Scott Ludlam (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

It is with a certain degree of alarm that I rise to speak on this bill this afternoon. Two-thirds of the Defence Legislation (Miscellaneous Amendments) Bill 2008 is entirely sensible, for many of the reasons Senator Johnston has just outlined; one-third of the bill is patently ridiculous. It is sensible to establish the red crystal as an alternative symbol to the red cross and the red crescent. The red crystal does not have any religious, cultural or political connotations. It is equally sensible for the members of the ADF and their families to have dental care, for many of the reasons Senator Johnston has outlined in detail. The Greens support those two-thirds of the bill.

Schedule 3, relating to Pine Gap, is the part of this bill that I describe as ridiculous because the Australian parliament is being asked to legislate to further protect a facility about which parliamentarians know and are allowed to know virtually nothing. The 1999 report No. 26 of the Joint Standing Committee on Treaties testifies to this fact. What we are witnessing today is not informed democratic policymaking. Because of the substantial secrecy surrounding this facility and its protection from parliamentary oversight, Australians have been told very little, or else have been told lies and misinformation, about the history of this facility. In 1966 Australians were told the facility was to be a weather station. Later, the official cover, which still resides in the name, was that it was a space research centre.

In fact, Pine Gap is a ground receiving station for space based intelligence gathering. It is the most strategically important United States base in Australia and is probably a vital component of fighting the illegal war against the people of Iraq. Its monitoring of radar, cell phone, radio and long-distance telephone communication enables it to provide targeting information for US air and ground forces. When the United States launched the shock and awe bombardment of Iraq, it is very likely that information from Pine Gap pointed the missiles and so-called smart weapons toward Iraqi military targets—and also toward the many thousands of civilians who died in that initial phase of the Iraq war and in the long years since then. Now that the United States is attacking so-called insurgents, information from Pine Gap tracks and monitors telephone communications, identifying and tracking suspects and leading troops, missiles and munitions to the houses and neighbourhoods in which they live. Many thousands of civilians continue to be killed as collateral damage in these campaigns.

Pine Gap is also a major component of the proposed missile defence shield—the so-called ‘Star Wars’ project. This shield proposes using satellite based weapons and ground based interceptors to shoot down incoming missiles. It has been described as attempting to hit a bullet with a bullet. The United States has spent billions developing this system, but it is still a long way from making it work. Both China and Russia, predictably, have strongly denounced the project as threatening a new arms race. The Senate is being asked this afternoon to enact legislation that would protect the United States’s spy facility from Australian citizens, citizens who might dare to have an opinion about infrastructure on our soil being used to kill civilians in an illegal war or about our population becoming a nuclear target because of this vital component to the United States’s nuclear-war-fighting machine being on our soil—or citizens who might have an opinion about whether a peppercorn is enough rent for the price that our country pays for hosting Pine Gap.

The second reason that schedule 3 of this bill, the part relating to Pine Gap, is ridiculous is that it is putting a very old Cold War piece of legislation on life support. In my role as Australian Greens heritage spokesperson, I wonder whether it would be possible to heritage list legislation like this and then set it aside like the relic that it is. The Defence (Special Undertakings) Act 1952 became law in our country to secure the sites for British atomic weapons testing. The law protected nuclear test sites ‘from observation by any unauthorised person’ so that the nuclear tests could release massive and harmful quantities of radiation off the coast of my home state of Western Australia and in South Australia. A very long way from decision makers in London, the Defence (Special Undertakings) Act ensured that these bombs were safe from observation, from demonstrators and from Australian citizens—apart from those who found themselves unlucky enough to be deliberately exposed.

I am interested to know why the Attorney-General thinks this 1952 piece of legislation demands beefing up. The reason is very interesting. It is because when Attorney-General Philip Ruddock used the Defence (Special Undertakings) Act for the very first time in its history in trying to send four Christian pacifists to jail for seven years Attorney-General Ruddock lost and the Howard government set this train in motion. Four Christian pacifists entered Pine Gap on 9 December 2005 after informing the Minister for Defence and the media of their intention to conduct a peaceful and non-violent citizens’ inspection of the facility. Despite engaging an army of QCs at taxpayers’ expense to inflict the maximum punishment and place the maximum limitation on the courts hearing the defence’s justification and legal argument, Philip Ruddock lost that case. The Northern Territory Court of Criminal Appeal quashed the convictions of the Christian pacifists. The court found that citizens had the right to challenge whether the prohibited area was necessary for the purpose of the defence of Australia.

It is very unfortunate that Attorney-General Robert McClelland is following his predecessor’s lead, finishing what Mr Ruddock started by amending the law to further crack down on peaceful protest. Given this series of events, the amendments proposed in this legislation can accurately be described as retrospective revenge that would ‘punish and frighten those thinking about engaging in non-violent resistance against Pine Gap’s role in war making’, as a number of the submissions to the inquiry stated. The amendments would inhibit citizens from ever challenging whether Pine Gap is necessary for Australia’s defence in future, which is an erosion of the democratic rights of which Australians are proud. This schedule of the bill is unnecessary because adequate legislation, in particular the Crimes Act 1914, already exists to protect Pine Gap from trespass or from acts of aggression. If it is such a core element of Australia’s national security, what Pine Gap does not need is legislative protection; it needs perimeter patrol—especially when Christian pacifists have politely provided forewarning of their intention to non-violently enter the facility to pray. If it is indeed such a sophisticated intelligence-gathering facility, the capacity to gather intelligence about its immediate environment should perhaps be enhanced.

Amendments to the Defence (Special Undertakings) Act 1952 making Pine Gap a special defence undertaking and a prohibited area are excessive, are corrosive of democratic principles and should not be supported. I foreshadow that the Australian Greens will make amendments to remove this schedule of the bill, retaining the red crystal and dental components but deleting the elements relating to Pine Gap.

Before I take my seat, I would like to put on the record what is probably a correction to one of Senator Johnston’s comments about people who have a long history of demonstration at Pine Gap—and that includes me—and who attended the Pine Gap demonstration in 2002. In my experience, these people are not anti the United States; they are anti war. They were there, we were there, to protest the coming bombardment and the loss of life of tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians, and they will be back whether or not this bill is passed into law.