Bob Brown (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

The Greens support this matter of public importance, and I go back to the period in 2002-03 when the Prime Minister of this country, on his own, made a decision to involve Australia in the illegal invasion of Iraq. He made no reference to the Australian parliament, and he ignored massive protest by people in the streets of Australia’s cities. One of the forecasts from international organisations at the time was that a war could lead to the deaths of up to 500,000 civilians. When I spoke about those figures in this place, government members rolled their eyes and laughed. But that is no longer the case, because the casualties, the sheer bloodshed, the terror, the awful inhumanity, the cruelty, the beheadings and the tortures in Iraq have exceeded anything in the Howard government’s experience under Saddam Hussein. And on it goes.

We now have President Bush saying that he will send an extra 20,000 troops to Iraq at a time when countries like Poland, Denmark, Spain and, more latterly, Britain have withdrawn and are withdrawing large contingents of troops from the country. The fact is that we have seen a political imperative to try to overcome increasing odds to win a hopeless war in Iraq. It is not going to happen. But we have President Bush, night after night, changing his position to try to accommodate his failed past pronouncements on the war and, extraordinarily enough, our Prime Minister simply following in his wake. It has been a blight on this nation and the independent regard that Australians hold themselves in that we have had a cipher of a prime minister—a sheriff, as President Bush described Prime Minister Howard when he was on his way to this parliament in 2003.

I remind members that when I spoke to President Bush in our parliament in 2003 about his need to uphold international law if he were to regain the respect of the world—and he broke that law in invading Iraq—the majority voted to have me removed from the chamber. How things have changed now. In 2007 a majority of people in Australia, a majority of people in the United States and a majority of Iraqis want the foreign troops withdrawn from Iraq. The repeated, almost bleating, statements by President Bush about democracy are denied by the hubris of people like President Bush, Mr Blair and Mr Howard, who deny what the public thinks. Mr Howard is worst of all, because he never referred his plans to send a contingent of Australian defence forces, good and true, to President Bush’s adventurism in Iraq to this parliament.

They had to do that in the United States. It was debated in the United Kingdom. But here, it was a decision made by the Prime Minister, arrogantly defying the better interests of this nation. Now, some four years down the line, he does not have the stature to say: ‘I made a mistake. I should bring the Australian troops home.’ Those Australian troops, who have served this nation so wonderfully, should never have been sent to Iraq for the political reasons that the Prime Minister had, and they should be brought home now for the national reasons that are in the best interests of this great country of Australia.

If you look at the upheaval and the insecurity in Iraq, you can see that one great promise that the Prime Minister made—which was that, by fighting in Iraq, we would make the world a safer place—has turned out to be blatantly untrue. Today, on a New South Wales radio station a child read out her essay marking the fourth anniversary of the Howard government’s misadventure in involving Australia in and sending troops to Iraq. In her essay she said that she and her friends felt less safe. They were worried that their bus might be blown up. They did not have a feeling of security. They have an increased sense of insecurity because of Prime Minister Howard and in the wake of President Bush and their failure as leaders to make decisions in the interests of their nation.

This world is a less safe place. Andrew Wilkie, from the Office of National Assessments, had the courage to leave that department, to sacrifice his job and his career—and an honourable career it was—to warn that there was no evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq well before the invasion began. For his trouble, he was vilified by this Prime Minister and this government. And, in the event, it has been shown that the government was wrong and, along with the Bush administration, lied to the citizenry. It has also been shown that the evidence of weapons of mass destruction was false. Prime Minister Howard said that he would not take part in a war in Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein—that he was not about regime change. So he cannot use that excuse now. What a mistake he has made. (Time expired)