take a long period of time, which is another reason the attention needs to not be in deficit. For that reason, whilst obviously there are aspects to the government’s approach towards Iraq that I strongly disagree with, I at least welcome the fact that there has been a statement presented—that there is attention drawn in a formal parliamentary sense to that situation.

We do have, of course, the reports overnight about the involvement of some Australians in the inadvertent shooting of a bodyguard. That is clearly an unfortunate situation and one that the government is responding to here. That in itself obviously raises some issues. I think that, by keeping an eye on the broader situation, there is certainly something that I am more focused on and the Democrats are more focused on, both in terms of what happens in Iraq and also that wider issue that many people, including the Democrats, have raised a number of times about where our Defence resources should be best focused. I think many people believe that they should be focused much more in our own region, not to the total exclusion of elsewhere in the world but certainly much more than they have been. I think recent events demonstrate that even more clearly than before.