Kerry Nettle (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

The Australian Greens have opposed the war in Iraq from the outset and all the way through. I think we are the last party standing in terms of having that consistent position right the way through. We have seen wavering views expressed by the opposition and by the Democrats, but the Greens are pleased that more and more people are joining us in our view that the war in Iraq is a disaster and has always been a disaster. Indeed, just last month we saw millions of Americans vote that way. What we saw in the United States in their congressional elections was millions of Americans saying: ‘Wrong way, George Bush. The war in Iraq is a disaster.’

Americans know it and Australians know it, but the Australian government refuses to accept the inevitable. It refuses to take off the ideological blinkers and see the reality on the ground in Iraq—the quagmire that we are stuck in. It refuses to acknowledge the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who have lost their lives because of this folly. That is the position of the Australian government. It refuses to accept the mistakes it has made and the responsibility that it bears for those mistakes.

In the United States, as a result of those millions of Americans voting to say that George Bush has done the wrong thing in Iraq, we have seen some change in leadership. We have seen a new US defence secretary. Donald Rumsfeld, who created the disaster, has been kicked out, and now we have a new US Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, whose job I am sure none of us envies, coming in and trying to fix the disaster that has been created by the Bush administration and by Donald Rumsfeld. I do not know very much about this guy, but as he is a former head of the CIA we probably do not share the same ideological views.

We may not share the same ideological views, but I can say one thing for the new US defence secretary: at least he is honest. Overnight, we heard the new US Secretary of Defense being asked a number of questions by the congress. He was asked whether or not, given the information we know now, it was the right thing for America to have invaded Iraq. He did not say, ‘Yes, I’m a lackey of the Bush administration and I’ll say yes.’ He did not say that. He refused to say that they had made the right decision by going into Iraq. What he said was: ‘History will judge them.’

And history will judge this decision. History will judge the Bush administration, and history will judge John Howard’s government. History will judge whether or not these over 100,000 Iraqis should have died. History will ask: did the right thing occur? And I predict that history will find that the position that my party, the Australian Greens, has taken from the outset has been the correct position to take on this issue. It is a moral position; it is a just position—that is, that hundreds of thousands of Iraqis should not have to die.